Black History Month

[mikesiva]

1 Overview
Joseph de Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was one of the most remarkable figures of the 18th century. Incredibly, this son of a slave rose to the top of French society through his mastery of fencing and his genius for classical music!

5 Birth
Joseph de Bologne's father was George de Bologne de Saint-Georges, a member of a wealthy family which had lived in the French West Indies colony of Guadeloupe since 1645. He married Élisabeth Merican on September 8, 1739. By January, 1740 he had moved to a 250-acre plantation with 60 slaves. One of the slaves was an attractive young woman about 17 who was named Anne but was called Nanon. She was of African descent and was born on the island. George and Nanon began an intimate relationship shortly after his arrival. Their son Joseph de Bologne came into the world on Christmas Day, 1745. His African heritage made him ineligible for the nobility and its titles under French law.

33 Friends of Black People
Saint-Georges' trips to England introduced him to the country's anti-slavery movement. He helped found a French group called the Société des amis des noirs [Society of the Friends of Black People]. He also produced a children's musical, Aline et Dupré ou Le Marchand des marrons [Aline and Dupré or The Chestnut Seller]. It was staged on August 9, 1788. As a violinist, Saint-Georges gave concerts in England as well as France. One dark evening in January 1790 on which he was scheduled to perform in England he was walking alone, carrying his violin, when a man with a pistol and a stick tried to rob him. He fought off the robber, only to be attacked by 4 more men. He overpowered them as well. Gabriel Banat argues that Saint-Georges' support for the liberation of slaves was known in England, “...and no doubt sufficiently irritating to Britain's slave cartel to make them try to eliminate him.”

34 French Revolution
Saint-Georges was living in Lille when the French Revolution broke out in July, 1789. He joined the National Guard in Lille later that year. He obtained the rank of Captain in 1790. Saint-Georges the soldier was still a musician and a fencer, so he organized concerts and fencing demonstrations in Lille while stationed in the city. He even wrote an opera, Guillaume-Tout-Coeur ou les Amis de village [William-All-Heart or The Village Friends]. An actor from Lille wrote the lyrics for the work, which was performed September 8, 1790. Saint-Georges' connections with the Ancien Régime now made him the object of great suspicion, so he began signing his name as either Saint-George or simply George.

35 Saint-George Legion
Members of the National Guard were asked to volunteer for active duty, so Saint-Georges enlisted on June 21, 1791 as an aide-de-camp to two generals. He soon received another call to duty. On September 1, 1791 a delegation of men of color, led by Julien Raimond of Saint-Domingue, asked the National Assembly to allow them to fight in defense of the Revolution and its egalitarian ideals. The next day, the Assembly approved a corps comprised mainly of men of color, with 800 infantry and 200 cavalry personnel. Saint-Georges was appointed to be its Colonel. Its official name was légion franche de cavalerie des Américains, but it soon became known to all as the légion Saint-George [Saint-George Legion]. The Colonel chose his friend and protege Alexandre Dumas as Lieutenant-Colonel. Like his Colonel, he was the son of a French aristocrat and an African slave. He later had a son, also named Alexandre Dumas, who won fame as author of The Three Musketeers.

36 13th Combat Regiment
Austrian troops laid siege to Lille and the men of the Saint-George Legion were among the first in combat. The Colonel led his own troops and others, fighting on the front lines even though his rank did not require it. The Austrians were ultimately repulsed and Saint-Georges proudly informed the Convention of the victory. Soon, however, the authorities began removing men of color from the Legion. They renamed it the 13e Régiment de chasseurs [13th Combat Regiment]. Many men of color in the infantry were sent to the colonies to put down slave rebellions. Critics, including Alexandre Dumas, tried to undermine Saint-Georges' position. They blamed him for chronic shortages of food and equipment, and for poor morale.

37 Treason of Dumouriez
Saint-Georges played a crucial role in halting "la trahison de Dumouriez" [The Treason of Dumouriez] at Lille in April, 1793. General Charles François Dumouriez had been defeated at Neerwinden, Belgium in March and had subsequently made a secret armistice with Austria. He intended to capture Lille, crown the son of the dead King as Louis XVII, and use the city as a base for regaining control of France for the monarchy. Dumouriez sent General Miaczinski to a town near Lille with 4,000 troops. Miaczinski told Saint-Georges and Alexandre Dumas of the plan in person. They let him believe they would allow his soldiers to seize Lille. When the time came for him to take control of Lille, Miaczinski brought only a small escort. Saint-Georges and Dumas arrested him and sent him to Paris, where he was executed. His troops did not try to take the city; Dumouriez took refuge outside France; and the young French Republic was saved.

