Time Travel Tours DC

The Truth About Juneteenth

2021-06-20T10:29:00.003-07:00

Lots of repeating the neo-confederate hoax that ignorant African Americans in Galveston were informed of their freedom today... this was done on time.com and most everywhere....today.. this is a lie.....to dishonor the intelligence of the freedom seekers... truth is Galveston had previously been liberated - today the last state in the union resisting the union army was defeated... thus enforcing the emancipation proclamation in this state......in otherwords it was a union victory over the confederates... this was hid from southerners taught this fiction all these years up to the present... thanks to Louis George Gregory, I volunteered at the African American Civil War museum, to honor his father George Gregory 104th USCT and learned from curator Hari Jones the truth.....https://youtu.be/I7__GlJuFOM...

what he taught me was the Union Navy blockaded the principal Confederate seaport, Galveston, for four years, and federal troops occupied the city for three months in late 1862.

So the common myth that African Americans in Galveston were unaware of the war and freedom is nonsensical. They could see the Union army was winning and that their hometown was blockaded throughout the war and even occupied for part of it. What was occurring on Juneteenth was the continuation of the war in Texas, as General Edmund Kirby Smith had 60,000 soldiers still fighting in Texas for enslavement. On April 20th Smith got news of Lee’s surrender. However he wanted to press on with the war. In May he got news of Johnston and Taylors surrenders. But still Texas fought on the war continued. On May 14th in Galveston, there was a mutiny of confederate soldiers, again African Americans would be hearing all this surrender news, and would see the mutiny. Again ludicrous to say they were sitting waiting to hear news of freedom and who is winning. Ludicrous. On May 21st the Galveston quartermasters stores were looted by Confederate soldiers in total anarchy. 100 citizens looted the Confederate boat LARK in Galveston. By May 27th half of the confederate forces in Texas had disbanded or disappeared. Kirby Smith lost the last of his soldiers by the end of May. Kirby Smith address his few remaining soldiers and condemned those who had fled, leaving him a “commander without an army a general without troops”… on June 2, he formally surrendered his army to Union soldiers…. However the collapse happened so quickly, Union soldiers did not arrive to apply martial law and garrison the towns until June 19th, with their order to return TEXAS to the UNION with General gordon Granger and his 2000 union soldiers arriving in the PORT of Galveston.. which is just the first place in TEXAS union troops arrived to proclaim victory. So this is a victory moment, not an informing of ignorant African American moment. And clearly with soldiers we could begin enforcing the end of enslavement. So it was a matter of force, not knowledge. The stars and stripes were not raised over Austin until the 25th of JUNE…

(Austin Statue)

again by force… not by informing them that it was free. They granted amnesty to ex-confederates if they promised to support the union. In April Texas still celebrates Confederate heroes day an official state holiday, and April is confederate history month… April 26th is confederate memorial day… so we can see that Juneteenth is a reply to this heavy confederate propaganda in Texas… as a day of conquest when the last of the confederacy was defeated… and the beginning of martial law and the beginning of the first reconstruction. Note that in Paris, Texas, in 1893, Ida B. Wells noted “Never in the history of civilization has any Christian people stooped to such shocking brutality as that which characterized the people of Paris, Texas, and adjacent communities on the first of February 1893.”…. so the need for this sort of life affirming steps was and is needed, especially in Texas. However we celebrated emancipation far before this in DC in April 1862 for instance 3 years earlier etc.

Racial Reconciliation In America Explained 105 years ago at Howard University

2017-06-16T12:04:00.003-07:00

DC Time Travel Tours presented recently at Howard University on 'Abdu'l-Baha's visit to Howard University in 1912. 'Abdu'l-Baha challenged America to a vision of Racial Integration far above mere social liberalism or tolerance to Unity in Diversity on the basis of Equality, Justice and Mutual Development. Charles Finey provided America a vision to end enslavement which inspired a war for its erradication a century earlier. But by 1866 President Johnson and America was adrift without a vision for what the post-enslavement era should aspire to and ordered the removal of all Soldiers from the Southern United states protecting the Rights of the 4 million Americans of African Descent liberated in part by the heroism of the 219,000 #USCT soldiers. This talk explains that the millennial hopes of the Millerite Christians that included Finey's platform of removing the sin of slavery from our midst to prepare for the coming of a Manifestation of God were well founded. For the Baha'i Faith's declaration in May 1844 and Baha'u'llah's public proclamation of May 1863 constitute a basis to answer Charles' prayers and provide the basis and vision for the post enslavement era for America and the World.

You might enjoy taking a DC Time Travel Tour because you will experience America's history of racial integration for yourself.

Time traveling 105 years back to Howard University to discover Race Amity

2017-03-21T22:50:00.003-07:00

Time Travel Tours is offering a new tour to commemorate a Race Amity event at Howard University over a century ago which resonates today!

'Abdu'l-Baha DC Tour from Jack On the Road on Vimeo.

Please join us at 10:30 am on the 22nd of April for the event! Tickets are available here: http://howarduniversity.bpt.me

Reflections upon the contributions of Baha'is Dr. Alain Locke and Mr. Robert Abbott on Race Amity in America

2017-02-22T22:29:00.002-08:00

Dr. Alain Locke credits Mr. Robert Abbott as the "spiritual emancipator" of Americans of African Descent.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. credits Dr. Alain Locke as a "philosopher" on par with Plato and Aristotle who all African American children should be taught about.

In that spirit I share with you their stories as Baha'i Leaders in America working for Race Amity.

I wish to share with you a talk DC Time Travel Tours gave exploring how Unifying Social Meanings can be used to replace divisive common understandings as exemplified by the examples of Baha'is Mr. Robert Abbott and Dr. Alain Locke.

Consider joining us on April 1st as we explore Racial Reconciliation with the First Americans, the Indigenous Nations of Virginia. http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2726011

This January attend the Tubman Douglass Inaugural

2017-01-14T13:44:00.002-08:00

PRESS RELEASE: ATTEND THE TUBMAN DOUGLASS INAUGURAL on JANUARY 21st

GLEN BURNIE, MD: January 14, 2106 –

The January 21st 2017 Tubman-Douglass Inaugural Tour takes DC tourists to time and place in America when its African Americans and European Americans lived, worked, and sacrificed together to realize the American dream of liberty and justice for all.

DC Time Travel Tours is a unique Maryland tourism startup that focuses exclusively on racial reconciliation through deep immersive experiences into Maryland's race relations.Taking this tour will help us learn from those acts of interracial cooperation and amity which were begun many years ago.

The Time Travel Tours' Liberation Tour takes the Time Traveler on a journey back to the 1838 escape of Frederick Douglass from the Wye Concentration Camp and the 1849 liberation of Harriet Tubman across the Choptank river. But it goes beyond this to tell the bigger story of how they returned to liberate everyone else and fight for justice thereafter. The tour through history emphasizes love, that is what reconciliation is at its heart, building new patterns of understanding and relating to one another and living together.

The spirit behind this eight-hour tour is that race relations in America will not substantially improve unless the public discourse on race moves beyond the blame/grievance framework, on which the nation has been stuck for over thirty years, to one that recognizes and celebrates our ability to overcome racial prejudice through association, amity, and collaboration. The basis for such a framework can be found in the close cross-racial and cross-cultural amity that is part of virtually every critical advance in access and equity in America’s racial history, and which collectively is called the “other tradition.” This “other tradition” has served as the moral and spiritual counterweight to the dominant tradition of racism that occupies so much of our national history.

This tour provides an examination of the many often-forgotten examples in our DC and Maryland history of amity and conciliation. It is empowering to both European and non-European Americans, and enlarges the critical mass of concerned people from all racial backgrounds who can make race amity and equity a priority in their lives.

Who: DC Time Travel Tour's is a new Maryland Tourism Startup founded by Lex, Torrie and Elhan Musta

What: Their inaugural Douglass Tubman tour fosters Maryland's much needed journey towards racial reconciliation

When: Saturday, January 21st 2017, 8:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Where: The tour begins at the African American Civil War Memoiral in Washington DC

Cost: This event is free for children who can sit on laps and 60% off for time travelers who can make reservations at dctimetraveltours.com

Phone: (202) 838-7502

Email: timetraveltoursdc@gmail.com

Twitter: @TTToursDC

Web: dctimetraveltours.com

Reservations: http://timetraveltours.bpt.me/

Trailer about Tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TmFYSw4j2s

Facebook Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1855333338035219/

Making the MLK Holiday as anticipated as Thanksgiving or Christmas

2017-01-13T14:00:00.000-08:00

As we reflect upon the Dr. Martin Luther King Holiday and the many amazing actions he took like rising up to the hour fresh out of school to lead a Bus Boycott that caused his house to be bombed and police to jail him for speeding in the first days of that campaign started by Rosa Parks on the heels of the horrendous lynching of Emmett Till, I encourage us to re-read the inspirational words of Mrs. Coretta Scott King describing the meaning of the holiday.

For me her message of “healing” resonates especially at this time. She mentions that we are called on to celebrate interracial sister and brotherhood. “No other day of the year brings so many peoples from different cultural backgrounds together in such a vibrant spirit of brother and sisterhood… This is not a black holiday; it is a peoples’ holiday... We call you to commemorate this Holiday by making your personal commitment to serve humanity with the vibrant spirit of unconditional love that was his greatest strength, and which empowered all of the great victories of his leadership.”

Heeding this inspiration, let us make it a people’s holiday, one to resonate with a celebration of our common sister and brotherhood.

Celebrating on the 16th of January — our American friendship and collaboration for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The pursuit of this other tradition — has persisted since before the dawn of this country’s independence, and has helped make our visible progress in human relations possible. We will work together to popularize the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday celebration with “Get To Know Me” sister and brotherhood events we will all look forward to every year.

One of the primary focus of the 2017 MLK celebration is our collaborative effort to heal from widespread racial violence across America. Unity in Diversity is the key for America to assert our greatness in the world. From ending slavery and building Nation to Nation relationships with Indigenous Nations, to sending a man to the moon, all great moments in American history have been achieved by forging true, close relationships across race, culture and ethnicity.

This year’s MLK commemoration can feature a potent mixing of our citizenry aimed at cultivating and fostering a moral cross-pollination and giving shape and new perspective to the public discourse on the vibrant spirit of brother and sisterhood that can bring peace and healing to our nation.

An “MLK Day Get to Know Me” project could encourage all citizens to get newly acquainted with someone who is diverse from themselves.

A) Have a meal with one or more people who are of another migratory history then yourself.

B) Email, call, text, Facebook, Tweet someone who is different then you.

C) Greet someone different than yourself who you pass by or drive past.

Get to Know Me is a fun way for people to overcome ignorance, fear or mistrust, which is the first step in healing the violence in our nation.

One day the MLK holiday will become as anticipated as the Thanksgiving or Christmas get together of distant family, except it will celebrate the coming together of brothers and sisters related by a common land.

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Time Travel Tours provides one way to get to know the "other tradition" of the Underground Railroad and America's Liberation Communities as well as that of the Indigenous Nations of our Country.

The "other tradition" of Tubman - Garrett Brotherhood and Sisterhood on Time Travel Tours

Desecration of a Washington DC African American Cemetery and how to salvage it

2017-01-01T05:16:00.000-08:00

In 1960 the historic Columbian Harmony African American Cemetery in Washington DC and its 135 year old graves were desecrated and the gravestones of some of the most famous Americans were dumped in a landfill.

