It’s a national disgrace that the ”fine-looking” Christian activist, ”Minty” Ross Harriet Tubman will not appear on the $20 bill until 2026 at the earliest. Some say it could be as late as 2030. The cynical say it will never happen. It’s certain that Minty was beautiful, because ”fine-looking” is how her owners described her on a Wanted Poster after she escaped at age twenty-seven.
Unfortunately, no pictures of Minty as a young woman have been found. She lived on to become a prominent administrator of the Underground Railroad; a friend of abolitionists Frederick Douglass and John Brown; a Civil War soldier and spy for the Union Army; and much, much more.
The Mint people say it takes a long time to retool the currency. In the case of Minty Ross, it will take at least ten years; maybe fifteen. I’m not sure I believe them.
With Ms. Tubman, it seems like one injustice followed another; she suffered abuse like no other heroine I’ve read about. A slave-owner crushed her skull with a hunk of iron he threw at another slave she was trying to protect. While traveling on a train, passengers broke her arms when she refused to move to another car. All her suffering came from haters, pure and simple. She will never get the credit she deserves.
Russian Professor, Igor Panarin, says the USA will look like this map, someday. Some folks think it already does.
Does anyone really think the USA will be around ten or fifteen years from now? It is likely to be divided into four countries, presumably under the control of the Russians or an international coalition of foreign powers, if leaked Russian intelligence assessments can be believed.
Sorry, but that’s what seems to be coming, according to Russian analysts. The world has had its fill; the earth’s power brokers are planning to take us down; they seem to be gathering the family of nations to make a grand, international intervention on our behalf — for our own good and for the well-being of the planet and its impoverished peoples.
Russia is deploying Nuclear Drone Submarines (NUDS) to overwhelm our defenses.
The Russian military is filling the oceans with drone subs armed with nuclear material; possibly missiles. Some sit in the sand at the bottom of the oceans on both coasts of the USA.
Hundreds of thousands of Russians live on the island of Cuba. They have submarine and air bases on the island.
The Chinese are building artificial islands in the Pacific and constructing military bases. During the past twenty years the Chinese have built the most modern Navy the world has ever seen.
The Koreans and several other hostile countries are building first strike nuclear capabilities. It’s not that they dislike the United States. It’s a matter of trust. They think our leaders are crazy, selfish, arrogant, and too powerful. It’s not good for other countries when one becomes disproportionately powerful.
It’s not enough for the USA to stop doing bad things. It must do good things. We don’t seem able to save ourselves, because the USA has a legacy of a country that has hated too many people; it has hurt and killed too many people.
The USA hasburned alive millions of people with diabolical weapons like napalm, Hellfire missiles, and atomic bombs. Most of the world outside the United States believes we dropped anthrax bombs on Chinese troops in North Korea in 1954. We placed a ”hospital” ship off the peninsula from which we spread a virulent strain of typhus that killed hundreds of thousands of North Koreans. We drew up plans to drop atomic munitions until a cessation of hostilities took hold and calmer heads prevailed.
The USA has inflicted too much injustice; ignored the cries of too many disadvantaged people; humiliated the weak and impoverished; and, since the end of WWII, has waged war against a quarter of all the countries on the earth.
We have crossed moral boundaries into the dark space of torture and drone-kills. A country that tortures and assassinates thousands of people by remote control is not worth defending or protecting, some say.
Modern Chinese Stealth Destroyer
The billionaires are having their parties; for them the world has never been better. In fact, many Americans, rich and poor, are ingesting daily cocktails of drugs, legal and illegal, to keep going; they are oblivious, uninformed, and asleep.
In our drug-induced stupor we are about to elect a mega-billionaire and his cronies to administer what is arguably the most militarized and corrupt nation on Earth. Like everything else we’ve done lately, it won’t go over well. The nations of the world are already preparing for this catastrophe; the outcome isn’t going to be good for any of us; no way.
The refusal of our military officers, our intelligence administrators, foreign service officials, and especially our elected political leaders to follow with enthusiasm the vision of our current president has not been lost on other nations.
South Carolina Republican Congressman, Joe Wilson, twice yelled You Lie! at President Obama during his speech before a joint session of Congress in 2009. Disrespect for the president is universal, open, and virulent among GOP congressmen, who make up the majority of our elected officials. The GOP’s unreasonable hatred for well-intentioned people is the main reason the community of nations fears the changes that will come with the election of a Republican president in 2016.
Our president’s capitulation to the world view of our bureaucratic cartels; his inability to get the simplest things done (like closing the Guantanamo torture chambers and returning the military base in Cuba to its rightful owner); his surrender to Wall Street thugs with Ivy League educations; his quiet suffering of disrespect by media and petty demagogues has convinced the powerful people abroad who both do and don’t like us that the United States won’t change; indeed, it cannot change.
Meanwhile, our citizens are tired of war. They don’t acknowledge basic facts; the Chinese Navy is the best in the world. Russian drone technology is the world’s best in the air, beneath the seas, and on land. And so on and on.
Yes, our government is spending two trillion dollars to upgrade our nuclear first-strike capabilities. We are spending our national treasure on a doomsday matrix designed to destroy planet Earth, should we get backed into a corner and face certain defeat.
We are so blind. The irony is that we are always looking deep into the heavens searching for advanced civilizations. We believe millions of hi-tech worlds are “out there”. Yet, we have found not a single one. Maybe the story of civilization is familiar; maybe it plays out across the universe on every inhabited planet in the same tragic way.
In every corner of our Milky Way galaxy, and in the trillion or more other galaxies that populate our unimaginably huge universe, intelligent life-forms fight to survive and prevail. They unlock the secrets of nature.
Somehow the technology gets control of them. The unnatural plutonium they create and store, even when it is not strewn in a fit of suicidal anger, leaches into their soils and poisons their planets, irreversibly.
Workers inspect chemical weapons barrels for leaks at a warehouse in Gorny, Syria. Stockpiles like this one exist in countries all over the world.
A slow death by poisoning might well be the future of every planet that has buried beneath its surface tens-of-thousands of thermo-nuclear bombs as well as biological and chemical weapons in every shade of depravity that super-intelligent life-forms can dream-up and build.
These weapons cannot be maintained forever. How many thousands of years can we go on pouring our treasure into poisons, until we have no more treasure, and the bombs begin to rot; the toxins soak into soil like turpentine into a sponge; the viruses and bacteria escape to breed and blow in the wind like dust and fall to the ground like drops of rain?
Armageddon is on its way. It may come fast; it may go slow. What every informed person knows is that Harriet Tubman’s face will never grace our currency. Time is too short, and making things right is not our nation’s highest priority. Not even close.
I believe, like my dad before me, that right makes might. Civilizations who dare to reverse the order — who use might to force others to believe that their abusers are right — play a fool’s game.
One important thing we can do as a country right now is to place Harriet Tubman’s portrait (and other freedom fighters like her) on our money, sooner rather than later. The plan, incredibly, is to put a slave-owner’s picture (Andrew Jackson, of all people) on the reverse side of the twenty-dollar bill opposite Ms. Tubman — to kind of balance out the message, I suppose.
No. That’s wrong. No way. Andrew Jackson owned the Hermitage Plantation of Tennessee and another plantation in Mississippi where, during his tenure, 150 slaves produced the cotton that made him wealthy.
