Category: History

Happy Birthday Homer Plessy: A Change Is Gonna Come

After Homer Plessy sat down in a car for white riders only, Plessy was then arrested. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day this March 17, which also is the birthday of Homer Plessy, who was born in New Orleans on March 17, 1862 and is one of the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement.  His work and action of trying to take a train led to one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in history.

Homer Plessy’s Train Ride

Thirty years after his birth, Plessy bought a first-class ticket on a Louisiana railroad on June 7, 1892. Plessy, who was part African-American, was working with the civil rights group Citizens’ Committee of New Orleans to challenge segregation laws.

The Committee had notified the railroad of what was happening.  And when Plessy sat down in a car for white riders only, a conductor asked him about his race. Plessy was then arrested.

Plessy v. Ferguson

railroad tracks

Plessy’s case went all the way to the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson.  In the case, Plessy overwhelmingly lost by a vote of 7-1.  In the case, the Court upheld the state’s segregation law under a doctrine permitting “separate but equal” facilities.

Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote for the majority, claiming that if one views separate facilities for the races as implying one is inferior, that was “solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” (163 U.S. at 551.) Justice John Marshall Harlan, who was from Kentucky, was the lone dissenter on Plessy’s side.

“A Change Is Gonna Come”

Sam Cooke’s famous song, “A Change Is Gonna Come” may have been partly inspired by an incident similar to Plessy’s that happened in the same state. According to Peter Guralnick’s Cooke biography Dream Boogie, in 1963 Cooke and his band tried to check into a segregated Holiday Inn hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana.

The clerk would not let them check in.  Cooke argued with the clerk until his wife and others convinced him to leave because they feared reprisals. Soon thereafter, the police tracked them down and charged them with creating a public disturbance.

Cooke wrote and recorded “A Change Is Gonna Come” the same year as the hotel incident. In the song, Cooke wrote, “Somebody keep telling me ‘don’t hang around.’ / It’s been a long, a long time coming, /But i know a change gonna come, oh yes it will.” Other national factors also inspired Cooke to write the song, such as Bob Dylan’s songs and sit-in protests taking place in the south.

The Legacy of Homer Plessy

Homer Plessy died on March 1, 1925, so he did not get to see Plessy v. Ferguson, one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in history, overruled. But his cause did eventually win. The Supreme Court overruled the case in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, which was later followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Not long ago, the descendants of Homer Plessy got together with the descendants of Louisiana Judge John Howard Ferguson, the other named party in Plessy v. Ferguson. The two families created the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation to work for equality.

Around 60 years after Homer Plessy took a seat on the train, another person helped inspire the Civil Rights Movement like Plessy did, by refusing to give up her seat in 1955.  In that year, Rosa Parks’s refusal led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a landmark moment in the struggle for Civil Rights.

When years later Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, Rosa Parks sought comfort in listening to Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.” She said Cooke’s voice was “like medicine to the soul. It was as if Dr. King was speaking directly to me.” (Guralnick, p. 651.)

There is a little of Homer Plessy’s voice in the song too.

What do you think? Leave a comment and give a Stumble if you like.

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    The Better Angels of Our Nature: Lincoln’s 1st Inaugural

    Abraham Lincoln Bobblehead On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in for his first term as President of the United States as the nation was on the verge of coming apart. As Lincoln addressed the crowd from the steps of the unfinished U.S. Capitol building, he sported a beard he had grown a few months earlier.

    Lincoln grew the beard after Grace Bedell, an 11-year-old girl from New York, had written the then smooth-faced presidential candidate suggesting the facial hair.  She wrote, “[Y]ou would look a great deal better for your face is so thin.”

    Lincoln’s Speech at His First Inaugural

    But on this date in 1861, Lincoln had other things on his mind besides his appearance. In writing his speech, he had struggled to find the words to keep the South from seceding and to keep his Northern supporters in his corner in case of a civil war. He closed his speech with poetic words that offered a warning to those who might divide the nation (I will crush you!).  But he also offered an olive branch (We are friends!):

    “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend it.’

    “I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

    Hal Holbrook as Lincoln

    In a previous Chimesfreedom post, we noted how most contemporary accounts of Lincoln’s voice classified it as high-pitched or squeaky, unlike many of the deep baritone portrayals we usually hear today. This short clip of Hal Holbrook giving Lincoln’s closing of the First Inaugural seems along the lines of what the crowd heard on this date in 1861.

    The video is from the TV miniseries Sandburg’s Lincoln (1974-76).  Check it out.

    Hal Holbrook is well-known for a number of roles, including his portrayals of Mark Twain. He was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his recent role in Into the Wild (2007), which made the 82-year-old the oldest actor to be nominated for an Oscar in that category. For more, see Holbrook’s IMDb page.