Desecrated Washington African American Cemetery

Recently efforts have begun to attempt to recover from the pogrom. Most recently on Veteran's Day in the year 2000, genealogist Paul E. Sluby Sr, the color guard from Fairmont Heights High School, Harpers Ferry Mayor Walton D.

Stowell, Ben Hawley, the great-great grandson of an African American soldier in the Union Army, black Civil War living historians of Company B of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Group, Prince George’s County Council Chairman Dorothy F. Bailey, a score of Anderson’s descendants and Dr. Frank Smith, the Director and Founder of the African American Civil War Monument and Museum participated in placing new memorial markers in memory of significant Civil War heroes and heroines who are honored in the Museum and on the African American Civil War Monument such as:

Sgt. Major Christian Fleetwood

Medal of Honor Recipient, Sgt. Major Christian Fleetwood (July 21, 1840 – September 28, 1914)
He was a non-commissioned officer in the United States Army, an editor, a musician, and a government official. Fleetwood was born in Baltimore on July 21, 1840, the son of liberated Charles and Anna Maria Fleetwood. Working for the Maryland Colonization Society, he went briefly to Liberia and Sierra Leone, and graduated in 1860 from Ashmun Institute (later Lincoln University) in Oxford, Pennsylvania. He and others published briefly the Lyceum Observer in Baltimore, said to be the first African American newspaper in the upper South. With the outbreak of the Civil War, he joined Company G of the 4th Regiment United States Colored Infantry, Union Army. He was given the rank of Sergeant upon enlistment and was promoted to Sergeant Major days later, on August 19.

Fleetwood memorial marker

During the 4th Regiment's charge on the enemy fortifications, Fleetwood supervised the unit's left flank. Among the charging soldiers was Sergeant Alfred B. Hilton, the bearer of two flags, one of which had been seized from a wounded sergeant. When Hilton himself was wounded, Fleetwood and another soldier, Charles Veale, each grabbed a flag from him before the colors could touch the ground. Now carrying the American flag, Fleetwood continued forward under heavy fire. He used the flag to rally his soldiers and continue the fight. For their actions during the battle, Fleetwood, Hilton, and Veale were each issued the Medal of Honor just over six months later, on April 6, 1865. Fleetwood's official Medal of Honor citation reads simply: "Seized the colors, after 2 color bearers had been shot down, and bore them nobly through the fight."

Fleetwood Living Historian

The First Separate Battalion of D.C. National Guards served as escort at his funeral. Among the honorary pallbearers were such prominent Washingtonians as Arthur Brooks, Daniel Murray, Whitefield McKinlay, and Judge Robert H. Terrell. Prominent reconstruction politicians PBS Pinchback and Henry Johnson were also honorary pallbearers. The participation by the National Guard, and by Arthur Brooks in particular, was an appropriate recognition of the most significant aspects of Fleetwood's career.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823 - June 5, 1893)

Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Civil War Spy

In Willmington Mary Ann grew up in an abolitionist housheold with her father Abraham Doras Shadd participating in the American War of Independence. She was the first black woman publisher in North America and the first woman publisher in Canada. Shadd Cary was an abolitionist who became the first female African American newspaper editor in North America when she edited the Provincial Freeman in 1853 Ontario, Canada. She became the second African American women to earn a law degree after she launched and won a law suit vs Howard University to permit women. In 1870 she testified to congress women have right to vote. In 1880 she founded colored women's progressive franchise association in DC. She lived at 1421 W Street, NW in Washington DC. The African American Civil War museum details her life as a spy in the Civil War.

Sgt. Major Thomas R. Hawkins

“Three Medals of Honor” by Don Troiani depicting Hawkins and Fleetwood at the Battle of Chaffin's Farm

Thomas Hawkins Memorial Marker

Thomas R. Hawkins (1840– February 28 1870), Medal of Honor recipient was a Union Army soldier during the American Civil War and a recipient of America's highest military decoration—the Medal of Honor—for his actions at the Battle of Chaffin's Farm. Hawkins joined the Army from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on August 4, 1863, and became Sergeant Major of the 6th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment on August 23. On September 29, 1864, he fought in the Battle of Chaffin's Farm, Virginia. He was discharged in May 1865 for wounds received in action.

Elizabeth Keckley, Civil War Leader

Elizabeth Keckley (February 1818– May 1907), a self-liberated successful, civic activist, and author. ^.She was best known as the personal modiste and confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln, the First Lady. Keckley had moved to Washington in 1860 after paying her own ransom and that of her son in St. Louis. She created an independent business in the capital based on clients who were the wives of the government elite. She was almost kicked out of Washington DC in 1860 for failure to pay the required fine for an African Descent American to live in the nation's capitol. Keckley appealed to her patrons, and a Ms. Ringold used her connection to Mayor James G. Berret to petition for a license for Keckley.

Keckley depicted by Gloria Reuben with Lincoln in 2012 charge

Soon thereafter Keckley founded the Contraband Relief Association ("CRA") in August 1862, receiving donations from both Lincolns, as well as other patrons and well-to-do in the liberation community. She wrote that the self-liberated were not going to find "flowery paths, days of perpetual sunshine, and bowers hanging with golden fruit" in Washington D.C., but that" the road was rugged and full of thorns." She saw that "their appeal for help too often was answered by cold neglect." One summer evening, Keckley witnessed "a festival given for the benefit of the sick and wounded soldiers in the city." She thought the liberation community could do something similar to benefit the poor and suggested to her friends "a society of colored people be formed to labor for the benefit of the unfortunate freedmen." She changed its name in July 1864 to the Ladies' Freedmen and Soldier's Relief Association, to "reflect its expanded mission" after African Descent Americans were permitted to serve in the United States Colored Troops. The CRA provided food, shelter, clothing, and emotional support to recently self-liberated and/or sick and wounded soldiers. The organization was based in Washington, D.C., but the funds distributed and the services provided helped families in the larger region. The CRA used the Liberation community churches for meetings and events, such as the Twelfth Baptist Church, Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, Israel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Siloam Presbyterian Church.The organization held fundraisers, with concerts, speeches, dramatic readings, and festivals with some being held in the Harmony Cemetery. Prominent Liberation Community figures who spoke on behalf of the organization included Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, and J. Sella Martin. By the late 1890s, she lived in the National Home for Destitute Colored Women and Children on Euclid Street (an institution established in part by funds contributed by the Contraband Association that she founded).

Charles Remond Douglass (October 21, 1844 – November 23, 1920)

Charles Remond Douglass

is the third and youngest son of Frederick Douglass and his first wife Anna Murray Douglass. Prior to the war he assisted John Brown in his abolitionism. He was the first African-American man to enlist in the military in New York during the Civil War, for the 5th Massacusetts Cavalry. After the war he served as one of the first African-American clerks in the Freedmen's Bureau in Washington, DC. On December 7, 1880, Douglass helped to organize the Capital City Guards' Battalion, in which served as a captain and major. The organization later became the First Separate Battalion, National Guard of the District of Columbia. Douglass held several commands in the District of Columbia National Guard, along with several high posts in the Grand Army of the Republic. He also founded a local resort for African Americans named Highland Beach, Maryland.

First Sergeant Charles Douglass

Haley George Douglass (1881-1954) who taught science and history at Dunbar High School for 46

Haley George Douglass

years before he retired in 1952, lived at 1732 Fifteenth Street N. W. Dunbar was the first high school in Washington and the nation for Americans of African Descent founded in 1870. Born in Canandaigua, N. Y., he was the grandson of the famous Frederick Douglass and son of Charles Douglass also buried in the cemetery. He went to public schools in DC and was graduated from the preparator department of Howard University in 1900. A year later he was graduated from Phillps Exeter Academy and in 1905 from Harvard. At the latter college he won his numerals in football, a medal in intercollegiate track and was a member of the Weld Rowing Club. His memberships included the Oldest Inhabitants, Inc., Mu-So-Lit Club, Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. For many years he was Mayor of Highland Beach, Md. an area developed by his father.

Osborne Perry Anderson(1830–1872)

Osborne Perry Anderson, Sgt. in the USCT

He was an African-American abolitionist and the only surviving African-American member of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, and later a non-commsioned officer in the Union army of the American Civil War. He was active recruiter for union army with Josiah Henson, of Unlce Tom's Cabin fame, in Canada.
Born in Pennsylvania on July 17, 1830, Anderson was educated at Oberlin College in Ohio, then immigrated to Canada to escape the dangers of the African American Re-enslavement Act of 1950. In Canada he learned the printing trade and met Brown in 1858. This dedicated and brave Christian traveled from Chatham, Canada to Harpers Ferry, W. Va. to fight beside John Brown in his quest to abolish slavery. Anderson was one of Brown’s 21 raiders, and he was only one of a handful among the entire group who escaped and

survived. He went on to write a book, “A Voice from Harper’s Ferry.” His sole purpose in publishing the Narrative of John Brown's attempted slave liberation was to save from oblivion the facts connected with one of the most important movements of this age, with reference to the overthrow of American slavery. His own personal experience in it, under the orders of Capt. Brown, on the 16th and 17th of October, 1859, provide the only eye-witness account who was at Harper's Ferry during the entire time. Anderson enlisted in the Union Army in 1864. Mustered from service, he lived in Washington, where he belonged to the 15th Street Presbyterian Church and died of tuberculosis in December 1872 at the age of 42. An obituary in the Washington Star described him as “a man of good character” eulogized by three ministers.

George Bell/Beall (1762-1844), established the first school for Americans of African Descent in Washington in 1807. His liberation ransom was paid to the Addison Concentration Camp (along today's Addison Road) by his wife Sophia who raised the money in her private garden, and her ransom was in turn paid by George who worked as a Carpenter. Over the coming years they would pay further Ransoms for all their children except for Harriet who the Concentration Camp Warden Rachel Pratt would not permit to be liberated from her imprisonment. Thirty years later their son would be arrested for attempting to liberate another Sophia from the same concentration camp.

Althea Browning Tanner George's Sister in Law

He together with Nicholas Freeman, his sister in law Althea Browning Tanner (who personally liberated 19 of her family members and friends through vegetable sales at Lafayette Square), and Moses Liverpool established the Bell School. Nicholas and Moses were caulkers at Washington's Navy Yard. The school was led by a teacher of European Descent Mr. Lowe for the city's 125 liberated sons and daughters. The small school was expanded in 1818 as the Resolute Beneficial Society School, with the following introduction:

Founded by an association of free people of color called the "Resolute Beneficial Society" situated near Eastern Public School and dwelling of Mrs. Fenwick is now open for the reception of free people of color and others that ladies or gentlemen may think proper to be instructed in reading, writing, arithmetic, English grammar or other branches of education apposite to their capacity, by a steady active and experienced teacher, whose attention is wholly devoted to the purpose described.

N.B. An Evening school will commence on the premises the first Monday in October and throughout the season.

The managers of the Sunday Schools in the eastern district are thus most dutifully informed that a Sabbath day the school-house belonging to the society will be uniformly at their service.

In 1872 Israel Bethel merged with Union Bethel to form the
current Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church

Two years later in 1820 with the departure from John Wesley's injunctions of equality of all before God and the relegation of the African Descent Methodist worshipers at Capitol Hill's Ebenezer Methodist Church to the gallery, they departed and established the Israel Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Sophia and George were not safe despite their prominence in the community. In the 1835 Washington DC European Pogrom Against African Americans their nephew John Frances Cook had to flee the city. He had run a school at 14th and H NW called Union Seminary. After he returned to the city he opened the Union Bethel Church in 1841 and the First Colored Presbyterian in 1841. Sophia and George's son Enoch George Bell was arrested on August 22, 1846 for attempting to liberate a family member or friend Sophia from his mother's former Pratt concentration camp. He skipped bail and liberated himself and his wife Ann Eliza and family to New Bedford Massachusetts until the end of the war when they returned to Washington DC.