As a General in the US army, Jackson fought genocidal wars against the Shawnee and Creek Indians of Georgia and Alabama; he warred against the Seminole Tribes of Florida. He had a reputation for ruthlessness. Native Americans referred to him as ”Sharp Knife.”
This 1905 photo of actors in Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Show portrays the killing of Custer by Sitting Bull. The Battle of Little Bighorn was unusual, because the native Americans actually won the battle. Some would argue that America’s war against its indigenous and kidnapped peoples has never really ended; apologies, forgiveness, and reparations are long overdue.
No slave holder, no human being who forced other human beings to work long hours for no pay under the threat of lash and beating; under the threat of death and loss of family should ever again have their likeness placed on any financial instrument, coin, or bill of the United States of America. What kind of people are we, anyway?
We are a people who stand for freedom and equality before the law, our schools teach us. Let’s behave like we believe it’s true. Crimes against people affect the generations of children who come after. Genocides against African slaves and native Americans can traumatize for centuries; ask any descendant of a victim of Hitler’sholocaust, if there is anyone who doesn’t believe it. The USA has not even begun to make things right, some argue.
Actions speak louder than words. The world watches, much of it in disgust and horror as we venerate the wicked and suppress our saints, like Araminta Ross Tubman. Time is running out. We have to make that change, as Michael Jackson once sung; sooner rather than later.
Loving others is a way to save our beloved America. Love will rescue us. Love is important; it’s powerful. It can sustain our civilization; it can preserve our freedoms; it can extinguish Armageddon.
In 1949, almost a year after I was born, the latest edition of the 30 volume Encyclopedia Americana hit the streets of America. The collection of big books was the first multi-volume encyclopedia sold in the United States, starting way back in 1829. Each year it grew in size, sometimes adding new volumes to cover more subjects. By 1949, it was truly comprehensive.
I own a complete set of the 1949 edition, which my wife’s dad passed on to me after his death a few years ago. By all accounts, the volumes were a sensation when first published. Not only were they successfully sold door to door throughout the United States, but libraries everywhere stocked them on their shelves for scholars and the public alike to explore and absorb.
1949 was a few short years after the end of World War II. Colleges overflowed with legions of returning GIs who studied for free courtesy of the recently passed GI Bill. The Encyclopedia Americanabecame a beacon of knowledge and enlightenment for hundreds of thousands of optimistic Americans who were ramping up their skills to conquer the ignorance and backwardness of a world they knew all too well from their recent exposure to the wars overseas.
After perusing these volumes during the past few years, I have been struck by how much we knew in 1949, and by how much we thought we knew but didn’t. I was dumbfounded by racist patterns of thinking, which seemed to permeate the collection. It came as a complete surprise. Modern people could be excused for thinking that Hitler himself wrote some of the articles, I thought to myself.
People have said that racism is the original sin of America; that we have never come to terms with the bad things we did (and continue to do), because some of our European forefathers — scientists even — believed that Africans were medically degenerate.
Our country enslaved blacks because ostensibly responsible people told our ancestors that Negroes were animals, like lions or tigers. Of course it was OK to work them like pack-animals, some thought. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all. Besides, slavery was in the Bible.
After slavery ended, whites continued to segregate the races. And they still do.
Look at Florida if you don’t believe it. In the State of Florida, segregation is a way of life. Americans, some among us, seem to be oblivious to the evil of our actions and unaware of the demonic origin of many of our ideas about what is true and what is right.
We tend to repeat lies that hurt whole classes of people; lies that help no one but drive to despair and even suicide folks like South American immigrants, gays and, yes, Middle Eastern refugees who struggle to get by in a society that seems to value only excellence and perfection, money and power, symmetry and form, orthodoxy and moral rectitude.
We look down on, shun, and isolate authentic human beings who typically possess attributes we don’t admire like humility, lowliness, incompetence, average intelligence, awkward manners, social inadequacy, clumsiness, unreliable physical ability, psychological disabilities, ugliness, poor hygiene, ravaged skin, lack of hair, too much hair, unpleasant smells, thinness, fatness, and on and on.
We condemn millions to long prison terms who have done nothing more than act like fools; who have made mistakes, which with a little maturity and wisdom gained in the fresh air of freedom they might not ever make again.
Many readers can probably think of many undesirable attributes of human beings they find repulsive and would repress with long prison terms if only they could. It’s a desire best left unfulfilled.
Most are not permitted beyond these gates. They aren’t worthy.
Our inability to accept and live next to people who have less money, less education, different physical traits; who might be less attractive and less polished; who may not understand the world as we do; who are different in some way we find compelling is destroying our humanity; our ability to love and accept others.
Think about it.
We wreck any chance for happiness; any sense of well-being for tens of millions of ordinary people — probably hundreds of millions — who, it turns out, have very few advantages in this life of dog-eat-dog competition; it’s a fight that some lack the temperament to endure. Bigotry is demoralizing for those bullied by it; it is diminishing our country and our world.
We seem unable to even look at people with physical disabilities and handicaps; the blind; the deaf; the burned; the paraplegic; the paralyzed, the mentally incapacitated, the depressed, the hyperactive and the socially fearful.
Many Americans are hiding themselves behind gates, guard shacks, and walls to avoid facing the simple truth that people are diverse; God demands that we accept and respect everyone, because each person — even those who are unattractive and ungrateful in our own morally-damaged sight — are made from the stuff of God Himself and are in the reality we shun truly beautiful and deserving of respect and deference.
Jesus said that God loves the wicked. He loves people who are weak and powerless and undesirable. How can we do less?
Well… one reason is that we are degenerate, everyone of us, whether we are able to see the ugly truth or not. The most admirable person falls short of God’s glory.
Who believes it’s true?
Anyway, I thought that these two entries from the 1949 Encyclopedia Americana, reprinted below in their brutal original version, might help open the eyes of folks who are blind to the cesspool of ideas which have corrupted the spirits of our country; which have driven some people to avoid, ostracize, exclude, and kill people they think are unworthy to enjoy the advantages and privileges they demand for themselves.
These tombs of hate from our past sat on bookshelves and in libraries where they were read for many decades after their publication. Hatred poured forth not only from encyclopedias like the Americana, but from all forms of media and public discourse, it turns out.
The nasty rhetoric of race, exclusion, and the exaggerated elevation of our elites into a pantheon of god-like celebrities has poisoned our minds and our souls; it continues to poison our churches and schools; the military and our public institutions. It’s painfully evident in the rabid venom-spewing aspirants we find in our politics today who I won’t name.
Why demean a good essay by recognizing deplorable people? The president is a public celebrity who rose to power on an ocean tide of hatred. I guess it does no harm to call him out.
People claim they mean well and are doing God’s will, but golly-gee, someone has to say it (it might as well be me): the movement to transfer children from public schools into homeschooling; the stampede to place civilians armed with concealed weapons into churches and schools; the attempts to scare women out of exercising their constitutionally protected freedom to make healthcare choices involving their bodies; fire bombing healthcare clinics that help the poor; intimidating writers like myself who publish views unpopular with morons — all are symptomatic of a country that has become less free, more fascist, less brave — certainly less accepting, less tolerant, less nurturing, and less forgiving.