    Bonus First Inaugural Coverage: The New York Times has several essays about the historical importance and background behind the First Inaugural. You may also read the entire speech.

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    Last Surviving U.S. WWI Veteran Passes

    Dixie Chicks – Travelin’ Soldier Live

    {Travelin’ Soldier (live) – Dixie Chicks }

    Frank Buckles — the last surviving U.S. veteran of the World War I forces — passed away Sunday at the age of 110. He enlisted in 1917 at the age of 16, lying about his age so he could serve his country. He later told a reporter, “I thought, well, ‘I want to get over there and see what it’s about.'”

    The WWI time period is a fascinating time and is not often covered in popular culture these days. Movies and popular culture pay little attention to WWI partly because that war was so long ago and partly because it does not have the heroic triumph over evil theme that World War II has. But there are several lessons to be learned from World War I and its time, and we hope to revisit the topic in the future on Chimesfreedom, especially because I just started reading Robert Graves’s memoir of the time period, Good-Bye to All That. For today, we wanted to make sure to note the death of Frank Buckles so it is not lost in less important news like the Oscars.

    World War I

    Today, we remember Frank Buckles and all of the other soldiers who served in “the Great War.” The above Dixie Chicks song, “Travelin’ Soldier” is off their 2003 Top Of The World Tour Live
    CD. The song was written and originally recorded by Bruce Robison, and The Dixie Chicks’s studio version of the song is on their 2002 Home album. In “Travelin’ Soldier,” the singer tells about “a girl with a bow” meeting a young man off to serve in the Vietnam war who asks her if she will write him because he has nobody else.

    I cried
    Never gonna hold the hand of another guy
    Too young for him they told her
    Waitin’ for the love of a travelin’ soldier
    Our love will never end
    Waitin’ for the soldier to come back again
    Never more to be alone when the letter said
    A soldier’s coming home.

    They exchange letters and she falls in love. But then she attends a football game where they read the names of the fallen. “And one name read but nobody really cared / But a pretty little girl with a bow in her hair.”

    It is ironic that this beautiful song about a woman supporting a man off to war was the victim of a campaign in the name of some sort of “patriotism.” The studio version “Travelin’ Soldier” was number one on the country charts as the U.S. was preparing to invade Iraq eight years ago this month on March 12, 2003. Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines told an audience in London: “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” A number of country radio stations stopped playing “Travelin’ Soldier,” and the song dropped off the charts.

    Many, like Merle Haggard defended Maines and her right to speak her mind. But as of today, “Travelin’ Soldier” is their last number one country song. The three made one more album together and went on hiatus. The 2006 documentary Dixie Chicks: Shut Up & Sing
    covers the reaction to the Bush quote and the impact on the group.

    Fortunately, unlike the soldier in the song and so many others, Frank Buckles returned home from World War I and lived a long life, outliving the almost five million Americans who served in the war. Only one Australian man and one British woman survive Buckles of all of the 65 million people from around the world who served in the war. Not only did he live through WWI, but he saw more than a century’s worth of history, even serving as a civilian prisoner for 38 months when Japanese soldiers captured him in 1941 while he was traveling around the world. In his later years, he campaigned to get the government to refurbish a neglected World War I monument in D.C. and rededicate it as a national memorial. You may donate to the cause at the World War I Memorial Foundation website.

    The West Virginia Congressional delegation from Buckles’s home state is proposing a plan for his body to lie in the U.S. Capitol. Buckles already had special government approval to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. It is good that he is so honored, because this honor is really about respecting all of the people who served in World War I, and hopefully the honor will continue to the WWI monument in DC. As for Frank Buckles, he is already home.

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    George Washington’s Escaped Slave: Told By a Drunk

    Happy Presidents’ Day Weekend! In a previous post about Abraham Lincoln, Chimesfreedom noted the importance of remembering that great leaders were human because we should recognize that fallible humans may still accomplish fantastic feats. Nothing makes us more human than our stupidity, and early U.S. leaders were idiots when it came to slavery. So this post features a story about Oney “Ona” Judge, a slave in George Washington’s household who escaped when she was 23 years old from the Philadelphia President’s House in 1796 while Washington was president.

    History does not have to be boring, so we will let someone else tell the tale about Oney Judge in a funny video featuring actors Denny McBride and Tymberlee Hill. But storyteller Jen Kirkman is drunk and swears a bit (so do not play loud at work) . . .