Simon Cameron the Secretary of War during the Civil War

Francis Datcher (180?-18??) who paid his own ransom from enslavement in 1821, was the first president of the Columbian Harmony Society and for 42 years a clerk for the War Department. At one time despite his prominence in 1839 he was kidnapped by Enslavers claiming him to be their prisoner. Only the testimony of European Descent Americans freed him. He would go on to always carry a paper with him thereafter showing the tenuous nature of life as a liberated man in the South. On his passing he made public this personal treasure of freedom. Testimonies to his faithfulness from John C Calhoun dated march 3 1825, and from:

james Barbour

PB Porter

JR Poinsett

Lewis Case

John H Eaton

J Spencer

JM Porer

WL Marey

George W. Crawford

CM Conrad

Jefferson Davis

John B Floyd

Simon Cameron the Secretary of War during the Civil War

William Slade (18?? - 186?), who was in charge of the White House staff and was once described as

William Slade depicted in the 2012 Lincoln Film

Abraham Lincoln’s “friend and human comforter.” Previously Slade had kept a boardinghouse in Washington and served as a messenger in the Treasury Department. Lincoln used to test the lines of some of his speeches out on Slade. He was an elder at the 15th Street Presbyterian Church. Presidential aide William Duffield Neill described William Slade as “a faithful man, prudent and dignified. He was an elder in the Presbyterian Church for colored people on Fifteenth Street, near the President’s mansion.” The daughter of William Slade later recalled that she had “stayed many nights in the White House with her parents when storms came up and they could not get home. She and her brothers played with Tad, and he often came and played with them in their home on Massachusetts Avenue, between 4th and 6th Streets, N.W.” Slade “was of medium height, olive in complexion, with light eyes and straight chestnut-brown hair and wore a little goatee. He had a wonderful disposition, never became excited, always could see the bright side of things, even when Lincoln was downcast and needed a cheering, hopeful friend. Slade was a great story teller. He was known for his collection of jokes and wisecracks, and I have often heard it said that ‘he had some that could make a horse laugh.’" Not only did Slade serve as confidential messenger for the Lincoln family, but he also acted as valet for the President, took complete charge of the Whitehouse staff, made arrangements for all public and private functions (from the standpoint of food and serving), kept a set of keys of the White House and knew every diplomat, general, and statesman. He had his own private room, bought all of the food and at evenings when the Lincolns had only a few friends to dinner or a party, he would plan and assist the waiter in serving them. Being a caterer himself he often made special dishes for these occasions. Week in, week out, from morn till night, his services were in constant demand by his employer. After President Lincoln’s assassination, according to Washington, “Slade had everything ready, including garments for clothing the body. The suit worn by Lincoln at his last inaugural was selected. As valet and steward, it was Slade’s duty and privilege to serve his employer to the last. After he had finished washing and dressing the remains and being present during the final trimming of the hair, he clipped off a lock for himself and family.” Slade’s wife Katherine, was given the dress Mary Todd Lincoln wore to the theater when President Lincoln was shot. Slade was appointed as White House steward by President Johnson but died before Johnson left office.

James Wormley (January 16, 1819 – October 18, 1884) proprietor of the

James Wormley

internationally-known Wormley House hotel, at 15th and I Streets NW. James Wormley’s remarkable life as a prominent 19^th century entrepreneur in the nation’s capital began on January 16, 1819 in a small, two-room, brick building located on E Street near 14^th in Washington, DC. His parents had come from southern Virginia in 1814. From his first job with the family’s hackney carriage business (started by his father, Peter Leigh Wormley), young James leaned skills and virtues of hard work which enabled him to rise to fame and leadership at Washington’s center stage during the Reconstruction era. Wormley’s travels and adventures – from gold mining in California, to the Court of St. James (London) to haute cuisine kitchens in Paris – propelled him to an intersection with destiny in 1877, immortalizing his name in U.S. history with the Wormley Agreement. The five-story hotel at 1500 H Street, NW which opened in 1869 containing a bar, a barbershop, and an acclaimed dining room where Wormley served European-style dishes using fresh ingredients he grew on his nearby farm and seafood hauled in daily from the Chesapeake Bay, was the site of the Wormley Agreement, secret meetings held at the Hotel which led to the Compromise of 1877 and the election of President Rutherford B. Hayes in return for ending Civil Rights for Americans of African Descent in the Rebellious South. In 1871, he helped lobby Congress to fund the city's first public elementary school for the liberation community, the Sumner School, and chaired the committee that oversaw its construction. He also chaired the committee that oversaw construction of the first elementary school for the liberation community, which opened as the Wormley School at 34th and Prospect Streets in Georgetown one year after his death and closed in 1952.

Wormley School in Georgetown

The building is now home to the Wormley Row condominium. Wormley died on October 18, 1884 from a kidney stones removal operation gone tragically wrong. He was interred at Columbian Harmony Cemetery in Washington, D.C. His son, James T. Wormley took over management of the hotel.

Sumner gift to Wormley

A fervent supporter of the cause of racial equality, Wormley was close friends with Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner (1811-1874), who had steadfastly championed the rights of African Americans both before and after emancipation. One of Wormley's prize possessions was a portrait of Charles Sumner painted by Henry Ulke and originally intended for the Charles Sumner School on M Street NW. The state of Massachusetts reportedly offered to purchase the Sumner portrait from Wormley, but he refused. “Never shall any one say that I parted with the picture of the man who befriended me and my race, for any money consideration,” he was quoted as saying. He later donated the portrait to hang in the Massachusetts State House in 1883. When President James Garfield was fatally shot in 1881, Wormley was chosen to prepare special meals for him. According to an article in the New York Herald-Tribune, Wormley had a “patented method” of making beef tea (beef broth), which he prepared for the wounded Garfield as he had previously done for the stricken Charles Sumner.

Rev. John Cook, founder and first pastor of the 15th Street Presbyterian Church in 1841. His

Rev John Cook

uncle George Bell is also burried in this cemetery described above.The Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church was founded in 1841 as the First Colored Presbyterian Church by educator and pastor John F. Cook, Sr. (ca. 1810-1855). Its first home was Cook's small frame schoolhouse, Union Seminary (formerly the Smothers School) at 14th and H streets, NW. The first church building was erected on 15th Street between I and K streets in 1853. The church moved to 15th and R streets in 1918. The current building was completed in 1979.John F. Cook, Sr., the first black Presbyterian pastor in the city, was born enslaved. His aunt, Alethia Browning Tanner, purchased his freedom, in addition to that of other family members, with money raised from vegetables she marketed at Lafayette Square. In 1834 he became schoolmaster of Union Seminary,

where he would establish the church and serve as its first pastor. In what was probably the first direct mail campaign in American politics, the Cook's American Antislavery Society started sending its publications, featuring stories and drawings of slavery’s many injustices, to every leading European Descent man in the city. In reaction, in August 1835, mobs of pirates started attacking the city’s liberation community, especially those active in the abolitionist cause. The city’s leaders stood aside or cowered in fear. Cook’s school was trashed, and he had to flee on horseback to Pennsylvania. No one was killed in the white pogrom of 1835 but the abolitionists, were driven from the city, at least temporarily. In 1835 while in flight he traveled to Philadelphia where he served as the Secretary of the 5th Annual Negro Convention in Philadelphia, a gathering of liberation communities from all over the country. Cook helped write the convention’s stirring declaration of war on slavery:

“We rejoice that we are thrown into a revolution where the contest is not for landed territory but for freedom. . . . Let no man remove from his native country, for our principles are drawn from the book of Divine Revelation, and are incorporated in the Declaration of Independence, ‘that all men are born equal.’"

His two sons would become professors and help found Howard University after the Civil War. When Cook died in March 1855, one newspaper reported that his funeral was attended by “clergymen of no less than five denominations, many of the oldest and most respectable citizens, and a vast concourse of all classes, white and colored.” Seven years later, in April 1862, slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia. The political power of the slaveholding 1% percent was dismantled, and the dream of the abolitionists, once scorned by the press and the pundits, had became the law of the land.

The Bell-Cook legacy lived on in Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, an ardent abolitionist and orator, served as pastor of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church from 1864 until 1866. When Congress passed the 13th Amendment officially ending slavery in the United States, Garnet was invited to preach a sermon before the House of Representatives. Rev. Francis J. Grimke (1850-1937) served the church as pastor for more than 50 years, beginning in 1877. He used his pulpit to call for civil rights, campaigned against racism in American churches, helped found the American Negro Academy in 1897, and worked toward the creation of the NAACP.The church has been a vital religious, educational, and social center. It was the first home of the Preparatory School for Colored Youth, the city's first public high school and the first black high school in the United States. Sojourner Truth held benefits for the Colored Soldiers' Aid Society at the church. Seamstress and memoirist Elizabeth Keckley (also burried in the cemetery) organized church members in an emancipation celebration in April 1863 to commemorate the first anniversary of the DC Emancipation Act.

Mr. Solomon G. Brown

Solomon G. Brown (1829 - 1906) was the first African-American employee at the Smithsonian Institute, serving for fifty-four years from 1852 to 1906. Brown joined the staff of the Smithsonian shortly after it was founded in 1846. During his time at the Smithsonian, he held many titles and performed many duties in service to the Institution. He served under the first three Smithsonian Secretaries, Joseph Henry, Spencer Fullerton Baird, and Samuel P. Langley. He also served his community in Anacostia, a part of Washington, DC, and was a prominent advocate of African American progress. Born around 1829, Brown was one of six children. With the unfortunate death of his father in 1833, Brown's chance of attending school and receiving a formal education was over. However, Brown began working for Lambert Tree, assistant postmaster with the DC post office. It was in this capacity that Brown first met Joseph Henry, the Smithsonian's first Secretary. Tree detailed Brown to work with Henry, Samuel B. Morse, and Alfred Vail, while they developed the first magnetic telegraph that ran from DC to Baltimore, Maryland. In 1864, Brown wrote of the Confederate march on the city and his own exemption from the military draft. He was so widely respected for his many accomplishments that he was known as Professor Brown. While working for Baird, he educated himself in the field of natural history. He illustrated maps and specimens for many of Baird's lectures, as well as his own talks on topics such as "The Social Habits of Insects," and delivered them to church organizations and civic groups. Not only did he excel as a naturalist, but he was an illustrator, lecturer, philosopher, and poet. Brown also read his poetry, which focused on religion and the social issues of the day, to local audiences and civic organizations. After Baird's death in 1887, Brown served as a clerk for the Smithsonian International Exchange Service, distributing scholarly publications around the world. Within his own Anacostia (Hillsdale) community, Brown was viewed as a leader. Brown and his wife Lucinda hosted picnics for their local community, one of which was attended by Frederick Douglass. He was elected to the DC House of Delegates, served as superintendent of the Pioneer Sabbath School and the North Washington Mission Sunday school, and was a trustee of the 15th Street Presbyterian Church. He was committed to bettering education and gaining opportunities for African American citizens.The Smithsonian commemorated the 100th anniversary of the ground breaking for the Natural History Museum Building with a tree planting ceremony on June 15, 2004 which paid tribute to the memory of Solomon G. Brown, who was at the 1904 ground breaking and expressed regret for the trees had to be cut down to build the new museum.