America is a mean-spirited place for many people. Even upscale people in high places are afraid to speak their minds plainly out of fear for the faceless billionaires who pull their strings and determine their futures. Look at all the safe-talk on television. Some people call it political correctness. What does that term mean?
It means people’s careers get ruined if they speak about certain subjects in a frank and unconventional way. When was the last time you heard a celebrity advocate for something as innocuous as a progressive income tax? Shorter prison sentences? Maximum incomes? Estate size limits? Limits on inherited wealth?
What accelerates and widens inequality can’t be right.
Our celebrities are held in-check by tight leashes. And it isn’t the public holding the leashes. To remain in the spotlight, celebrities must wear muzzles. Does anyone think they are going to complain?
Try to remember the names of celebrities who said something controversial and were never heard from again. You might remember their faces, maybe even some of the shows they were on. Few remember their names, more likely than not. They dropped off the face of the earth. They disappeared. The list is long, it really is.
I write about forbidden subjects all the time, but I’m not a celebrity. No one controls me, not since I resigned my memberships in certain organizations and work for free. But the public doesn’t read my blog. And, yes, some subjects are off-limits even for writers like me who want to believe they are free.
I don’t write about Israel or North Korea or drug cartels; I don’t bad-mouth artists; I don’t condemn creative people, because people with unusual points of view who have talent are fragile and easily frightened to silence; money and fame drive people into isolation bubbles. I don’t publish articles about my sexuality. I tried once; it didn’t turn out well.
Sometimes I break my own rules, it’s true. But let’s get back on message.
I don’t feel like I’m overstating. Below are two examples of a vicious way of thinking, which was mainstream in the decades following 1949. Today in 2015 some folks continue to embrace crazy reasoning. Who will exorcise the evil winds that freeze-dry hearts to raging cold?
Tolerance isn’t enough. It’s uncommitted and indifferent.
Embracing outcasts in love is the way.
It’s not possible to embrace the marginalized in love when advantaged people segregate themselves by income, class, and race. No one can help when they push aside those who don’t think like them or look like them or act like them. No one who believes that diversity is a plague to be avoided can help desperados who need a hand up.
Think about it.
Who can save their children and grand-children when they lack the courage to confront the billionaires who built the gilded cell-block we call America? Billionaires built prison-America to protect themselves from us.
Here’s the problem. Most folks don’t know the names of the billionaires who rule them. Who can reason with the wealthy? Who can find them?
The truth is, they find us, usually when they need someone like a soldier to fight to protect their property or a worker who will add value to their estates by performing tasks for low wages.
The problem is: they don’t love us. Otherwise they would live in the world where we live, but they don’t. Then again, they might allow us to live in their world, where the water in their pools is blue and clean and the sun is warm. But they won’t do that either.
Maybe someday. Someday maybe if they change, they will. They will unlock the gates. They will throw away the keys. They will let us in.
On that day we will become one people, one nation, indivisible, under God.
While we wait, we change ourselves. We learn to live unafraid. We learn to share our advantages. We teach ourselves to love the unloved.
What else is there?
Billy Lee
[The following are excerpts from the 1949 edition of The Encyclopedia Americana. Billy Lee does not endorse any of it. The Editorial Board.]
DEGENERACY. Unfavorable environment is now generally recognized as the chief cause of the failure of individuals to attain the physical, mental, and moral norm of the race. In certain individuals, however, a defective constitution may predispose them toward an inadequate development of mental, and especially moral, qualities. Such individuals are known as degenerates.
In many such cases the basis of degeneracy is a lesion of the nervous system or of the sense organs. Congenital blindness and deafness can result in idiocy unless early measures are taken. However, the fundamental defects may be obscure and inaccessible to the pathological anatomist of the present day. The neuro-sensory defects are often, but not always, accompanied by malformations of a more conspicuous character, known as stigmata.
These include various distortions of the external ear, facial asymmetry, very early or very late closure of the cranial sutures, polydactylism and other digital anomalies and various signs of imperfect or abnormal development. Individual stigmata may be present in a person of normal mental and moral make-up, but the concurrence of a considerable number of stigmata is a fairly good sign of degeneracy.
The forms assumed by degeneracy are very various. The mental defect varies from utter idiocy, where the patient is unable to protect himself from immediate physical danger, through imbecility, where he is still incapable of carrying out the daily processes of dressing and undressing, washing, etc., to the various grades of feeble-mindedness, in which he is able to satisfy all his immediate personal needs, but cannot earn an independent livelihood nor associate with his fellows on equal terms.
The causes of degeneracy are manifold. The racial poisons of alcohol, drugs and venereal diseases are responsible for a large proportion of the cases, though in many cases alcoholism and drug habits may be symptoms rather than causes of degeneracy. Any factor which enfeebles the mother — poverty, illness or the like — may injure the mental and moral constitution of the child as well as its physical constitution. However, the most important cause of degeneracy is in all probability the inherent inferiority of the stock.
That certain forms of degeneracy exhibit a pedigree conforming to the Mendelian law is now an established fact. This hereditary quality of degeneracy, together with the fact that degenerates are often likely to have many children, owing to their immorality, makes the problem of degeneracy a most serious one.
The so-called Jukes family cost the taxpayers of New York State millions of dollars in the course of the 19th century. For this reason many States have enacted laws making it legal in certain cases to perform on degenerates operations designed to prevent their propagating their kind.
See ALCOHOLISM; CRIMINOLOGY; DEGENERATION; EUGENICS; FEEBLE-MINDEDNESS; IDIOCY; INSANITY; PAUPERISM.
Bibliography. — Gillin, J.L., Poverty and Delinquency (New York 1926) ; Slawson, J., Delinquent Boy (Boston 1926) ; Glueck, S. S. and E., Five Hundred Delinquent Women (New York 1934) ; Chassell, C. R., Relation Between Morality and Intellect (New York 1935) ; Lunden, W. A., Juvenile Delinquency (Pittsburg 1936) ; Burt, C. L., Subnormal Mind (New York 1937) ; Karpman, B., Case Studies in the Psychopathology of Crime (Washington 1944).
DEGENERATION —a work of Max Nordau (1895), which aimed at a scientific criticism of those degenerates not upon the acknowledged lists of the criminal classes. Degenerates, asserted Nordau, are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists.
These, however, manifest the same mental characteristics, and for the most part the same somatic features, as the members of the above-mentioned anthropological family, who satisfy their unhealthy impulses with the knife of the assassin or the bomb of the dynamiter, instead of with pen and pencil….
Now I have undertaken the work of investigating the tendencies of the fashions in art and literature; of proving that they have their source in the degeneracy of their authors, and that the enthusiasm of their admirers is for manifestations of more or less pronounced moral insanity and dementia.
One word best describes my reaction to the above entries from the 1949 Encyclopedia Americana: Yikes!
Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, more than any other two people, were responsible for throwing the Mafia out of Cuba in 1959. White (i.e.non-black) gangsters ran Cuba, some may recall. Watch the second Godfather movie, anyone who doesn’t believe it.