    Not only did Oney Judge escape slavery, she escaped from the U.S. President! How cool is that? According to Wikipedia, at the time when Philadelphia was the U.S. capital, Pennsylvania had a law that prohibited nonresidents from possessing slaves in the state for more than six months. If six months passed, the slaves had legal power to free themselves. George and Martha Washington, though, worked around the law by rotating their slaves in and out of the state so none were in the state for six months or more. So even though the Father of our Country did many terrific things as a general and as a president, he also could be a douchebag. This website for the President’s House in Philadelphia features two interviews with Judge from the 1840s.

    But what about that video? My friend Mike recently introduced me to the Drunk History videos on YouTube. I am a little late coming to the party, so you may have already seen them. But if not, check out some other ones too. Drunk History videos feature a drunk person telling about a historical event while famous actors reenact what is being described. The series started a few years ago on the Funny or Die website. The series, created by comedian Darek Waters, is pretty funny, but be warned that they generally include swearing and some other drunken activities. Kids: Don’t try this at home. Not only are they funny, though, they are entertaining and educational discussions of history. Check out the links below.

    Bonus Drunk History Video    : Here is a funny Drunk History video about Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, featuring John C. Reilly and Crispin Glover. Yes, even the pigeon part is true.

    More Bonus Drunk History Video Links: Here is a Drunk History video about Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, starring Will Ferrell and Don Cheadle. Here is the original Drunk History episode, about Aaron Burr.

    Bonus George Washington Information: In case you need to be reminded of some of the great things that George Washington accomplished, check out the official White House page for a short biography.

    What do you think? Leave a comment.

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    Happy Birthday Mr. Lincoln

    Abraham Lincoln's Cabin Birthplace
    “Granny Woman,” Nancy Walters remembered:

    It was Saturday afternoon when Tom Lincoln sent over and asked me to come. They sent for Nancy’s two aunts, Mis’ Betsy Sparrow and Mis’ Polly Friend. I was there before them, and we all had quite a spell to wait, and we got everything ready. Nancy had a good feather-bed under her; it wasn’t a goose-feather bed, hardly anyone had that kind then, but good hen feathers.

    Nancy had about as hard a time as most women, I reckon, easier than some and maybe harder than a few. The baby was born just about sunup, on Sunday morning. Nancy’s two aunts took the baby and washed him and dressed him, and I looked after Nancy. And I remember after the baby was born, Tom came and stood beside the bed with that sort of hang-dog look that a man has, sort of guilty like, but mighty proud, and he says to me, ‘Are you sure she’s all right, Mis’ Walters?’ And Nancy kind of stuck out her hand and reached for his, and said, ‘Yes, Tom, I’m all right.’ And then she said, ‘You’re glad it’s a boy, Tom, aren’t you? So am I.'”

    And Dennis swung the baby back and forth, keeping up a chatter about how tickled he was to have a new cousin to play with. The baby screwed up the muscles of its face and began crying with no let-up.

    Dennis turned to Betsy Sparrow, handed her the baby and said to her, “Aunt, take him! He’ll never amount to much.”

    So on that 12th of February, 1809, was the birth of a boy they named Abraham after his grandfather who had been killed by Indians — born in silence and pain from a wilderness mother on a bed of perhaps cornhusks and perhaps hen feathers — with perhaps a laughing child prophecy later that he would “never come to much.”

    The above quote from Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln is one of my favorite quotes about Lincoln. Yesterday, we posted and discussed Aaron Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait. In that work, when you hear the great words, the building music, and Gregory Peck’s strong voice, it is easy to think of Lincoln as super human. We have this perception that he was something like Superman, flying around in perfection winning the war and freeing the slaves, when the truth is more complex.

    A Lincoln Portrait, the Lincoln Memorial, and other monuments to the man are the reasons I like the story about the crying baby. The story reminds us that Lincoln was a human who dealt with many of the same problems we do, and then some. In his own home, he faced depression, marital problems, and the loss of a child while the nation was coming apart. He was imperfect, he had flaws, and he was sometimes wrong (such as early support for colonization of slaves).

    Yet, for us today, it is good to be reminded that Lincoln was not perfect. The reminder that Abraham Lincoln was human like us serves two purposes. First, it makes us appreciate even more what Lincoln accomplished because he was not Superman. Second, because Lincoln was once a crying baby just like we all were, it reminds us that we may aspire to a little bit of greatness in our everyday lives too.

    Happy Birthday, Mr. Lincoln.

    Battle Cry Of Freedom 2 (Jacqueline Schwab) (from A Civil War Soundtrack) (click to play)

    Bonus Birthplace Information: The above photo is a cabin enshrined at Lincoln’s birthplace in Hodgenville, Kentucky. I have visited the location several times over the years. Unfortunately, they do not believe the cabin is the actual one where Lincoln was born, but it is a similar one that was found in the area at the time.

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