Henrietta Vinton Davis, (1860–1941) actress, elocutionist, dramatist, impersonator and high-ranking

member of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League Davis was proclaimed by Marcus Garvey to be the "greatest woman of the Negro race today". She has come to be considered the physical, intellectual, and spiritual link between the abolitionist movement of Frederick Douglass and the African Redemption Movement of the UNIA-ACL and Marcus Garvey. Step daughter of influential Baltimorean, George A. Hackett, a member of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church who worked to defeat the 1859 Jacobs bill crafted to enslave the children of free Africans and deport their parents from the state of Maryland. In 1878, and only in her late teens, she became the first African-American woman employed by the Office of the Recorder of Deeds in Washington, D.C. under George A. Sheridan as a copyist. In 1881 Frederick Douglass was appointed Recorder of Deeds. As an actress on April 25, 1883, she was introduced by the Honorable Frederick

Douglass before a distinguished integrated audience. She went on to appear in New London, Connecticut, New York state, Boston, and "more than a dozen of the larger cities of the Eastern and Middle States". Her performances consisted of a diverse spectrum of works from Paul Lawrence Dunbar's poems to such works as Romeo and Juliet, As you like it; "Mary Queen of Scots"; "Cleopatra's Dying Speech"; "The Battle" by Friedrich Schiller; Shakespeare works and "How Tom Sawyer Got His Fence Whitewashed" by Mark Twain. In 1893 she started her own company in Chicago, travelled to the Caribbean, and collaborated on writing Our Old Kentucky Home with distinguished journalist and future Garveyite John Edward Bruce. She decided to give up her career to work with Garvey and the UNIA-ACL, becoming the UNIA's first International Organizer, a director of the Black Star Line and the second Vice-President of the corporation. At the UNIA-ACL convention in August 1920, she was one of the signatories of The Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World. Among the 54 declarations made in this document are resolutions that the colors red, black, and green are to be the symbolic colors of the African race. She established UNIA-ACL divisions in Cuba; Guadeloupe;St. Thomas, Virgin Islands; Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica. In December 1921, she traveled to Liberia, West Africa, as the only woman in the UNIA delegation seeking consent to establish a UNIA-ACL colony in Liberia.

William Henry Harrison Hart (October 30, 1857 – January 6, 1934), co-founder of the Niagara Movement (predecessor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People)

was an African American attorney and Professor of Criminal Law at Howard University for from 1887 to 1922. While he was 17, in 1874 former rebels attempted to oust the pro-African American civil rights Alabama government, Hart campaigned in favor of Civil Rights. His life was threatened, and he fled Alabama. He walked all the way to Washington, D.C. Upon arriving in Washington, D.C., Hart enrolled in the college preparatory program at Howard University in 1876 and graduated with a Preparatory Department Certificate in 1880. He enrolled in the undergraduate program, and received a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in 1885. He entered the Howard University School of Law, and received his Bachelor of Laws (LLB) in 1887From Howard University he also received a Master of Arts (MA) degree in 1889, and a Master of Laws (LLM) degree in 1891.In 1890, Hart joined the faculty of Howard University's law school. He taught there for the next 25 years. Along with fellow law school professor William Henry Richards, Hart secured $10,000 from Congress to build the law school's first building. Hart was the first Liberation Community lawyer appointed as special U.S. District Attorney for the District of Columbia in 1889. In 1904, in a groundbreaking case, Hart challenged Maryland's Jim Crow laws. He was traveling in a whites-only section of a railroad car when a conductor ordered him to move into the blacks-only car as the train crossed

William Hart Memorial Marker

the Maryland state line. Hart refused, and was arrested, charged, convicted of violating the "separate-car" law, and fined $5. He appealed to The Maryland Court of Appeals, which held that Maryland's Jim Crow laws were an improper restriction on interstate commerce. So long as Hart was crossing state lines (rather than engaged in intrastate travel), the racial segregation laws could not apply. In 1897 Hart started the Hart Farm School and Junior Republic for Dependent Colored Boys on 700 acres of land along the Potomac River near Fort Washington, MD. On July 11, 1905, Hart, along with twenty-eight other black intellectuals, including W. E. B. DuBois, founded the Niagara Movement with the drafting of the Niagara Movement's Declaration of Principles. It formally incorporated in 1906 and was the precursor organization to the NAACP in 1910. Hart lived at 216 Arthur Place N.W. in Washington D.C. in 1902. Also in 1902, Hart had a thriving law practice that was located at 420 5th Street, N.W., Washington D.C

Robert Heberton Terrell (1857–1925), the first Liberation Community judge in Washington, D.C. He was born in Orange, Virginia on November 27, 1857 to parents Harris and Louisa Ann Terrell. Terrell was one of seven Magna Cum Laude scholars to graduate from Harvard University in 1884. He later went on to attend Howard University School of Law. On October 18, 1891, Terrell married Mary Church Terrell. The two met at the Preparatory School for Colored Youth now known as the M Street High School, in Washington, D.C. He was a participant in the March 5, 1897 meeting to celebrate the memory of Frederick Douglass which founded the American Negro Academy led by Alexander Crummell. In 1899, Terrell was hired as principal of the M. Street High School, a position he left in 1901. In 1901, Terrell accepted an appointment to serve as a justice of the peace in Washington D.C., which made him the first African-American justice of the peace in Washington D.C In 1910, Terrell was appointed by William Howard Taft to the Municipal Court of the District of Columbia. Terrell was appointed and reappointed by Presidents Taft, Roosevelt, and Wilson.Terrell became a faculty member at the Howard University of Law in 1911, while still serving as a municipal judge. In February 1911 he became a charter member of the first Washington D.C. chapter of Sigma Pi Phi fraternity, the oldest African American fraternity in the nation. In 1919, Terrell along with Henry Lassiter, Lafayette M. Hershaw, Archibald Grimké, and Walter J. Singleton was a prime mover in the introduction by Congressman Martin B. Madden of a law to abolish the "Jim Crow" car.

Cupid Plummer fought for the American Revolution

Cupid Plummer, while imprisoned in Prince George's county enlisted in the Maryland 2nd Regiment, commanded by Colonel Thomas Price, in 1778. On May 27, 1781, Cupid Plummer was discharged from military service and granted his freedom. Plummer remained in Prince George’s County and raised his family. The 2nd Maryland Regiment was authorized on the 14th of January 1776 with seven independent Eastern Maryland companies.

However none of these heroic Americans were buried where their bodies now reside in a mass grave without their headstones. All of their headstones were desecrated.

They were buried in DC's most prestigious Columbian Harmony Cemetery. It was founded in 1825 by the town's liberation community. The Columbian Harmony Society was a mutual aid society formed on November 25, 1825. The Columbian Harmony Society was established "to aid each other in infirmity, sickness, disease, or accident, and to provide burial for them after death." All liberated African-American males, 21 years or older, were eligible for election to membership in the Society. Upon election to membership, an individual was required to pay an initiation fee of fifteen dollars and monthly dues of twenty-five cents plus three percent on the annual total. Members were required to visit fellow members who became sick and to "tender such attention as may be convenient or agreeable." On April 7, 1828, it established the "Harmoneon" cemetery exclusively for members of the society. This was a 1.3 acres cemetery bounded by 5th Street NW, 6th Street NW, S Street NW, and Boundary Street NW. In a generation they had outgrown the acre lot and the Society acquired on July 1, 1857, a 17 acres tract bounded by Rhode Island Avenue NE, Brentwood Road NE, T Street NE, and the railroad tracks of the Capital Subdivision of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Transferral of graves and headstones was completed in 1859. A further expansion of a 18 acres tract adjacent to the Columbian Harmony Cemetery was purchased in the summer of 1886. By 1900 landscaping and roads were added throughout the cemetery. A chapel was built in 1899. By 1901, it held 10,000 graves. A caretaker's lodge was built in 1912.

The land was made sacred by the burial by 1901 of more than 400 African Descent American civil war veterans for whom Elizabeth Keckley made the site of elaborate Decoration Day events at the turn of the century. On the 50th anniversary of the Civil war in 1912, the son of Frederick Douglass himself, Charles led fellow Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) veterans, from the "Frederick Douglass Post" No. 21, in a "Decoration Day" commemoration on the 30th of May. The post consisted of 24 veterans still alive with C.W. Hale as its lead officer and Christian Fleetwood as its mustering officer.

Desecrator Alvin

Desecrator Kerrick

Desecrator Robert

In 1960 an opportunistic fraudster Louis H. Bell and his son Richard took advantage of the cemetery's fall from consciousness and destroyed all of its headstones and reinterred its 37,000 bodies in a mass unmarked grave. He netted $3.4 Million dollars from DC taxpayers passed along by developers who would later buy these acres at bargain basement prices prior to DC Home Rule. When he failed to move the bodies as promised the DC government finished that task. The DC commissioners who oversaw this desecration were David B. Karrick (1893-1960), Col. Alvin C. Welling and Robert E. McLaughlin who was president of the commission. . African Americans were banned from government of their own city, to fully protect their city. To add insult to injury, on July 17 1974 DC Metro bulldozers unearthed and shattered at least five coffins of the Columbia Harmony Cemetery that were not transferred. Seeing what Bell had in store for Woodlawn, its heirs began a lengthy court battles to prevent Bell from desecrating that cemetery finally removing the Bells in 1972. Payne Cemetery was not as lucky and it was desecrated, like Columbian Harmony by the Bells. Multi-million dollar developments have been taking place on Columbian Harmony ever since, with projects like Rhode Island Row (received $7.2 million in DC Tax Payer subsidies), Rhode Island Center, Brentwood Shopping Center (worth $23.5 million in 2010) and Rhode Island Place.

This desecration of some of America's most famous heroes and heroines can now be undone.

70 miles south some of the grave markers of the have been found! In 2009, hikers found a large number of headstones from Columbian Harmony Cemetery lining the banks of the Potomac River on privately owned land near Caledon State Park in King George County, Virginia. According to the landowner, most of the headstones were buried on-site when the cemetery was relocated.

Now we have the chance to travel through time back to 1960 and reclaim all the headstones and place them back on the 40 acres of graves in Landover Maryland.

Please contact Time Travel Tours if you are interested in traveling back to 1960 to explore preventing the destruction of these American heroes' graves. #projectharmony

Finding Mutuality Among Maryland's Last Lynchers

2016-12-28T19:54:00.001-08:00

In 1900 Ida B. Wells said "Our country's national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob. It represents the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an "unwritten law" that justifies them in putting human beings to death without complaint under oath, without trial by jury, without opportunity to make defense, and without right of appeal."

In Oswald Tilghman's 1915 History of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, this cool calculation is well expressed by one of the erectors of the Pirate Statue in front of the Talbot County Courthouse, "For the maintenance of due discipline a rigid regime was absolutely necessary... It must be remembered too, that even deserved punishments when inflicted by a private hand, and not by the unimpassioned arm of the law, are apt to be regarded as cruel, even when they are milder than those judicially inflicted."

Ida continues, "Far removed from and entirely without protection of the courts of civilized life...in the South...It asserted its sway in defiance of law and in favor of anarchy. There it has flourished with the inhuman butchery of more than ten thousand men, women, and children by shooting, drowning, hanging, and burning them alive. Not only this, but so potent is the force of example that the lynching mania has spread throughout the North and middle West. It is now no uncommon thing to read of lynchings north of Mason and Dixon's line, and those most responsible for this fashion gleefully point to these instances and assert that the North is no better than the South.