Cuban attorney Fidel Castro and Argentine physician Che Guevara expelled organized-crime bosses from Cuba in 1959. The 1974 movie The Godfather Part Two featuring Al Pacino conveyed some of the dangers these men faced and had to overcome, not only in 1959 but for years after when the CIA and organized-crime joined forces on behalf of the United States to kill them both and undo their revolution.
Race relations were terrible. One-third of Cuba’s six-million people were non-white, poor, and disenfranchised. Beaches were whites-only. Restaurants, clubs, casinos, hotels, and other businesses were off-limits to black families.
Castro racially integrated the Revolution by asking blacks to play prominent roles, which some did — like the military commanders Juan Almeida Bosque and Calixto Garcia. Non-whites made up one-half of the volunteer-soldiers in the Revolutionary Army. Cuba became the first predominately non-black country in the Western Hemisphere to include black people in leadership.
Juan Almeida Bosque stands next to Che Guevara. Juan Almeida was a Havana-born freedom fighter (and popular song-writer) who rose to the rank of General in the Cuban Army. He died on 11 September 2009 at age 82 of heart failure.
In the United States, the civil-rights movement lagged Cuba’s by many years. It was five years after the Cuban Revolution before black Americans got legislation to guarantee their right to move freely in public spaces and to vote. Some think our elites pushed the USA toward racial-integration to undercut propaganda advantages the issue provided the new Cuban government within the international community.
The move toward integration in the USA stalled after James Earl Ray assassinated Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968. One hundred and twenty-five cities erupted into racial violence during that summer. Today, 47 years later, large swaths of the United States of America remain largely segregated. Florida is the most egregious example. Florida owns the distinction for being home to the largest number of white Cuban refugees. It also protects the largest number of racially gated communities in the USA.
But Che had a different attitude than the present-day leaders of the state of Florida. According to historian Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara surrounded himself with peasants and black people. He embraced racial, social and intellectual diversity and never let go of this fundamental principle of equality, which undergirded the Cuban Revolution.
Che Guevara, the Cuban doctor-poet, is the one person besides Fidel Castro whose leadership made the Cuban victory possible. An argument can be made — were it not for Che, the Mafia would still run things in Cuba and be stronger internationally than it is now.
It’s possible that without Che and the Cuban Revolution, our elites would not have felt the same urgency to address the problem of racial segregation in the USA, and we would be even more divided today than we still are. It’s possible that the feudal-system in the Americas practiced during the past century would have remained in place.
Anyway, the Cuban Revolution succeeded and the rest, as they say, is history.
”Che” as a child. Ernesto Guevara’s parents were members of Argentina’s ”royal” class.
Ernesto Guevara spent the first twenty-five years of his life preparing for a career in medicine. He traveled the Americas and networked extensively. Through family connections and his personal charisma, Che was able to meet and interact with anyone he chose from the most exalted public figures to the most downtrodden peasants.
Who was Che Guevara? Most Americans have no clue because they don’t read about Che, and television doesn’t do shows about him.
People point out that Che is better known and understood outside the United States. The reason is this: Che thought that the answer to why the people of Cuba, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America were destitute was because powerful people — many of them, citizens of the USA — impoverished poor people on purpose to enrich themselves. It was a simple idea, unacceptable to our elites.
Greed is an easy concept to understand and compelling to anyone who thinks about it for very long. It’s an idea our leaders don’t want ordinary people in the USA to think about too much. The memory of Che Guevara will never be celebrated inside the United States as it is in some other places in the world. In fact, our media has successfully trained most people to forget all about him.
Billionaires, like some members of the Kennedy family, sensed that Che was right (and said so), but they also knew from the inside what it took to create wealth. They understood both the technical and political sides of wealth-creation. Generating and accumulating vast wealth is a complicated, fragile, and sacred process, apparently.
Revolution, they were sure, would screw things up big time.
It took energy, planning and cunning to protect fortunes from governments, but it could be done because governments can be bought for a price. On the other hand, it seemed to the wealthy that protecting their empires from communists, if they ever took over, might be impossible.
Communists believed wealth should be created cooperatively and then shared. It was a point of view opposite to that of our elites who believed wealth was best created by individuals motivated by profit. Riches were to be accumulated to purchase privileges, advantages, and the material pleasures of life for individuals, not society as a whole.
Joseph and Rose Kennedy pose in the lobby of the Colonial Hotel in 1940. Joseph was Ambassador to the Court of Saint James (the United Kingdom). His 23 year old son John would become our 35th President; his 15 year old Bobby would become Attorney General. Ernesto Guevara, 12 at the time, and Fidel Castro, 14, would grow up to confront John Kennedy** and his brother Bobby in the nuclear show-down known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The hatred some rich-folks felt for men and women who thought like Che Guevara was visceral. Ted Kennedy described in his book True Compass how his dad Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. — who made his fortune in movies, then liquor imports — hated communists with a passion that seemed at times unreasonable bordering on insane.
Many wealthy individuals feared that someone who possessed the trustworthiness of a doctor — a physician, for example, who had healthy hair, white teeth and the sparkle of truth in his eyes — might persuade ignorant people to believe pretty much anything.
Che Guevara was that kind of person — a gorgeous communist who believed that any economic system that prevailed because rich people dominated and hurt poor people was an abomination;an evil, which led to a kind of hell-on-earth for just-plain-folks.
Che was dangerous, they decided; truly dangerous.
Che Guevara was a yerba mate tea-drinker.
It’s probably correct to suggest that folks in the USA know very little about Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna because no one in leadership wants to feed Americans information about Che that can be easily understood and digested. Our billionaires would rather we forget all about Ernesto Guevara. I get that.
But a lot of time has passed. Yes, some old people are still left who knew Che. But most who knew him are now dead. Che has passed into the lore of ancient history, he really has.
The United States and Cuba established full diplomatic relations on July 1, 2015. The war between them and us is over. Yes, there are the details of making peace, like the embargo, yet to be unwound. But the war is over, it really is.
Are there hard feelings about how things turned out? Yes, of course there are; on both sides. Some wounds may never heal. War is like that. It’s cruel.
It’s sad that so many got hurt on both sides. But it’s time, we all know it, to allow ourselves to understand better this historical figure, this man, Che Guevara; who he was, what he did, what he stood for, and what he believed.
What follows is a bullet-list of facts we collected about ”Che.” Some facts, encountered for the first time, might surprise some people. Let’s hang onto our hats and keep an open mind. We are all adults here. We can handle the truth if we take the time to breathe deeply and not give in to fear or hate.
[For readers who may want to learn more about modern day Cuba from someone who travels there, click on this link. The Editorial Board]
Che Guevara with his second wife Aleida March. Aleida was an urban guerilla who worked as a courier for the Cuban Revolution. Batista’s secret police referred to her as ”Scarface.” An informer told them she had dog-bite wounds on her face.
Che was a human being — like everyone else. The difference is, he was a rare version of a human being; unusual and unique. His mother and his father, his wives and children have all insisted, Che was special. Aleida, his widow, said he was a perfect man. The people who would eventually murder him hoped to ensure that the world would never see another like him, perhaps to the end of time.
So let’s get started. These glimpses into the personality and skill-set that was ”Che” Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna are in no particular order.
Cuban ”Nico” Antonio Lopez gave Guevara his nickname: ”Che.”