38 Prisoner
Saint-Georges was a hero, but not for long. His ties to the aristocracy made him vulnerable to false charges of misusing public funds. Simon Dufresse, a commissaire, wrote a scathing denunciation. Alexandre Dumas apparently had different political sympathies than his Colonel. He joined others in accusing his commanding officer of wrongdoing. Colonel Saint-Georges was arrested on November 4, 1793 and was imprisoned without trial. Robespierre eventually fell, signalling a change in the political winds. The Committee of Public Safety finally ruled that Saint-Georges had been removed without cause. On October 23, 1794 it ordered his release from prison. Saint-Georges' hopes of returning to his former position were dashed by a general decree of October 25, 1795.

39 Saint-Domingue
Biographer Gabriel Banat reports he is persuaded by circumstantial evidence that Saint-Georges journeyed to Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, between April 2, 1796 and April 6, 1797. The Parisian press made no mention of Saint-Georges during the period. His sojourn is also supported by the book Memoirs of An Actress, by Louise Fusil, his close associate. Gabriel Banat and Pierre Bardin agree, however, that no documentary evidence of such a trip has been found, even though passenger records of the relevant ships have been searched thoroughly.

http://chevalierdesaintgeorges.homestead.com/page1.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The sentence I put in bold is the only one I question...when a slave-holder demands sex from his slave, I'm not sure how "intimate" that can be.

I also highlighted references to Dumas...more of which will come later.

[mikesiva]