This is the work of the "unwritten law" about which so much is said, and in whose behest butchery is made a pastime and national savagery condoned. The first statute of this "unwritten law" was written in the blood of thousands of brave men who thought that a government that was good enough to create a citizenship was strong enough to protect it. Under the authority of a national law that gave every citizen the right to vote, the newly-made citizens chose to exercise their suffrage. But the reign of the national law was short-lived and illusionary. Hardly had the sentences dried upon the statute-books before one Southern State after another raised the cry against "negro domination" and proclaimed there was an "unwritten law" that justified any means to resist it.

The method then inaugurated was the outrages by the "red-shirt" bands of Louisiana, South Carolina, and other Southern States, which were succeeded by the Ku-Klux Klans. These advocates of the "unwritten law" boldly avowed their purpose to intimidate, suppress, and nullify the negro's right to vote. In support of its plans the Ku-Klux Klans, the "red-shirt" and similar organizations proceeded to beat, exile, and kill negroes until the purpose of their organization was accomplished and the supremacy of the "unwritten law" was effected. Thus lynchings began in the South, rapidly spreading into the various States until the national law was nullified and the reign of the "unwritten law" was supreme. Men were taken from their homes by "red-shirt" bands and stripped, beaten, and exiled; others were assassinated when their political prominence made them obnoxious to their political opponents; while the Ku-Klux barbarism of election days, reveling in the butchery of thousands of colored voters, furnished records in Congressional investigations that are a disgrace to civilization.

The alleged menace of universal suffrage having been avoided by the absolute suppression of the negro vote, the spirit of mob murder should have been satisfied and the butchery of negroes should have ceased. But men, women, and children were the victims of murder by individuals and murder by mobs, just as they had been when killed at the demands of the "unwritten law" to prevent "negro domination." Negroes were killed for disputing over terms of contracts with their employers. If a few barns were burned some colored man was killed to stop it. If a colored man resented the imposition of a white man and the two came to blows, the colored man had to die, either at the hands of the white man then and there or later at the hands of a mob that speedily gathered. If he showed a spirit of courageous manhood he was hanged for his pains, and the killing was justified by the declaration that he was a "saucy nigger." Colored women have been murdered because they refused to tell the mobs where relatives could be found for "lynching bees." Boys of fourteen years have been lynched by white representatives of American civilization. In fact, for all kinds of offenses--and, for no offenses--from murders to misdemeanors, men and women are put to death without judge or jury; so that, although the political excuse was no longer necessary, the wholesale murder of human beings went on just the same. A new name was given to the killings and a new excuse was invented for so doing.

Again the aid of the "unwritten law" is invoked, and again it comes to the rescue. During the last ten years a new statute has been added to the "unwritten law." This statute proclaims that for certain crimes or alleged crimes no negro shall be allowed a trial; that no white woman shall be compelled to charge an assault under oath or to submit any such charge to the investigation of a court of law. The result is that many men have been put to death whose innocence was afterward established; and to-day, under this reign of the "unwritten law," no colored man, no matter what his reputation, is safe from lynching if a white woman, no matter what her standing or motive, cares to charge him with insult or assault.

It is considered a sufficient excuse and reasonable justification to put a prisoner to death under this "unwritten law" for the frequently repeated charge that these lynching horrors are necessary to prevent crimes against women. The sentiment of the country has been appealed to, in describing the isolated condition of white families in thickly populated negro districts; and the charge is made that these homes are in as great danger as if they were surrounded by wild beasts. And the world has accepted this theory without let or hindrance. In many cases there has been open expression that the fate meted out to the victim was only what he deserved. In many other instances there has been a silence that says more forcibly than words can proclaim it that it is right and proper that a human being should be seized by a mob and burned to death upon the unsworn and the uncorroborated charge of his accuser. No matter that our laws presume every man innocent until he is proved guilty; no matter that it leaves a certain class of individuals completely at the mercy of another class; no matter that it encourages those criminally disposed to blacken their faces and commit any crime in the calendar so long as they can throw suspicion on some negro, as is frequently done, and then lead a mob to take his life; no matter that mobs make a farce of the law and a mockery of justice; no matter that hundreds of boys are being hardened in crime and schooled in vice by the repetition of such scenes before their eyes--if a white woman declares herself insulted or assaulted, some life must pay the penalty, with all the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition and all the barbarism of the Middle Ages. The world looks on and says it is well.

Not only are two hundred men and women put to death annually, on the average, in this country by mobs, but these lives are taken with the greatest publicity. In many instances the leading citizens aid and abet by their presence when they do not participate, and the leading journals inflame the public mind to the lynching point with scare-head articles and offers of rewards. Whenever a burning is advertised to take place, the railroads run excursions, photographs are taken, and the same jubilee is indulged in that characterized the public hangings of one hundred years ago. There is, however, this difference: in those old days the multitude that stood by was permitted only to guy or jeer. The nineteenth century lynching mob cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd. If the leaders of the mob are so minded, coal-oil is poured over the body and the victim is then roasted to death. This has been done in Texarkana and Paris, Tex., in Bardswell, Ky., and in Newman, Ga. In Paris the officers of the law delivered the prisoner to the mob. The mayor gave the school children a holiday and the railroads ran excursion trains so that the people might see a human being burned to death. In Texarkana, the year before, men and boys amused themselves by cutting off strips of flesh and thrusting knives into their helpless victim.

This condition of affairs were brutal enough and horrible enough if it were true that lynchings occurred only because of the commission of crimes against women--as is constantly declared by ministers, editors, lawyers, teachers, statesmen, and even by women themselves. It has been to the interest of those who did the lynching to blacken the good name of the helpless and defenseless victims of their hate. For this reason they publish at every possible opportunity this excuse for lynching, hoping thereby not only to palliate their own crime but at the same time to prove the negro a moral monster and unworthy of the respect and sympathy of the civilized world. But this alleged reason adds to the deliberate injustice of the mob's work. Instead of lynchings being caused by assaults upon women, the statistics show that not one-third of the victims of lynchings are even charged with such crimes. The Chicago Tribune, which publishes annually lynching statistics, is authority for the following:

In 1892, when lynching reached high-water mark, there were 241 persons lynched."

Maryland was included among those lynchings. 23 year old James Taylor was lynched in Kennedyville, Kent County on May 17, 1892. The lynchers proclaimed Taylor's lynching would serve to protect their wives, mothers, and children from any further harm. It would also protect Nettie Silcox from having to tell of her experience in court. James Taylor continued to proclaim innocence even up until the last hour of his life. He reported to The Sun when asked if he was guilty of the crime, "No, sir, I am an innocent man and I am not afraid to say so even while I am expecting to meet my God in a few minutes."

Contemporary News Image of Maryland Lynching

Ida goes on, "The negro has been too long associated with the white man not to have copied his vices as well as his virtues. But the negro resents and utterly repudiates the efforts to blacken his good name by asserting that assaults upon women are peculiar to his race. The negro has suffered far more from the commission of this crime against the women of his race by white men than the white race has ever suffered through his crimes. Very scant notice is taken of the matter when this is the condition of affairs. What becomes a crime deserving capital punishment when the tables are turned is a matter of small moment when the negro woman is the accusing party.

But since the world has accepted this false and unjust statement, and the burden of proof has been placed upon the negro to vindicate his race, he is taking steps to do so. The Anti-Lynching Bureau of the National Afro-American Council is arranging to have every lynching investigated and publish the facts to the world, as has been done in the case of Sam Hose, who was burned alive last April at Newman, Ga. The detective's report showed that Hose killed Cranford, his employer, in self-defense, and that, while a mob was organizing to hunt Hose to punish him for killing a white man, not till twenty-four hours after the murder was the charge of rape, embellished with psychological and physical impossibilities, circulated. That gave an impetus to the hunt, and the Atlanta Constitution's reward of $500 keyed the mob to the necessary burning and roasting pitch. Of five hundred newspaper clippings of that horrible affair, nine-tenths of them assumed Hose's guilt--simply because his murderers said so, and because it is the fashion to believe the negro peculiarly addicted to this species of crime. All the negro asks is justice--a fair and impartial trial in the courts of the country. That given, he will abide the result.

But this question affects the entire American nation, and from several points of view: First, on the ground of consistency. Our watchword has been "the land of the free and the home of the brave." Brave men do not gather by thousands to torture and murder a single individual, so gagged and bound he cannot make even feeble resistance or defense. Neither do brave men or women stand by and see such things done without compunction of conscience, nor read of them without protest. Our nation has been active and outspoken in its endeavors to right the wrongs of the Armenian Christian, the Russian Jew, the Irish Home Ruler, the native women of India, the Siberian exile, and the Cuban patriot. Surely it should be the nation's duty to correct its own evils!

Third, for the honor of Anglo-Saxon civilization. No scoffer at our boasted American civilization could say anything more harsh of it than does the American white man himself who says he is unable to protect the honor of his women without resort to such brutal, inhuman, and degrading exhibitions as characterize "lynching bees." No nation, savage or civilized, save only the United States of America, has confessed its inability to protect its women save by hanging, shooting, and burning alleged offenders.

Finally, for love of country. No American travels abroad without blushing for shame for his country on this subject. And whatever the excuse that passes current in the United States, it avails nothing abroad. With all the powers of government in control; with all laws made by white men, administered by white judges, jurors, prosecuting attorneys, and sheriffs; with every office of the executive department filled by white men--no excuse can be offered for exchanging the orderly administration of justice for barbarous lynchings and "unwritten laws." Our country should be placed speedily above the plane of confessing herself a failure at self-government. This cannot be until Americans of every section, of broadest patriotism and best and wisest citizenship, not only see the defect in our country's armor but take the necessary steps to remedy it. Although lynchings have steadily increased in number and barbarity during the last twenty years, there has been no single effort put forth by the many moral and philanthropic forces of the country to put a stop to this wholesale slaughter. Indeed, the silence and seeming condonation grow more marked as the years go by."

Ida B Well's words went unheeded. Lynchings continued on the Eastern Shore of Maryland along the same lines as those described by Oswald Tilghman fifteen years later. In Princess Anne, Maryland it was to strike again in similarly absurd circumstances;

82 Year Old Alleged Rape Victim

20 year old Lynching Victim

On October 17 1933 George Armwood who was 20 years of age was accused of raping an 82 year old feeble farm women named Mary Denston. The next day after he had been captured, the reporters asked Harry Denston how his wife Mary was he replied "She's all right now I guess," as they saw her go about her household duties. Their son, William Denston, a motorcycle policemen from Philadelphia raced down for the lynching who explained "Armwood got what was coming to him. He should have been lynched. Justice has been done." The lynching was well advertised throughout Maryland, neighboring Washington D.C. and northern Virginia.

Judge Robert F. Duer and State Attorney John Robbins provided Maryland Governor Albert Ritchie the false assurance that no lynching would take place. The police reported getting a confession, Mary never identified her alleged assailant.

Captain Edward McKim Johnson could not stop the lynching as they came with heavy timbers intent on battering down the jail doors. Sergt. E.F. Hadaway of Claiborne and Patrolman Clyde Serman of Salisbury went to hospital with injuries attempting to defend Mr. Armwood. Five other officers were also injured. Captain Johnson himself was struck in the head by a brick and went for treatment at 8:10pm on the 18th of October. In all 25 national guardsman and 8 state troopers were overpowered by not resorting to lethal force. The city's lone policeman Marion Austin also claimed to not see a single face he knew.