— Ernesto Guevara’s close friend — known to many as the happy Cuban, ”Nico” Antonio Lopez — gave Ernesto his nickname because he thought it was funny that Ernesto always asked for people’s attention by calling out, che! — a Paraquayan Guarani word, which means something like hey you! or better translated perhaps, hey, bro!
It should be mentioned that Nico — ebullient and larger than life — made the initial landing with Che and eighty other fighters near Cabo Cruz lighthouse, which marked the beginning of the military phase of the Cuban Revolution.
During the following week, Batista’s army hunted down and killed 60 members of the landing party. Che, who was shot in the neck, found refuge in a cave. Nico did not survive. Two years later, Che led the survivors and the peasant army he helped build into Havana. The revolution was won.
— Che once worked as a professional photographer. He covered the Second Pan American games in Mexico City in 1955 for Agencia Latina, the Argentine international news agency at the time.
— Che, during his med-school years, flew glider-planes to relax with his uncle Jorge de la Serna.
Che climbed Mexico’s Mt. Popocatepetl three times. He planted the flag of Argentina at its summit in 1956. He was 28 years old.
— Che was an accomplished mountain climber. He climbed Mexico’s Mount Popocatepetl (altitude: 17,900 ft.), three times. He planted the Argentinian national flag at its summit in 1956. He was twenty-eight years old.
— Che, it seems, could walk a tight-rope. He wasn’t afraid of heights, anyway, or of taking risks. A photo exists of him crossing high above a river-chasm spanned only by a connected series of drainage-pipes.
— Che traveled extensively. He took three trips on different routes from south to north through the Americas by horse, motorized-bicycle, motorcycle, truck, bus, train, boat, raft, commercial tanker, cargo-ship, and airplane before his 25th birthday. He even hitch-hiked when necessary.
The hopeless poverty of the common people he met shocked him. Eventually, he would vow to do something to try to change the unfair way things were administered by people of wealth who he also met and spent time with during his journeys.
— Che’s first traveling adventure was during the winter of 1951 at age 22, when he took a job as ship’s nurse and traveled 5,000 miles by tanker along the east-coast (the Atlantic side) of South America making stops along the way from a port in Patagonia in the south to the tiny island nation of Curacao in the north near the coast of Venezuela.
— Che, during extended trips in 1952 and again in 1953, explored the Amazon, Inca and Mayan ruins, and Machu Picchu. He toured copper and titanium mines and visited remote, hard to find leper-colonies where he sometimes stayed for weeks to provide sufferers with needed medical attention.
Che loved archaeology and anthropology almost as much as medicine. He visited Machu Picchu in Peru several times as well as other Inca and Mayan sites. He wrote and published articles in magazines about what he learned.
— Che wrote daily in his diaries and journals for many years. He left behind an extensive and introspective record of his internal world as he developed his point of view and his place in history.
— Che published his first magazine article before age 23. Later, he published research in medical journals.
University of Buenos-Aires Medical School where Che graduated April 11, 1953 at age 25. He specialized in allergy-medicine and pediatrics.
— After graduating from medical school at the University of Buenos-Aires in Argentina, Che completed his internship in Mexico at the Mexico City General Hospital where he worked in the Department of Immunology. He also worked as a researcher at the nearby Pediatric Hospital.
— Che’s second love after medicine was archaeology; he was an expert in the Mayan and Incan civilizations. He visited Palenque and scoured sites at Chichen Itza and Uxmal, which he wrote about extensively. He published articles describing the dig-sites he visited.
— Che vacationed in Miami, Florida for three weeks during his twenties.
— Che was a talented writer and poet. He published several best-selling books during his lifetime. He also authored several unpublished works, which some hope will be published after Fidel Castro and his brother Raul retire from politics.
— Che visited Guatemala in 1954 and witnessed first-hand the CIA overthrow of its popularly elected government. CIA seizure of media enabled it to create in Guatemala an Orwellian aura of inevitability, which disturbed Che and depressed him.
Not to stray too far afield, but psy-ops in Guatemala should be of interest to US citizens for the simple reason that they were coordinated by CIA field officer David Atlee Phillips—later accused by discredited writers and some agency insiders of meeting with Alpha 66 founder Antonio Veciana Blanch and double-agent Lee Harvey Oswald to discuss details of possible assassination plots against both Fidel Castro and John Kennedy.
Anyway, CIA contractors, in a final humiliation, forced the popular President Jacob Arbenz to strip naked in front of reporters before they expelled him from the country. Sickened by the incident, Che wrote: The United States is the enemy of humanity.
— Che’s mom and dad were both members of Argentinian ”royal” families.
Che read constantly from an early age. Released CIA documents noted the depth and diversity of his literary interests.
— According to released CIA documents, Che was unusually well-read, especially in politics, history, philosophy, geography, medicine and psychology. A favorite book was the classic Argentine masterpiece ”El Gaucho Martin Fierro” by Jose Hernandez, published in 1872.
— After high school, Che read the entire 25 volume Contemporary History of the Modern World.
— Che spoke French and Spanish. He had an easy familiarity with English, though he refused to be interviewed using it. He also picked up a limited ability in Swahili, the lingua franca of Africa’s Great Lakes region, when he spent time there on assignment for Cuba. And the Soviet Union provided Che with a tutor who helped him become more proficient in Russian.
— Che was a skilled rugby player and coach. He founded and edited the short-lived (eleven issues) rugby magazine, Tackle.
— Che was a tournament-playing chess enthusiast.
— Che spent his high school years in Cordoba, Argentina, where his family belonged to the exclusive Lawn Tennis Club where Che learned to swim and play tennis.
— Che was a good golfer.
— Che passed a certification exam in civil engineering during high school. His first job after graduating was as a ”soils specialist.” He analyzed soils for road building companies.
— Che’s asthma enabled him to avoid Argentina’s military draft.
— In 1956, Fidel Castro — the well-connected Cuban attorney who belonged to a wealthy land-owning family — shared a cell in a Mexican prison with Che that lasted a month. Fidel and Che — close acquaintances before — bonded; they suffered together as political prisoners.
— After Castro’s release, Che and Calixto Garcia (a black freedom-fighter who would rise to the rank of Brigadier General in the Cuban defense forces) remained in prison for another month.
Che’s uncle, the Argentine ambassador to Cuba, wanted to use his influence to free his nephew but Che refused the help until Mexico agreed to release his friend. In a case of truth-is-stranger-than-fiction, Fidel paid for the two men’s release with funds he unwittingly received from the CIA.
— Fidel soon realized that Guevara could be far more than the physician-poet he had hired to care for his men. On 12 July 1957, Fidel asked Ernesto to command the army he was building. His decision to promote Che created the momentum necessary to secure victory for the Cuban Revolution.
This colorized photo shows a showered and cleaned-up Che following his triumphant entry into Havana, Cuba in January, 1959. He was thirty years old.
— Che was directly responsible for the success of the Cuban Revolution in this way: on 29 December 1958, his battle-group (the Eighth Column) ambushed and de-railed a key armored supply train loaded with weapons, munitions and troop reinforcements belonging to General Fulgencio Batista’s national army. Che and his guerilla fighters then took the city of Santa Clara, which was defended by a force more than ten times the size of their own.
