Creation Story Of Reconstruction Era Blacks

Below is a creation story as told by black preachers in Reconstruction era America. It comes from the book The Age of Lincoln by Orville Vernon Burton.

From the book— 

“Throughout the southern states whites heard a different version of the creation story. In His own image, African American preachers declared, God created Adam and Eve black. They turned white, and the hair straightened, from sin and guilt, from encountering God after eating the forbidden fruit.”

As you can guess, stories like this did not go over well with southern whites. Black preachers, black folks, and whites sympathetic to black progress in the years after the Civil War were routinely harassed, attacked and killed in the post Civil War South. 

Reconstruction was a time of great potential and tragic failure. It’s a time in our history that merits study by all Americans. While 2008 is a better day than 1875, you can still see today many echos of a brutal past. 

PBS has good information on Reconstruction. 

Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 is a leading history of this time.

It remains hard to imagine that all that blood was shed in the Civil War and black folks still had to endure 100 more years of Jim Crow.

Nothing is so lousy that it can not come true. The work of freedom is never done.

Sputnik/Earth/Us

 

(Blogger’s Note–This is a post I ran last year on this date. It’s been tweaked just a bit. The post got a lot of traffic and it is something I enjoyed writing.)   

Today is the 51st anniversary of the launch of Sputnik.

To mark the day, I’m running a big picture of the Earth.

The Earth is where you and I and all our brothers and sisters live.

The Earth is all we have. No transporter beam or stargate is going to take you anywhere else. If you believe in some sort of afterlife, that’s great. But as far as I know, the Earth is all we’ve got. 

The big problems we have today— climate change, global economics and living standards, and issues of war and peace— are problems that transcend borders.

We need to get our imaginations around the fact that we are dependent on others. We need to work with other nations and other people far away from what we narrowly define as our homes.

Sputnik was an act of the Cold War. Yet our imaginations allow us to see Sputnik as a first step in calling our attention to the fact we all share this planet and we must live in a way that respects the value of all people.     

That is the power of imagination. Politics is at core an act of imagination.