The Princess Anne fire department sounded the alarm and brought out the fire truck as a signal for the mob to gather. At 8:30pm Mr. Armwood was kidnapped from jail by a mob of 2500 individuals including Princess Anne women and children over the objections of Sheriff Luther Daugherty who did not stop them. After the lynching he was asked if he was going to arrest the guilty. He replied, "What investigation?" He didn't "recognize a single soul, not a single soul" in the mob.

Princess Anne 1933 Lynching Mob

As he was marched to his hanging the mob screamed and cursed Mr. Armwood and knocked him down repeatedly. One Princess Anne resident cut off his ear with a knife as a savage keepsake.

In a sign of defiance of government authority, they lynched Mr. Armwood on an oak tree at the home of Judge Duer on main street in Princess Anne.

The body was returned to Princess Anne dragged behind a car attached by a rope around his neck naked. In the city's main intersection gasoline was used to set the body alight.

Frank Spencer recalled, "After a while his burning body lay in the street, filling the breeze with stench of burning flesh, the mob, men, women, young girls and boys, joined hands and danced around and around his prostrate body singing 'John Brown's Body' and 'Give me Something to Remember You By'." One man was quoted as stating, “It would have cost the state $1,000 to hang the man. It cost us 75 cents.” Pieces from the rope used to hang Armwood were taken as souvenirs.

With that 270 years of lynching history on the Eastern Shore came to an end as the lynchers were prosecuted for the first time in Maryland history. Brave Maryland policemen stood up and identified 9 of the lynchers. The American Civil Liberties union offered $1000 as a reward for identifying lynchers.

Standoff With National Guard To Free Accused Lynchers

Governor Albert Ritchie, who was "shocked beyond expression at this horrible lynching", shut off all telephones in Princess Anne to help ensure the capture of the lynchers by the National Guard. Five of the accused successfully hid. Famous Howard University Civil Rights Lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston wrote to Samuel Dennis, of the Maryland State Bar to keep the case out of the complicit Judge Duer's court: "Judge Duet's attitude and misconduct in this case completely disqualify him both professionally and personally."

Dr. William H. Thompson was one of the lynchers arrested. He was 33 years old. A druggist on Hampden Avenue. 13 years later he would serve on the Somerset County Welfare Board. The police recorded that he was "trying to assert his leadership" of the mob. (Police Statement 414)

Lyncher William Thompson

Mr. Irving Adkins, was one of the lynchers arrested. He was 30 years old. A local farmer. He "jumped in the center of the crowd and had his hat in his hand, and with his hand up in the air, he hollered 'Follow me', or 'Go get him'" (Police Statement 426)

Mr. William McQuay or McQuade, was one of the lynchers arrested.

Mr William P. Hearn was one of the lynchers arrested. He was 28 years old 6'2" and 180 pounds with light hair a grey hat, blue coats and pants. A Salisbury trucking business owner. "He shouted 'Let's go get him' just before the battering rams came in, he came to the door and attempted to shove us off the steps. He shouted 'Let's go, Come On' just before the mob rushed into the jail. He ran into the jail followed by the mob. He was the clear leaders of the mob. His breath smelt of alcohol. He told the crowd that the police could not shoot you (Police Statements 325, 326, 385, 389, 391, 392)

Prior to their Grand Jury hearing in Princess Anne, the crowd was chanting "Lynch Ritchie" the governor of Maryland. The crowd went so far as to disturb the grave of George Armwood.

The Grand Jury heard testimony from 42 witnesses to the lynching, including 12 African Americans held in the jail, and from state police officers who personally identified the men as acting as leaders of the mob, the Princess Anne jury declined to indict anyone for Armwood's murder. All four were ordered released by the grand jury and the case was dismissed. All four were greeted in town as returning heroes. There was dancing in the streets of Princess Anne for many hours. Shots rang out in celebration. The mob even shot Princess Anne resident of African Descent William Jones in the leg and the authorities arrested no one. The newspaper reporters were chased out of town, and their hotel was burned down. On January 25, 1934 the lynching investigation was closed. Out of the 5000 documented lynchings which occurred between 1890 and 1960, less than one percent resulted in a conviction of any of the murderers.

2500 others were not arrested included the likes of World War One veteran Rusty Heath a Princess Anne resident and former employee of the Jail. "I positively identify Rusty Heath as being in front of the jail. He was the leader of the first mob of 100 who were pushed back. I saw him by the tree where Armwood was being hung. Rusty was so drunk he could hardly stand. Rusty Heath was holding the rope. " (Police Statements 422, 426, 427, 430)

The collective responsibility is well stated by Mary Denston's son Williwam, "I was one of the 2500 men, women and children of Princess Anne who witnessed the storming of the jail and saw the actual lynching but I took no part in the mob action. I think Armwood should have been lynched. He did a terrible thing. He attacked Mary Denston."

The collective Princess Anne guilt continues this day well expressed by another Mary Denston descendent, this time her great-grand daughter claiming "He robbed her, beat her and raped her. She was 71. He chewed off her breasts. She even caught pneumonia because of this. She was able to identify her attacker, he was found, arrested and put in jail." Joseph E. Moore, a former Worcester County prosecutor explains "There are members of the mob who are still alive. We have moved on from this." The police station continues to exist on the spot of the lynching to this day.

There is another memory of this event in Princess Anne, which speaks to its "other tradition", which offers us hope and a model to build upon as opposed to the denialist paradigm expressed above.

The other tradition found expression in a poem by Esther Popel published in the August 1934 issue of the Crisis. The poem juxtaposes the murder of Armwood with the Pledge of Allegiance. This writing hearkens back to the move by Frederick Douglass and others who believed the Constitution of the country would end slavery.

The other tradition also found expression in the African Descent American journalists and brothers Clarence Mitchell Jr (1911-1984) and Parren Mitchell (1922-2007) who covered the Lynching with an eye to objectivity and truth. Baltimore's Afro-American newspaper sent them across the bay to report on the advertised lynching and they arrived the next morning on the 19th. Mitchell described the horrific sight in vivid detail for the readers of the October 28 issue of the Afro-American:

“The skin of George Armwood was scorched and blackened while his face had suffered many blows from sharp and heavy instruments. A cursory glance revealed that one ear was missing and his tongue clenched between his teeth, gave evidence of his great agony before death. There is no adequate description of the mute evidence of gloating on the part of whites who gathered to watch the effect upon our people.”

Clarence Mitchell Jr. with President Johnson

So affected were both Clarence and Parren that they both went on to dedicate their lives to furthering the cause of Civil Rights. Clarence went to testify in support of an anti-lynching bill in February of 1935. Clarence continued down this path of service becoming known in Washington as the "101st Senator," as he was so instrumental in helping to usher major civil rights legislation through Congress: The Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960 and 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. One journalist called him the "prime source of moral pressure for the cause of racial justice." In 1985 the City Courthouse in Baltimore was named in his honor.

Senator Parren Mitchell

Parren was able to attend the University of Maryland's College Park campus to study sociology after suing the school to gain entrance. He went on to be elected to Congress in 1970 as a representative of Maryland's 7th district. He not only became the first African-American congressman from Maryland, but the first since 1898 to hold a congressional seat from any state south of the Mason-Dixon line. He also was one of the founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Over the course of his eight terms as a congressman, Mitchell remained a tireless advocate for increasing economic opportunities for minorities.

The other tradition also found expression at the nearby Metropolitan United Methodist Church two blocks from the jailhouse mob a Princess Anne resident of African Descent recalls "I was at church that night. We were having a revivial. I heard the tin cans. They were dragging him behind a car. The preacher said 'There's a lynching. We have to get down on our knees and pray. They were yelling and screaming. The white people were cheering: 'This is great.' I could hear it. It was close by. I'll never forget that. The preacher told us to get down on our knees and pray. We sat there a while before we left." That church which provided spiritual and physical refuge on such a cursed night, was built upon the stone foundation of mutuality which underpins the 'other tradition' in Princess Anne, both literally and figuratively.

This cornerstone of the church by the Lynching was placed on September 19, 1886 just two years after the land was purchased for it from Mr. Thomas Dixon by the liberation community of Princess Anne. In 1842 those in the concentration camps in and around Princess Anne had won the right to form their own House of Worship, and called it the John Wesley Methodist Episcopal church. They left the balcony of St. Andrews Episcopal Church where Thomas Dixon worshipped with his wife Laura's Brittingham Family. Until 1861 they were using a church they built on the farm of Georgia Jones. Then for twenty years they built a small church distant from town until they outgrew it in 1884 and began looking for the grounds Mr. Thomas Dixon sold them.

The ground is made sacred by it being from the 1740s the Summerset County Courthouse property. Upon its enslavement block were distributed the kidnapped Africans who were brought up the Manokin River running just north of the property amongst the wardens of the county's many concentration camps. Mr. Thomas Dixon had purchased the property about 30 years prior when the new court house was moved to. Not only did he provide the bedrock upon which the liberation community of Princess Anne made its center, he was also make Princess Anne the bedrock of the first integrated inter-racial religious movement in the Southern United States.

Arcadia East of Princess Anne

Mr. Thomas Dixon's wife's sister and brother's wife Charlotte Brittingham Dixon was guided to change the course of Princess Anne history. She had been born on 19 July 1852 at Arcadia, an estate three miles from Princess Anne. Charlotte attended the Washington Academy, the excellent private school in Princess Anne, then taught there for fourteen years. She married George Dixon on 8 April 1874 and they had two children. Following the death of her husband in 1878, just ten years after her brother in law's sale of the property to the liberation community, she was struck with the following vision in 1896:

“Through visions and voices I was shown that a New Dispensation had dawned, and that Our Lord was again upon earth, to establish the glorious reign of Peace, and the Millennium. This was 1896..... I prayed most earnestly for guidance, and light, and God opened a door for me, by taking me to live in Chicago, where I remained part of two years. While there I was wonderfully impressed that someone there knew of the great Revelation that had been shown me in Maryland ... I asked for a Mrs. Reed and questioned about her work, she paused a moment and then said: 'Woman, God sent you here; you are not seeking Mrs. Reed. We have the greatest message since Christ.'... She said she was unworthy to speak of the great Message, but referred me to a man from Palestine who was in Chicago giving the Baha'i Teachings to the first class of students in America, at that time. I lost not time in finding this man who had a class of about fifty earnest seekers. He told me the great Message, and I returned to Maryland in a few weeks, the first person on Maryland soil who knew of the Revelation. I taught my family, and they accepted it in a surprising way. My father died in the faith, receiving a glorious Baptism of the Spirit, and my brothers and sisters became Baha’is.”

Princess Anne Baha'i Charlotte Emily Dixon

Princess Anne Baha'i William J. Brittingham

Princess Anne Baha'i Henry Lawrence Brittingham

Princess Anne Baha'i Louise Dixon Boyle

Thomas, his wife Laura both became Baha'is. Their father William J. Brittingham became Baha'i the family for whom Brittingham lane in Princess Anne is named. Her brothers James and Henry Brittingham Sr. became Baha'is. Her daughter Louise Dixon, Her sisters Henrietta Brittingham and Evalina Brittingham. As did Thomas and Laura's daughter Emilie Dixon. This Princess Anne community of believers brought this Faith to New York, Washington DC, Baltimore and Philadelphia. The Brittingham's also wrote the most popular Baha'i book running through nine editions from 1902 to 1920: The Revelation of Baha'u'llah in a Sequence of Four Lessons . What did these Princess Anne Baha'is believe?