This unexpected loss scared the Cuban dictator who fled the country two days later on New Years Eve (taking an entourage of over two-hundred people and the entire Cuban treasury with him).
On 2 January 1959, Che and his soldiers walked into Havana with their captured weapons and took control of government buildings and military bases without firing a shot. They seized a government that was 1.2 billion dollars in debt and running huge yearly deficits due in part to looting by Batista’s cartel.
— Che published the classic book Guerrilla Warfare in 1961. John Kennedy immediately read it. Based on what he learned, he organized a few weeks later the Green Berets from units of the 77th Special Forces Group, which he renamed the 7th Special Forces Group.
— Che married twice. He fathered one child by his first wife, four by his second.
— After the revolution, Che became the object of a CIA manhunt. Che continued to travel freely because of a disguise he designed that fooled even Fidel Castro and his closest advisors.
— Che felt that Cuba’s relationship with the Soviet Union was one-sided. The Soviets didn’t provide the support in personnel and financial aid needed to offset the international embargo coordinated against Cuba by the United States. Che complained, and it created a flap between the two governments.
— After the Revolution, the new government lowered the age requirement for ministerial service from 35 to 30 and granted Cuban citizenship to Che (who was 30 and Argentinian) so he could legally hold a number of administrative posts. One of the most important was Minister of the Cuban banking system — a position he earned by his reputation for integrity.
Fidel once said that Che Guevara was honest to a fault. True to his reputation, the first thing Dr. Guevara did as Central Bank Administrator was halt the scheduled construction of a new Central Bank complex and use the money saved to build a badly-needed hospital.
— Che, after visiting the Soviet Union, expressed outrage to confidants about the lavish lifestyles of the Russian leaders.
— When Cuba went to rationing after the United States impeded its right to buy food, Che insisted that his family receive the same food-coupons as every other family in Cuba. Despite his efforts, Russian officials later admitted that they smuggled food to his wife, Aleida, when he traveled outside the country.
— Che wrote privately to the Cuban minister of sugar, Orlando Borrego, that he believed — based on his observations of Russian society while visiting there — that the Soviet Union would fall back into Capitalism one day.
— Che returned all gifts showered on him and his family by foreign leaders while serving in Cuba’s ministries. Although the Cuban government provided him with a car, he used it for official duties only. He insisted his family use public transportation.
— When Che entered Havana for the first time, he wore a cast on one of his elbows; he broke it ten days earlier after falling off a wall in the city of Cabaiguan, one of the many towns that fell to his forces before the decisive battle of Santa Clara, which ended the military phase of the revolution.
Che drank yerba mate, a tea popular in Argentina.
— Although Che is often portrayed as a cigar-smoker, and sometimes posed with cigars, he suffered from chronic and severe asthma. He rarely smoked, or drank alcohol, because his health would not permit it.
During the most dangerous phase of the fighting when Che wasn’t sure each day whether he would live or die he did smoke according to at least one credible historian. When victory came, he was hospitalized for pulmonary distress and spent several months recuperating.
— Che was allergic to seafood.
— Che’s favorite beverage was yerba mate, a caffeinated drink brewed from the leaves and twigs of a rainforest tree in the holly family. Popular in Argentina, it was thought to have medicinal properties at the time. Che may have used it to treat his asthma.
— Che was a good swimmer. He used vigorous swimming to help strengthen his lungs.
— The Cuban government gave Che an airplane and a personal pilot to use for government business. He often flew the plane himself because he loved to fly.
— Che taught French to the current president of Cuba, Raul Castro, during their time in the Sierra Maestra, before the Revolution was won.
— Alberto Korda took the iconic photo above of Che (by which the world now identifies him) on March 5, 1960. It followed the state memorial service for the one-hundred people who died in the terrorist attack on the French freighter La Coubre in Havana Harbor the previous day. Two-hundred people were severely injured.)
Because Americans were napalming sugar-cane fields and sugar refineries to wreck the Cuban economy (one plane had been shot down and the pilot, an American, captured), Fidel Castro in his address to the mourners blamed the CIA for the attack on the French ship while Che Guevara stood next to him wearing the iconic expression on his face that became his brand.
Neither man knew at the time that in 13 months the United States would escalate the conflict by conducting a full-scale military assault on the island of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
The CIA continued to attack Cuban shipping through 1964 before international outrage over the killing of the captain and two crew members of a misidentified Spanish freighter — it was also set on fire and almost sunk — brought sufficient pressure on the agency to change its policies.
Che Guevara — a few hours before they killed him.
— In 1967, an 1800 man Bolivian Ranger Force trained in Guatemala by the USA hunted down Che in Bolivia and captured him. A small unit from this force tortured him by firing a half-dozen rounds into his legs, then executed him.
Those who murdered Che reported that he measured 5’8″ and weighed 155 pounds. These numbers are widely repeated on the Internet. The killers cut off his hands and sent them to Fidel Castro, then hid his body among six of his fighters in an unmarked grave. Some have wondered if truth was one of their core-values.
According to the killers, Che would have been seven inches shorter than Fidel, which doesn’t seem to match-up with the many photos of the two men together, including the lead photo in this essay. Based on photos I’ve reviewed, Che appears to be 4 to 5 inches shorter than Fidel, who was 6’3″. After reviewing photographs, my opinion is that Che was 5’10”.
Why Che’s executioners would misrepresent his height is anybody’s guess.
— The woman who fed Che a bowl of soup before his execution, Julia Cortez, said this about his appearance: He was an extraordinarily handsome man. He wasn’t the man depicted to us: black, ugly, evil. His eyebrows, his nose, his mouth — all of his features were perfect.
— Captain Gary Prado of Bolivia asked Che: Why didn’t you give up? Why didn’t you disband your unit and go home when you had the chance? Che answered: Where would I go?
According to Prado, that was Che’s dilemma in Bolivia. He was isolated, shunned by the international community of nations, and trapped. He had no place else to go.
Neill W. MacCaulay, Citadel graduate, Korean War Veteran, and trainer of the Cuban expeditionary force led by Fidel Castro.
— Fidel Castro hired a number of American Korean War veterans — among them Neill W. MacCaulay and Miguel Sanchez — to train his expeditionary force. In 1956, MacCaulay evaluated Che, writing that he was an ”excellent” marksman with ”excellent” discipline, leadership abilities, and physical endurance. The only negative: Che smiled a lot, which MacCaulay felt was an inappropriate facial expression for a guerrilla warrior.
— Neill W. MacCaulay, Jr. entered Havana at Che’s side in his moment of total victory. Years later he would teach Latin-American history at the University of Florida as professor-emeritus. Before he passed in 2007, Professor MacCaulay said in a filmed interview: Che’s troops knew what they were doing. They knew they had a good commander. They had Che, who was top of the line. They trusted him.
As for the victory parade into Havana, Neill said, We were received as liberators; celebrated; I mean people ran out with bottles of rum. People went wild.
— Six years and ten months after the Revolution on 3 October 1965, Che Guevara resigned his post as Minister, his rank of Commander, and his Cuban citizenship. He severed all ties to Castro and the country of Cuba. He followed the lead of every country in the Western Hemisphere except Mexico, which alone among countries resisted pressure from the United States to sever relations. Che turned his back on the protection offered by Castro and the Soviet Union.