"At the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, a mixed-race child born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean grows up to cast aside his white father's noble heritage -- and his family name -- to join the French military. With strength and courage in battle, he is eventually promoted to its highest ranks. Over time, the future emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, comes to resent this outsized "black devil," but it is the soldier's son, a novelist, who will have the last word. By immortalizing his father in legend, the son not only makes the family name immortal; he becomes one of the most celebrated French writers in history....Dumas was born Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie ("Alex" for short) on March 25, 1762, in Jérémie, Saint-Domingue, a French colony occupying the west of Hispaniola island in the Caribbean Sea (in the country that we know as Haiti today). Alex's mother was a black or mulatto slave, Marie Cessette Dumas. His father was the French nobleman, Alexandre Antoine Davy, whose title was the Marquis de la Pailleterie. The marquis (known as Antoine) had ventured to Saint-Domingue to live with his brother, Charles, a prosperous sugar planter. When the two brothers had a falling-out, Antoine fled to the countryside, taking three of Charles' slaves with him. Though no record exists indicating they ever married, Antoine and Marie Cessette had four children, all of them "mulattoes and mulatresses," as a detective for Antoine's brother's family reported, according to Reiss. (To be sure, Alex's mother was not one of the slaves his father plundered, but one for whom he paid "an exorbitant price," the detective noted.) Given the blending of his parents, Reiss writes, Alex "had the unique perspective of being from the highest and lowest ranks of society at once." It didn't last long, however. In order to finance his trip back to France, Antoine ended up selling Marie Cessette and three of his four children into slavery (it is also possible Marie had died three years earlier, perhaps in a hurricane, Reiss notes, but no solid evidence of her passing has been found). Antoine's favorite child, Alex, he eventually sold, too, at Port au Prince, but only "conditionally," Reiss explains; when Antoine assumed control of his family's chateau in Normandy, France, in 1775, he bought Alex back (but not the others) so that he could come and live with him....For Dumas, it was a critical turning point. In fact, in the year of revolution, 1789, he met his wife, Marie Louise Labouret, while stationed with her family at Villers-Cotterêts. They married in 1792 -- the same year Dumas was promoted to corporal after leading a group of four dragoons to capture 12 Austrian raiders along the Belgian frontier. 1792 was important for another reason as well: It was the year King Louis XVI was deposed and France became a republic. As the country mobilized, new military units formed. Among them was la Légion Noire (the Black Legion), a coalition of free and mixed-race blacks from the French colonies under the command of another mixed-race man, Joseph Boulogne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. Hearing of Corporal Dumas' daring, Saint-Georges tried to recruit him, but Dumas' notoriety had spread so far that he became the object of a fierce bidding war until Saint-Georges offered him the rank of lieutenant colonel -- second in command. As historian John G. Gallaher writes in his book, General Alexandre Dumas: Soldier of the French Revolution, "[t]he transition for Dumas must have been a shock. Almost overnight he was catapulted from a corporal leading patrols of five or six men on reconnaissance missions to commanding a legion that quickly reached battalion strength." Yet Dumas continued to demonstrate his valor in battle and in 1793 was promoted again, this time to general of division in charge of 10,000 men. More good news followed when the National Convention in France decreed that slavery in its colonies was to be abolished and that all men, regardless of color, were to become citizens under the French constitution. In a letter of exhortation to his soldiers on March 6, 1794, Dumas conveyed his swelling feelings in the third person. As Reiss quotes him: "Sincere lover of liberty and equality, convinced that all free men are equals, he will be proud to march out before you, to aid you in your efforts, and the coalition of tyrants will learn that they are loathed equally by men of all colors." Marching out before the Army of the Alps in 1794, Dumas engaged in a series of furious, frozen mountain battles against the Austrians. By this point, he had risen to commander-in-chief, which, as Reiss pointed out in Harvard Magazine, was the equivalent of a four-star general today. The number of men under his command: 53,000....Back in the saddle, Dumas assumed command of the Army of the West in Vendeé, where he earned plaudits for imposing order on an army that had grown too fond of plunder, even murdering peasants. In the summer of 1795, Dumas then teamed up with the Army of the Rhine to attack Austria's positions in the always coveted (thus contested) Rhineland. Injured in the battle, Dumas spent the rest of the year on France's Eastern frontier and at home with his pregnant wife and child. In November 1796, Dumas traveled to Milan, in Italy, where he formed a bond with a man who would one day control his fate: Napoleon Bonaparte. Dumas served under Napoleon in two major campaigns, Italy in 1796-1797 and Egypt in 1798-1799. Eisenhower and Patton they were not....The feeling was mutual. Dumas disliked Napoleon for advancing his own political agenda and criticized him for not doing more to keep his troops from exploiting local populations and his generals from whipping up a cult of personality around him. At the same time, Dumas was convinced Napoleon was going out of his way to diminish Dumas' military accomplishments. And on January 18, 1787, Dumas let Napoleon know it obliquely in a letter that Reiss quotes: "I have learned that the jack ass whose business it is to report to you upon the battle … stated that I stayed in observation throughout the battle. I don't wish any such observation on him, since he would have shit in his pants." Here Dumas was dumping on Napoleon's messenger, but his message to the future emperor was clear: Don't mess with the facts! In battle, Dumas continued attracting attention -- and acclaim -- for his courage. In fact, after leading small groups of soldiers against the Austrians in Italy, the Austrians started calling Dumas der schwarze Teufel, "the black devil," according to Reiss. Napoleon, too, was bedeviled by Dumas' battlefield prowess. Acknowledging them, he coined his own nickname for Dumas: "the Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol," a reference to the man who had protected ancient Rome from the Barbarians. Actually, Dumas should have been doing more to protect himself from Napoleon....Unbeknownst to Dumas, Napoleon had an informant shadow a meeting Dumas was having with his fellow officers, and when word traveled back, Reiss writes, Napoleon (I imagine him looking up!) confronted Dumas with explosive accusations of mutiny and sedition. Napoleon even threatened to shoot Dumas if it continued. Not one to back down, Dumas reiterated his desire to fight for his country, and not for the selfish goals of one man. With that, he asked for a leave to return to France. Adding to the mix, Reiss notes, were Dumas' frustrations that Napoleon had no apparent intention of abolishing slavery in Egypt. Remember, Dumas' last name had been that of a slave, his mother. General Dumas departed Egypt in 1799 -- months after Napoleon's own unannounced exit. The sailing was less smooth for Dumas, however. When the ship Belle Maltaise sprung a leak, the crew of 120 men was forced to make an unplanned stopover in Italy. Thinking they would land among friends, they were sorry to discover Taranto had fallen to the anti-French insurgency, the Holy Faith Army, and in the confusion, Dumas was seized as a prisoner of war and imprisoned in a fortress dungeon. It was only when Dumas' wife persuaded French officials to intervene that the general gained his release -- two years later."

http://www.theroot.com/articles/history ... rmy.4.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

And so much more!