CNN recently featured the opening of a new Baha'i temple in Chile in 2016

"The Revelation proclaimed by Bahá’u’lláh, His followers believe is divine in origin, all-embracing in scope, broad in its outlook, scientific in its method, humanitarian in its principles and dynamic in the influence it exerts on the hearts and minds of men. The mission of the founder of their Faith, they conceive it to be to proclaim that religious truth is not absolute but relative, that Divine Revelation is continuous and progressive, that the Founders of all past religions, though different in the nonessential aspects of their teachings, “abide in the same Tabernacle, soar in the same heaven, are seated upon the same throne, utter the same speech and proclaim the same Faith.” His Cause, they have already demonstrated, stands identified with and revolves around, the principle of the organic unity of mankind as representing the consummation of the whole process of human evolution. This final stage in this stupendous evolution, they assert, is not only necessary but inevitable, that it is gradually approaching, and that nothing short of the celestial potency with which a divinely ordained Message can claim to be endowed can succeed in establishing it.

The Bahá’í Faith recognizes the unity of God and of His Prophets, upholds the principle of an unfettered search after truth, condemns all forms of superstition and prejudice, teaches that the fundamental purpose of religion is to promote concord and harmony, that it must go hand-in-hand with science, that it constitutes the sole and ultimate basis of a peaceful, an ordered and progressive society" - Shoghi Effendi

In 1900 Charlotte and Mrs. Emilie Dixon traveled to Haifa, Palestine to visit the leader of the Baha'i Faith, 'Abdu'l-Baha. This may have been one of the first Eastern Shore residents to travel to the holy land to seek guidance for its affairs. Before she left she had founded a community of seven adherents in Washington DC in 1899. That community would grow into the first inter-racial Baha'i community in America by 1908 with 15 African Descent adherents. This led to 'Abdu'l-Baha speaking at Howard University on April 23rd, 1912 at Rankin Chapel.

Time Travel Tours serving as reenactor and guide to the film crew of Luminous Journey in 2011 Washington DC where they recreated the visit of 'Abdu'l-Baha to Howard University's Rankin Chapel

'Abdu'l-Baha's approach to racial injustice and build racial unity has always been somewhat unique for its emphasis on the need for spiritual, as well as political, legal, social, economic, and cultural, transformation. While governments and some of the public discourse has tended to emphasize themes of law, politics, and order, the Bahá’í community has argued for an integrative and comprehensive approach in which the challenges of overcoming racial oppression and building social unity are viewed as one and the same.

The distinct elements of the Bahá’í approach were exemplified at the time of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s visit to Howard University. On April 9, 1912, President William Howard Taft stated in his address to Howard University alumni that “the only way by which [lynching] can be suppressed is that some time we shall have men as sheriffs and as governors and as prosecutors and as jurors who will see to it that the men who are engaged in pulling the rope under those conditions shall themselves swing by the rope” (Du Bois in the Crisis, volume 4, issue 1, page 12). Two weeks later, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá delivered a speech at Howard University that contrasted sharply with President Taft’s. He explained that a spiritual solution is required to challenge the souls of people, to enlist individuals ready to blaze the trail of human amity, to overcome suspicions and “mix together completely,” and to “become very loving toward” and “enhance [the] honor” of the other. In other words, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá provided the vision that to overcome racial disunity we must change our mindsets, worldviews, and ways of acting, challenging the very social meanings that divide one from another.

In recognition of the contribution of 'Abdu'l-Baha to the solution of lynching in America, Du Bois named 'Abdu'l-Baha the May 1912 Man of the Month. He was also invited seven days later on April 30, 1912, to address the 4^thAnnual Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People at Handel Hall in Chicago, Illinois .

Charlotte's daughter Louise Boyle grand children are seen in the first row on the left with Roger in pink and Patton in blue, participating in the centenary commemoration of 'Abdu'l-Baha's visit to Washington DC. Time Travel Tours organized the tour.

Time Travel Tours attempts to foster the Racial Reconciliation spirit that has always existed on the Eastern Shore with its Liberation Tour.

A Civil War Monument In Easton That Everyone Could Support

2016-12-21T21:21:00.000-08:00

A review of the consultation upon the removal of the Enslavement Rights statue on the Talbot County Courthouse lawn reveals a wide gulf in world views and experience which requires a Racial Reconciliation to heal from. When we speak of enslavement rights, there was only one right which was so egregious that states would rebel against the Union to maintain it. From the bloody fields of Kansas to keep it as Free Soil to the Maryland Blood shed in Christiana to keep men free, the lead up to the Civil War and every presidential debate in 1861 was ONLY about the right to enslave other humans of African Descent. Briefly let us review the common arguments put forward for the removal of enslavement rights statues argued by the County's residents.

Those who are of African Descent:
1) Jim Bottorf said “they fought for a cause that said, it’s OK for a human being to own another human being."

2) Harriette Lowery, "I will say that anytime any black person has seen a Confederate flag, on anybody’s lawn, on anybody’s truck, on anybody’s belt buckle, we have fear. We grew up with that fear, we knew what it meant."

Those who are of European Descent:

1) Corey Pack "soldiers are viewed as veterans" plain and simple. In a previous post I shared Frederick Douglass' dismantlement of this argument.

2) Corey Pack and Tracey Lyons argue "it would be disrespectful to the family members" on the monument. Again Frederick Douglass dismantles this argument.

3) Rachel Smith argues "states rights are not racist". In the paragraph above this argument is defeated by the only state right which was in question was enslavement.

4) Carol Dixon and David Ewing argue "why now." This overlooks the fact that Talbot County residents of African Descent had no rights until they fought for them in 1863 and again in 1963. The Jim Crow laws were so restrictive here that the 15th Amendment to the USA Constitution; "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race" - was not made law here until 1972. So there was no capacity to object to Enslavement Statues prior to the present.

This division speaks to a more fundamental issue in America, that of the need for Racial Reconciliation.

The arguments raised for and against the statue show two pernicious policies used for over 350 years against those of African Descent on the Eastern Shore - first the denial of their humanity. The Post Traumatic Slavery Disorder, the discovery by Dr. Joy DeGruy of how the Liberation Communities in America remain traumatized by 220 years of enslavement in Maryland is expressed by the fear many feel today of being denied any protection from the law any civil rights whatsoever. This notion of denial of the African American concerns makes it very difficult to have a healthy relationship. We cannot have a loving, just relationship while one party ignores the rights of the other to be human and enjoy liberty and freedom and equality. We cannot reconcile as we deny the other exists.

The other interconnected strand of injustice is the policy of cultural genocide. From the removal of their names, to their removal from public life, to their thoughts that their feelings being removed from discussion - you can see this in the Council's final decision which no where addressed the feelings expressed by Harriette and Jim, in spite of their claims that they represent all of Talbot County's residents. We cannot reconcile as we remove the culture of the other.

I point out these two policies of denial and cultural genocide to show just how great is the challenge we all bear here. This is what Racial Reconciliation must overcome. We have to move away from the adversarialism of denial and genocide and towards loving one another in new ways, restructuring our relations and how we relate in new ways. It is too painful to continue not doing this.

This challenge of Racial Reconciliation is about learning to love one another. It is not about how to live side by side, set up one Liberation statue next to one Enslavement Rights statue. It is not just about accepting one another's differences. It is about learning to love. It demands a new mindset and orientation to each other and the relationships between us.

We must build unity across our diversity. We must cultivate true altruistic love in our hearts and minds between each other. All the Racial Reconciliation revolves around a theme of deep mutuality, a deep understanding which needs to come out of this. We require a shift away from the 100s of Jim Crow era comments, and flip all the way to learn to truly learn to love one another in new ways. We do know how to do this!

The theme of mutuality has always been there in the history of the Eastern Shore in relations of African and European Descent Americans in various ways. It has been submerged under many other layers of oppression but it has always been there. At the Nation's birth there were early patterns of sharing and interdependence, but there was a turn away from it. We started with patterns of learning and finding ways to share, to find mutual patterns of expression. Things later changed to a pattern of injustice which we are more familiar with. We wished to be partners with one another in this country, to live as one family. There were many negative things as well, but there was a desire for mutuality there.

We were working on our relationship as equals, to define our ways of working and living together. So where should we look to rediscover these stories of our mutuality?

Why don't we start with Eastern Shore's own Bull Conor - Robert Fasenfeld.

This Re-enslavement Law promoter is shown at right (Conor to the left) smashing an egg on a liberation protester on Race Street in Cambridge in July 1863 and yelling "Get these people out of here, I know my rights". Race Street still divides African American and European American Cambridge today and the protesters were attempting to gain the right to eat where they wished in his store.

Who is this Robert? Why was he so keen on re-enslavement laws passed after the legal end of slavery in November of 1864, meant to maintain the social and economic practises of that era? He was born on August 14, 1921 in Baltimore and raised in Trappe midway between Cambridge and Easton. While Robert is emblematic of a town which in its 1881 history makes no mention of its glorious earlier inter-racial history, makes only mention of the world view which would so poison the mind of poor Robert. If that history said anything of Americans of African Descent it only said negative things like "The African Methodist Church has a hard struggle to keep up an existence, and has been in considerable debt." Also, Trappe's European citizens are "sociable, intelligent gentlemen. This may be because they have so much leisure. As an indication of their health, the census-taker for the norther half of Trappe (African-Americans live in the southern half) did not find but two sick persons." The final mention is that the "Colored people have a little school building, lately erected." With that all that was available to Robert no wonder he thought so little of them and wished to protect his "considerable life of leisure" at their expense.

However, no history could be more wrong. In Trappe there is a magnificent other tradition. It is from Trappe that the first signer of the Declaration of Independence arose to liberate all the Americans of African Descent he had enslaved. He ran the largest concentration camp in Delaware at the time. John Dickinson was born in Trappe on November 7 1782. Even today's Trappe government website history makes NO MENTION OF MR. DICKINSON. He was the fourth generation of Dickinson to live in Trappe, settling the city in 1659 with other Society of Friends co-religionists would would provide the AME congregation the church spoken of in 1881 and be so critical to Harriet Tubman's Underground Railroad liberation activity on the Eastern Shore and to provide the only land the Africans who fought for their own liberty in 1863 were granted on the Eastern Shore, in what we now call Unionville. Dickinson did not only sign the declaration of independence, he led 10,000 soldiers into battle against the British in 1777. He was Delaware's wealthiest citizen. He remains the only founding father to liberate his prisoners between 1776 an 1786. This is a story of love and mutuality we can relearn and redevelop the patterns of mutuality we so critically need for our racial reconciliation.

The other we have is of Trappe town founder, and first Town Commissioner, Charles R. Mullikin, a leading Trappe merchant, named Captain of Talbot County's first unit in the First Eastern Shore Regiment of the US Army. His relative Robert Thomas Mullikin was the Union Army Quartermaster stationed in Baltimore. His other cousin James Mullikin was a Lieutenant of the unit. Other Trappe area soldiers were Col James Wallace, Argalus Hennissee and Solomon Colburn. Twelve other non-commissioned officers and 64 privates were as well.