No one to my knowledge knows for sure why Che made this break. What we do know is that Castro read Che’s confidential resignation letter on Cuban radio and television, perhaps without Che’s consent, and that two years later almost to the day — October 9, 1967 — Che lay dead in a Bolivian school house.
— Before the Revolution, Che’s fellow ”boot-camp” trainees, in a peer-review conducted by MacCaulay, agreed unanimously that Che possessed the skills and talents required to lead effectively at the highest level. His subsequent performance in the Cuban Revolution confirmed their judgment and propelled Che Guevara into the ranks of legendary warriors like Spartacus and Geronimo, who lost their lives fighting for hopeless causes and changed the world.
Billy Lee
Post Script: Cuba buriedChe Guevara with full military honors on 17 October 1997 after his remains and the remains of six of his fighters were discovered in Bolivia and returned to Santa Clara, the site of the battle he conducted to win the Cuban Revolution. Che’s wife, Aleida, and his children — at the sides Raul and Fidel Castro — grieved in a more private ceremony three month’s earlier in July.
Although the CIA had an agent present and trained and equipped — in Guatemala, of all places — the Bolivian Special Forces unit that killed Guevara, the agency has always insisted it tried to save Che’s life. The President of Bolivia at the time, Rene Barrientos, demanded Che’s execution; it was Bolivia’s war, the CIA argued, and not their call.
They were powerless to save him.
On April 27, 1969, Rene Barrientos died in a helicopter crash. The Editorial Board
Ernesto ”Che” GuevaraSean Connery
— Some say that Sean Connery parodied Che’s personality and adopted one of his ”looks” to create the movie character, James Bond, in the 1960s movie-series.*
Ronald before.Ronald after.
No one ever suggested that Ronald Reagan used plastic surgery to make himself appear more Che-like. But look at Ronald’s before and after pictures. You decide.
* We investigated the assertion that Sean Connery’s James Bond is a caricature of Che Guevara. It turns out Billy Lee said this, and maybe a couple of his imaginary friends. The Editorial Board
Billy Lee’s Acknowledgement: The most important source of information for this essay was Jon Lee Anderson‘s Che Guevara, a Revolutionary Life, published in 1997. The New York Times called it, the complete and definitive biography of Che Guevara.
I cut the disturbing cover off the book in order to read it (it scared me), and willed myself to peer through the negative colors its author used to paint Che’s portrait on its 780 pages. I believe I found the truth Anderson buried there.
Billy Lee
John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States. Here is a link to the quote below.
** October 24, 1963 I believe that there is no country in the world…where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies…. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.
… In any case, the nations of Latin America are not going to attain justice and progress…through communist subversion. They won’t get there by…a Marxist dictatorship.
U.S. President John F. Kennedy
35th President of the United States Assassinated November 22, 1963
In 1958 when I was a fourth grader our family moved to Quonset Point, Rhode Island where my dad was soon promoted to lead HS-11, one of the Navy jet-helicopter squadrons defending the east coast from attack by Russian submarines.
We moved to Quonset Point with some trepidation because Hoskins Park — the housing project for military families in those days (now sold, redeveloped, and renamed Wickford Point) — had a long waiting list; we didn’t know where we would live or if we could afford off-base housing.
As it turned out, we got a lucky break. A Navy Lieutenant — who was a Negro — moved his family into Hoskins Park. Some white officers found out and decided their families weren’t going to live in non-segregated housing. As a result, vacancies popped-up, and we got in; we moved-in next door to the Negro officer and his family.
In 1958, my family moved to Quonset Point, Rhode Island. Inexpensive on-base housing was overcrowded. We didn’t know where we would live, or if we could afford to live anywhere.
Lieutenant Brown, his wife and two daughters, lived in the two-story, condo-style apartment on the other side of a thin concrete wall from us.
Despite the custom that white and black families didn’t fraternize in those days, eventually I had encounters, conversations, and interactions with all the members of the Brown family.
Over time, I came to understand how traumatized they were, each in their own way, living in a country that, basically, isolated and mistreated them.
My parents accepted an invitation to the Brown’s for dinner — an event that had all the drama of the movie, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, released nine years later, in 1967.
One encounter involved my parents. The Browns invited them for dinner to get acquainted, and after agonizing about it, Mom and Dad accepted. I think Dad wanted to check them out; to make sure his kids would be “safe” living next door.
After the meal, Dad reported that the Lieutenant’s wife, Jean (Alston), was a good cook, but he couldn’t shake a queasy feeling in his stomach, which spoiled his appetite. He had never interacted with negroes, except servants(everyone called black people negroes in the 1950s); he certainly had not eaten food at the same table. And, unlike my dad, Mr. Brown was a graduate of the Naval Academy.
In that sense, the lieutenant kind of outranked him. According to dad, Academy graduates favored one another and worked hard to help each other achieve promotions. They put non-Academy graduates (like dad) to great disadvantage in the competition for rank, which was fierce inside the Navy.
A black Academy graduate presented a dilemma. Brown was a graduate of the elite Naval Academy with all its privileges and protections; at the same time, he belonged to a race that was, to put it politely, undervalued both by the Navy and the country at large. It was unfamiliar terrain for dad and made him uncomfortable. I remember my parents writing a thank-you note to the Brown’s for their hospitality but as far as I know, they didn’t return an invitation.
Another incident occurred a few weeks later that changed the way I thought about people and what they sometimes go through. It happened on a day when my fourth-grade teacher decided to punish me for violation of good-citizenship. I sassed her, she claimed, because I insisted — in a loud voice before classmates — she couldn’t tell me what to do!She wasn’t my parent!
In my mind, it made sense. To show how wrong I was, she kept me after school to clean the blackboard. She forced me to practice my reading. I left school an hour late.
When I arrived home, I saw Billie — Lieutenant Brown’s sixth-grade daughter — standing on her porch a few feet from ours, crying, and shifting back and forth on her feet in a puddle of — I took a second look to be sure — her own pee. I couldn’t believe it; I didn’t know what to say or do. I ran inside our condo to tell mom.
I wish I could say that Mom brought Billie into our place, helped her clean-up, and gave her a secure place to wait until her mom got home with a key. But mother did nothing like that. Instead, she became animated and began to marvel about how such an embarrassing calamity could befall a sweet girl like Billie. I became annoyed. Why didn’t she ask us? I interrupted. We would have let her use our bathroom!
Maybe she was afraid to ask, mom said. Maybe she was afraid we would say, no.
So afraid she let her stomach burst? I yelled.
1957. Daisy Bates tries to enter Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to rescue her and eight other students from angry whites. It was the following year that our family moved to Quonset Point, Rhode Island.
Some weeks after, I stood alone in the playground behind our building when Billie walked up. We didn’t speak but sat down together on the ground to draw pictures in the gray clay beneath us — clay the housing complex we shared was built on.
It didn’t seem right to sit with someone and not talk but I couldn’t think of anything to say. Billie was a couple of years older. We had little in common, it seemed. We concentrated for a while, in silence, on our art.
Then, she looked up. She fixed her eyes on mine. I didn’t look away. I tried to hold her gaze. Finally, she whispered. She said simply, I hate being colored.
