One nation indivisible
18th July 2022 · 0 Comments
Francis Bellamy, a socialist Christian minister, wrote the Pledge of Allegiance for the Youth’s Companion magazine for the National Public School Celebration of Columbus Day in 1892. Bellamy wanted to revive “patriotism” in the decades following the American Civil War.
The author’s stirring words are a testament to his love for the Republic and Bellamy’s beliefs that there should be liberty and justice for all.
It’s a shame that his beautiful vision of America was not confirmed for many American-born citizens. America is a divided nation with liberty and justice for some. It was that way when Bellamy put pen to paper, and it remains so today due to laws written and enacted by the country’s political leaders.
France, Louisiana’s original colonizer, created a separate and unequal society with its 1724 Louisiana Black Code (Code Noir). The Code’s 55 Articles, based on France’s Louis XIV’s edict of 1685, the Saint Domingue Code Noir for the policing of enslaved people in France’s Caribbean colonies, regulated the status of enslaved people, free blacks, and Native Americans as well as relations between enslavers and enslaved people. The Code remained in force until the United States took possession of Louisiana in 1803,” according to BlackPast.org, an online reference center.
Interestingly, the Code Noir’s First Article “Decrees the expulsion of Jews from the colony.” Another forbade interracial marriages and other métissage (racial mixing) between Blancs and noirs (whites and Blacks).
After the United States Civil War, state governments that had been part of the Confederacy denied Blacks voting rights, freedom of movement, and employment. And mandated segregation of the races.
Like most southern states, Louisiana’s Black Codes prevented African Americans from achieving political and economic autonomy. On December 21, 1865, Louisiana Governor J. Madison Wells- signed an ACT (Louisiana Black Code of 1865) that forced Black adults into servitude for five years, and they could only work as “domestic servants and to work on farms, plantations or in manufacturing establishments.”
That was a slick way of keeping Black people tied to and working for their former masters.
Louisiana’s St. Landry’s Parish had black codes that required its Black citizens to work for someone who was white, restricted free travel without a permit, ordained that no Blacks were permitted to rent or keep a house within the parish, and outlawed public meetings among other restrictions.
In the 1890s, Southern states enacted a new form of Black Codes, called “Jim Crow” laws. These laws made it illegal for blacks and whites to share public facilities. This meant that blacks and whites had to use separate schools, hospitals, libraries, restaurants, hotels, bathrooms, and drinking fountains.
And, of course, Louisiana bears all the credit for ushering in a half-century of segregation based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, a case that started here in New Orleans when Homer Plessy and other Black citizens challenged segregated rail cars. “Separate but Equal” became the law of the land in 1896.
But what the white supremacists in high places were determined to accomplish with Jim Crow, a.k.a. American Apartheid, freed Blacks, as they have always done, used ingenuity, grit, and determination to overcome. Yes, they drank from ‘colored fountains,’ and tolerated segregated transportation facilities, but they also continued the villages they were forced to form during enslavement.
Blacks owned insurance companies, grocery stores, restaurants, pharmacies, funeral homes, hotels, nightclubs, banks, pre-schools, daycare services, trade schools, and mutual aid societies that provided services and care for members of their communities. Black inventors created and patented items that are indispensable worldwide.
Blacks constructed commercial districts in New Orleans on Rampart Street, Dryades Street, and Claiborne Avenue. Blacks weren’t allowed to participate in “Mardi Gras” activities. Still, they had “Carnival Day” on Claiborne Avenue, where the Black Indians, Baby Dolls, Skeletons, and Brass Bands congregated, and the Zulu Parade came through.
Despite laws that codified white supremacy by restricting Blacks’ civic participation, their right to vote, to serve on juries, to own or carry weapons, and, in some cases, even the right to rent or lease land, Blacks thrived within the walls of segregation.
White supremacists couldn’t stand to see Black people prosper. American history is littered with White supremacists’ acts of violence against Black people and their property.
The Red Summer of 1919 when hundreds of Blacks were lynched, the destruction of the affluent African-American Greenwood District during the Tulsa Massacre, and the dismantling of thriving Black communities by running highways through them, like Black Wall Street in Durham, North Carolina, and New Orleans’ Claiborne Avenue, are well-documented.
When Brown v. Board of Education ended official segregation, we (Blacks) bought into the saying that “The White man’s ice is always colder”….that we bought into their thinking that we were better if we were spending our money with them. And that mentality, turning our backs on our own, caused the rapid demise of many Black-owned thriving businesses.
In New Orleans, fewer Blacks own businesses, and in a predominately-Black city, they struggle to survive. The golden age of the self-contained Black society in New Orleans is gone but not forgotten.
We can rebuild the village. We see signs of significant Black business growth. We have young entrepreneurs in several industries, hair care, art, technology, and other sectors of the economy. We must support them. We must make a conscious effort, daily, to buy black. We must help Black-owned newspapers to survive and thrive.
Without the Black press, the Civil Rights Movement would not have been successful from its beginning to now; we would remain uninformed and clueless about what is happening with us locally, nationally, and internationally.
If we are to thrive, as in the days of segregation, we must own our history and tell it like it is.
On that note, here’s food for thought: Today, we proudly wear and brandish the Fleur-de-lis as Louisiana’s official state symbol and the Saints football team’s icon, but Louisiana descendants of enslaved people may want to reconsider such pride for the lily. According to the Code Noir, enslaved people found guilty of illegally gathering in crowds were whipped for the first offense and then branded with the mark of a fleur-de-lis after multiple violations.
Indeed, we can forgive and forget and embrace the Fleur-de-lis, but let us remember Aesop’s fable, “The Four Oxen.”
A lion used to prowl about a field in which four oxen used to dwell. Many times, he tried to attack them, but whenever he came near, they turned their tails to one another so that whichever way he approached them, he was met by the horns of one of them. At last, however, they fell a-quarreling among themselves, and each went off to pasture alone in a separate corner of the field. Then the lion attacked them one by one and soon made an end of all four. United we stand, divided we fall.
This article originally published in the July 18, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