[mikesiva]

Black history cannot be confined to one month....

Remembering Frantz Fanon:

“To speak pidgin to a Negro makes him angry, because he himself is a pidgin-n****r-talker. But, I will be told, there is no wish, no intention to anger him. I grant this; but it is just this absence of wish, this lack of interest, this indifference, this automatic manner of classifying him, imprisoning him, primitivizing him, decivilizing him, that makes him angry. If a man who speaks pidgin to a man of color or an Arab does not see anything wrong or evil in such behavior, it is because he has never stopped to think.”
― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

“The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother-country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

[mikesiva]

The fact that we officially commemorate the Holocaust on January 27, the date of the liberation of Auschwitz, means that remembrance of Nazi crimes focuses on the systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews.

The other victims of Nazi racism, including Europe’s Sinti and Roma are now routinely named in commemoration, but not all survivors have had equal opportunities to have their story heard. One group of victims who have yet to be publicly memorialised is black Germans.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 39216.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[mikesiva]

Karl Marx on the Morant Bay Rebellion....

"The Jamaican business is typical of the utter turpitude of the ‘true Englishman’. These fellows are as bad as the Russians in every respect. But, says the good old Times, these damned rogues enjoyed ‘all the liberties of an Anglo-Saxon Constitution’. I.e. they enjoyed the liberty, amongst others, of having their hides taxed to raise money for the planters to import c*****s and thus depress their own labour market below the minimum. And these English curs with their sensibilities sent up an outcry about ‘beast Butler’ for hanging one man! and refusing to allow the former planters’ diamond-spangled yellow womenfolk to spit in the faces of the Federal soldiers! The Irish affair and the Jamaica butcheries were all that was needed after the American war to complete the unmasking of English hypocrisy!"

Marx to Engels, 20 November 1865

http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/marx ... _11_20.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[mikesiva]

"Much has been made, inevitably in The Guardian, of Nolan’s failure to acknowledge the presence of Muslim troops at Dunkirk – Muslim Indian Commonwealth soldiers (from what is now Pakistan) and, of course, Algerian and Moroccan regiments in the French army. Atonement did contain a black British soldier in the retreat to Dunkirk although no photographs appear to exist of black UK troops in 1940 France – and Leslie Norman’s much older Dunkirk movie, which premiered two years after I first visited the beaches, contained no black soldiers – John Mills’s companions in the retreat to Dunkirk were all white – although in the film French civilians risk their lives to help save British troops. Of course, even in this early stage of the Second World War, ethnic minority British citizens did show enormous courage – one of the bravest ARP men during the Blitz was black, although we have yet to see a film about him."

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/dun ... 74501.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

This is why I don't watch films like "Dunkirk"....

[MarcusGarveyLives]

Anger after primary school in Manor Park asks pupils to dress as slaves for Black History Month (click for more)

[mikesiva]

Schoolchildren should be taught about the "role and legacy" of the British Empire and colonisation, Jeremy Corbyn says.

The Labour leader said it was vital that future generations understood about black Britons' struggle for racial equality.

He said this was more important than ever in light of the Windrush scandal.

The government said schools taught a "broad and balanced curriculum" including black history.

Black History Month has been marked in the UK every October for more than 30 years.

But on a visit to Bristol - which grew wealthy on the back of the slave trade in the 18th century - Mr Corbyn said it should not be confined to a single month because "black history is British history".

He said: "It is vital that future generations understand the role that black Britons have played in our country's history and the struggle for racial equality.

"In the light of the Windrush scandal, Black History Month has taken on a renewed significance and it is more important now than ever that we learn and understand, as a society, the role and legacy of the British Empire, colonisation and slavery."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-45824498" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[mikesiva]

Decades of racism has resulted in the whitwashing of black composers Samuel Coleridge Taylor and Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de St-George:

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