I felt the blood drain from my face. Hate was a bad word. We didn’t use the word hate in our family.
To hear Billie whisper, hate, about herself — hate about something she had no control over or responsibility for, which she couldn’t change, wish away, or escape — upended my internal world. In that moment, the ground shifted beneath my feet.
Somehow, hearing her speak those words — and the mental image I had created in my memory of the day she danced in a pool of her own urine — conflated in my mind. As Billie waded ankle-deep in her own bodily fluids, I heard her screaming. I hate being colored!!! I hate it!! I hate it!I hate it.
In my imagination, I took my place beside her. I raged against God and all the earth for making her colored; for allowing white people to be so insensitive, so mean, so un-caring, so ill-tempered, so prejudiced.
—————
Billie’s father supervised a motor-pool near, but outside, the Quonset Point military base. According to friends of my mom, he was some kind of gas-station attendant. One warm day, he saw me playing outside and asked if I wanted to take a ride with him in his new convertible. I said sure.
He said he wanted to show me something. He was in charge of something and wanted to show me what it was. He wanted to show me what he did.At his work.
I thought, this is a crazy request. After all, I didn’t know what my own dad did. He’d never taken me to work or showed me anything having to do with what he was about when he wasn’t home.
So, I climbed into Mr. Brown’s convertible, top down, and off we went. It turned out that he was good at small talk. I listened happily to his resonant voice and enjoyed the sun and warm breezes as we rambled along. We passed through some old guard shacks, a few barbed-wire-topped chain-link fences, and entered an area so remote and wild, it was hard to believe we were still in Rhode Island.
We drove through a dense grove of trees and up onto a hill. Mr. Brown slowed the car and stopped. The sun blazed into the open convertible. Look, he said. He frowned, then nudged my shoulder and pointed. Look down there.
There were more military vehicles under Navy Lieutenant Brown’s command than I imagined there were cars in the entire world. This photo of a military motor-pool in a western state reminds me of what I saw in Rhode Island.
Below us for as far as my eyes could see, in a valley that stretched to the very edge of Earth, sat thousands of green and gray trucks and jeeps; armored personnel carriers and tanks; military vehicles of every stripe and size, all neatly parked in long straight lines. As a naive fourth grader, I found the view hard to take in. There lay spread below us more vehicles than I imagined existed in the entire world.
It was the second time a member of the Brown family stunned me. I was speechless. Then I said, you’re in charge of all of those trucks? Navy Lieutenant Brown smiled, sadly, I thought, then looked at me like Billie had.
I am, he said.
Billy Lee
Editor’s Postscript: This story is grounded in the memories of a fourth grader of events that occurred almost sixty years ago. The make of Mr. Brown’s car and the nature of the installation visited may or may not be accurate.
After writing this article, Billy Lee learned that Mr. Brown, sadly, passed away on May 22, 2012, at age 85 from cancer. After reading old press releases, he discovered that historian Robert J. Schneller had published a book in 2005 about Mr. Brown’s experiences at the Naval Academy called Breaking the Color Barrier. In 1949, it turns out, Midshipman Brown became the school’s first black graduate.
Unknown to Billy Lee, Wesley Brown had become an historical figure. Billy Lee has asked the Editors to add biographical notes to his post.
In 1958, neither Billy Lee nor Mr. Brown’s neighbors knew that the young Naval officer owned the distinction of being the first black midshipman to graduate from the Naval Academy. In the racial climate of the 1950’s, an achievement like Mr. Brown’s would have been seen as the exception that proved the rule: Negroes were inferior. It would have been bad taste in polite society to call attention to Lieutenant Brown’s achievement.
None of Wesley’s neighbors, Billy Lee recalls, had any idea of the hell he went through to become a Naval officer. In any event, white people in 1958 were so blinded by racism that they would have thought, had they known: Wesley’s accomplishment was of no consequence; it was not worth mentioning or even thinking about.
It’s hard to believe now, but white Americans in 1958 didn’t know their country had a race problem.
Wesley Brown was the first black graduate of the Naval Academy. Because no white midshipmen would share a room with him, he lived alone during the four years it took to earn his engineering degree. When classmates blocked his admission to the academy choir, Wesley joined the cross-country track team where future President and upperclassman, Jimmy Carter, befriended him.
Wesley Brown became the first black American to survive the racial hazing at the Naval Academy and graduate. I knew him to be a happy person with a charitable attitude toward all people. He was a kind and gentle neighbor who, during the year of 1958, made me feel good each time I saw or spent time with him.
His wife, Jean (Alston), led our church choir and taught me to sing. We did a television show under her direction. His daughter, Willetta (Billie), transformed my view of the world with a single sentence. I read somewhere that Carol, the youngest daughter, did well in life.
After our families parted ways, Wesley’s family grew to include sons. Eventually, Wesley Brown and Jean divorced; Wesley married Crystal Malone in 1963. He rose to the rank of Lieutenant Commander before retiring in 1969 to pursue other interests.
As my story tells, it was racism in the Navy that made it possible for me to know the Browns. Midshipman Wesley Brown changed America for the better. He suffered to accomplish it, but he kept his pain to himself and his closest friends.
I am proud to say that once, I knew Wesley Brown and he knew me.
In an effort to bring common sense to government, citizens of the United States voted yesterday to restore control of the Senate and House of Representatives to the Republican Party. Barack Hussein Obama, the Kenyan usurper — the first modern president to misplace his birth certificate — called the vote, idiotic.
Kenyan Usurper Barack Obama (KUBO)
Republicans have vowed to quickly demonstrate their ability to lead by promising to impeach both President Obama and VP Joe Biden so that sobbing John Boehner — the House Majority Leader (and next in line) — can ascend to the Oval Office.
Boehner, for his part, pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act and return health-care in America to what it has always been — unaffordable.
Sobbing John Boehner
The Grand Old Party promised to eliminate taxes on anyone earning over one-million dollars per year to “free up the economy” and bring prosperity to America — like was done in 2008, at the end of the Bush administration.
The GOP pledged to improve racial segregation by offering low cost loans to gated communities, exclusive golf resorts, and home-schoolers.
Triumphant GOP honchos guaranteed they will annihilate ISIS, totally eradicate diseases like Ebola and the dreaded GAY, and make Ted Cruz a household name. They pledged to intensify the national campaign to improve racial segregation by offering low-interest loans to gated-communities, private golf-resorts and home-schools.
And — in a bold election year tip-of-the-hat to Alaska, Wisconsin and Michigan — they swore to raise the temperature of planet Earth to a more comfortable setting by ignoring silly scientists who are always belly-aching about global warming.
GOP leaders agreed to work with Democrats to fund firearms training for preschoolers.
GOP paladins vowed to construct a half-mile wide oil-filled ignite-able moat (you know, the kind they dig around castles) to stop the huddledMexican masses yearning to breathe free from ever crossing the border into the United States again.
Last (but not least) they agreed to work with Democrats to fund firearms training for preschoolers.
Not Jesus.
Christian leaders praised today’s election results: it pleased Jesus, it really did, to learn that responsible, rich people with good values were finally going to fix things in America.
No more Muslim presidents, GOP preachers asserted confidently. Nor brown-skinned, another giggled.