At Gettysburg the defence of Washington and the Union Army supply line stood in the balance as Culp's Hill was attacked by the Army of Enslavement on July 2nd 1863, with a 5 to 1 numeric superiority. The bravery of the Trappe area Union soldiers won the day together with other units on Culp's Hill. They were very innovative and made use of trenches to equal the odds foreshadowing the trench warfare used thereafter at Petersburg and in WW1. They were joined that year in battle by hundreds of Eastern Shore self-liberated Americans of African Descent of Talbot County Descent like two of Frederick Douglass' sons. In all the teamwork and love between the boys in blue won the war and liberated all of Eastern Shore's Americans of African Descent from Enslavement forever. John Cowgill who served in the 108th United States Colored Troops, was so moved by the experience, that he helped his fellow soldiers, his victorious brothers in arms settle into farms to raise their now free families in Unionville, Maryland north of Easton. This inter-racial mutuality is yet another strong icon of racial recollection and love we can build upon.

Four images of the strong position of the Trappe boys on Culp's Hill from which they soundly defeated the Talbot Boys who have a statue on the Courthouse Grounds, preserving the Union and liberating 4 million Africans in so doing.

What is quite ironic about the statue raised on the Courthouse grounds, the Army of Enslavement facing off against the Union Trappe Boys were traitors to Maryland fighting against it. The Army of Enslavement was butchered failing to take Culp's Hill in spite of their 5 to 1 numeric superiority. After the longest close quarter battle of the entire war, which won the battle of Gettysburg for America, the Army of Enslavement was cut to pieces. Colonel Wallace of the Union 1st Maryland wrote, "The 1st Maryland Confederate Regiment met us and were cut to pieces. We sorrowfully gathered up many of our old friends and acquaintances and had them carefully and tenderly cared for."

Reconciliation at is heart is building deep patterns of understanding, relating and living together. After 250 years we have turned or backs on this process, we forgot how to do it. We don't know how to relate in love. We don't have the infrastructure to know how to create love between us. Think how hard it will be to build these relationships, to learn how to work together. Think how complicated it is to build real enduring, loving, sacrificial, creative, exciting and constructive relationships. We have to do that between people, between societies.

We had some good history to build on, but we had totally shut it out. At Time Travel Tours we hope by reliving that history we can rediscover our mutuality, our love, and work hard to create racial reconciliation in our time.

To conclude turn your gaze towards this monument to the Trappe Boys on the Gettysburg battlefield where they literally saved America from defeat and the perpetuation of enslavement beyond 1864. The 209,000 African Descent soldiers in the war knew they must win the war to have the Emancipation Proclamation liberate anyone. It was an interracial victory for America! It forms a strong basis for the love and mutuality which we must build upon.

Mount Hebron High School Teachings Harken Back To Drapetomania

2016-12-18T21:40:00.001-08:00

PRESS RELEASE: THE TIME IS NOW FOR RACIAL RECONCILIATION

GLEN BURNIE, MD: December 19, 2106 –

The suspension of the Ellicott City, Maryland English teacher two weeks ago for requesting students to look at the fun side of slavery harkens back to the century old Maryland teaching of Drapetomania and Dysaesthesia Aethiopica explaining scientifically why Africans enslaved in Maryland were happiest when enslaved.

(Mount Hebron High School Students Protesting Racism in February 2016)

(Mount Hebron High School Where Teacher Taught "Happy" Enslavement in December 2016)

(Samuel Cartwright Taught Drapetomania in 1851 teaching that African Americans are "spell-bound" by enslavement)

The extremely different ways of thinking about Americans of African-Descent displayed by the teacher and those of a typical 300 year, ten generation African-Descent Maryland resident, cry out for racial reconciliation. Maryland needs to take this reconciliation journey, a journey from ignorance and ignorance of each other to a destination of deep understanding about each other.

This is why Time Travel Tours' new Liberation Tour is needed in Maryland right now! DC Time Travel Tours is a Maryland tourism startup that focuses exclusively on racial reconciliation through deep immersive experiences in Maryland's race relations. There is a great need to learn to understand one another a deep mutuality has always existed between us. The theme of mutuality has always been present but it has been submerged under a sea of injustice and oppression.

The Time Travel Tours Liberation Tour takes the Time Traveler on a journey back to the 1838 escape of Frederick Douglass from the Wye Concentration Camp and the 1849 escape of Harriet Tubman ultimately to Canada. But it goes beyond this to tell the bigger story of how they returned to liberate everyone else and then fight for justice thereafter up to the present day. The tour through history emphasizes love, that is what reconciliation is at its heart, building deep patterns of understanding, relating to one another and living together.

As the suspended teacher demonstrated, we have turned our back on this history for over 100 years. We don't know how to relate in healthy ways. If we had followed through with the early work of mutuality that was so effective in ending enslavement and creating numerous healthy liberation communities across Maryland we would be in a much better place of knowing how to work and live together.

Think of your own relationships, and how complicated it is to create long, creative, sacrificial, exiting, constructive relationships. The mutuality required to create such relationships has been totally shut out of our relationships. We no longer have the infrastructure to know how to do that with each other. This tour takes you back through time to rediscover it.

Reconciliation is an integrative, comprehensive, encompassing term for our needed journey to mutuality. Time travel tours will help us deal with the past, with what has been wrong, healing it, and effecting justice in relation to it by creating relationships for the traveler of mutuality with Maryland's liberation communities. The tour speaks to a future state of an interconnected relationship we have to build with each other.

Who: DC Time Travel Tour's is a new Maryland Tourism Startup founded by Lex, Torrie and Elhan Musta

What: Their inaugural liberation tour fosters Maryland's much needed journey towards racial reconcilliation

When: Saturday, January 21st 2017, 8:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Where: The tour begins at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC

Cost: This event is free for children who can sit on laps and $20 for time travelers who can make reservations at dctimetraveltours.com

Phone: (202) 838-7502

Email: timetraveltoursdc@gmail.com

Twitter: @TTToursDC

Web: dctimetraveltours.com

Reservations: http://timetraveltours.bpt.me/

Trailer about Tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TmFYSw4j2s

Frederick Douglass and the Woman who began African American History Month

2016-12-16T04:56:00.001-08:00

Last night Time Travel Tours attended the annual Christmas Party at the African American Civil War Museum and Memorial in Washington DC. The museum and memorial honor the 209,145 USCT soldiers who fought in the war. African Descent Americans fought in every major campaign and battle during the last two years of the war earning twenty-five Medals of Honor. USCT regiments captured Charleston, the Cradle of Secession, and Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. Lincoln recognized their contributions. He declared, “Without the military help of the black freedmen, the war against the South could not have been won.”

I am not sure if it was the Christmas Spirit but the museum felt very special last night. It could have been the gathering of friends we have seen at many wonderful living historian events around the region. I learned that every Sunday from 130-300 pm at the Museum the public is free to join them in practicing drilling as USCT Living Historians.

Or was it the great racial reconciliation activists of DC present, like Todd Ewing author of "Seeing Heaven in the Face of Black Men."

Or it could have been the Monument and Museum's Founder Dr. Frank Smith who was trained by Bob Moses in Mississippi working in Freedom Summer to end segregation and the disenfranchisement of African Descent Americans. He had hosted the SNAC (Student Nonviolent Action Committee) Christmas party there just the previous night. They are still liberating our Country!

Frank introduced me to an activist who is working on the bicentennial of the birth of Frederick Douglass in February 14 2018. Then I saw the image of Frederick Douglass in the Museum.

And then my heart appreciated where I was. This is just north of where Camp Barker had stood, the first liberation community for so many Americans of African Descent upon Washington DC abolishing enslavement in 1862. The church communities surrounding the borders of this camp still thrive to this day born of their liberation and are well worth visiting to worship along with. This is the land in the heart of YOU street, which was vital to the Birth of the Harlem Renaissance. Georgia Douglass Johnson's famed Saturday Nighters which still resonate to this day hosted by the Museum's Curator Mr. Hari Jones who kept a blue light on outside his home so you would know how to find it. It was YOU street where millionaire African Descent American Mary Church Terrell lived just to the east in Le Droit Park where her residence still stands. Then I began appreciating how Mary Church Terrell a great friend of Mr. Frederick Douglass helped give birth to this museum.

In 1895 she was greatly affected by the passing of Frederick Douglass her friend of 16 years. The funeral procession can be seen in the image below:

She knew him well as she wrote in "I Remember Frederick Douglass,""It is 58 years since Frederick Douglass, the most illustrious Negro leader, and to my mind the greatest of all Americans died of a heart attack in his home, Cedar Hill in Anacostia, D.C. … I knew Frederick Douglass well and was his friend for 16 years…"

Her own brilliance and activism had led her to become the first American of African Descent in charge of the education in the Nation's Capital of its African Descent American children in 1895 that same year. She well recognized how prejudice held down its children and fought to have this position so she could do something about it!

And she did do something! Honoring her great friend Mr. Frederick Douglass two years after his passing, she began having all the city's African-Descent Children honor Mr. Frederick Douglass day in February of every year. On this day songs, speeches, essays would be carefully prepared and presented on subjects relating to African Descent American history (Fradin & Fradin, Fight On!: Mary Church Terrell's Battle for Integration). This holiday would go on for decades and when Carter G. Woodson moved to the city in 1909 he was taught Mary Church Terrell's Black History Month first hand. After years of celebrating it with other DC residents he would describe it as "Negro History Week."

From this position Mary Church Terrell also hired a fellow Oberlin Alumni Mrs. Harriet Gibbs Marshall, to run the city's Music Program in 1900. Having an African American in this position would permit the Children of the city to learn about their own music.

Unfortunately, she was not given enough empowerment to introduce African Descent American music to the school children, so she opened her own School in 1901 in True Reformers Hall (incidentally this was the same building the African American Civil War Museum was originally located - it is the First African American Designed, Funded and Constructed great building in the city). Her father who prepared a Military Regiment for the Civil War in Canada, purchased a permanent site for the school the "Washington Conservatory of Music" at 902 T Street, NW a block from the current Museum site. E.Azallia Hackley, Clarence Cameron White, J. Hilary Taylor, Will Marion Cook, Baha'i Race Reconciliation Leader Louis George Gregory and the future wife of W.E.B. Du Bois Shirley Graham all joined the faculty and the administration of the school. At its height it employed 14 faculty members and enrolled 175 students. Even one of Duke Ellington's teachers, Henry Grant" was taught by the school. Duke Ellington grew up in the shadow of this school.

As a boy, Ellington took piano lessons, though in his autobiography, Music Is My Mistress, he confesses that he did not take to the piano in childhood. Ellington's mother played piano and had encouraged his lessons early on, but it was not until his teenage years, when he began hanging out with other high school and college students as well as pool sharks at Frank's Billiards next door to the Howard Theater, that Ellington really focused on his future musical career. He fell in love with the rolling style and the chatty worldliness of the itinerant piano players, whose style he combined with that of the "academic" pianists such as Henry Grant, with whom he studied. (PBS)

So appreciating the impact of Mary Church Terrell's creation of African American History Month inspired to this action by the life and legacy of Frederick Douglass, I decided to drive past the Washington Conservatory of Music.

Happy Christmas.

On our Liberation Tour you will experience the Civil War contributions of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and the Self-Liberators of the Eastern Shore of Maryland as well as be accompanied on the tour by Captain William Bartlett of the 19th USCT Regiment.

The Unity of Indigenous Nations

2016-12-08T01:08:00.000-08:00

While the Tsenacommacah Confederacy united some 30 Indigenous Nations 400 years ago we are now seeing a much broader unity arising. An example of this is in the recorded video prayer above, there is no word for art in Lakota because, it is prayer. They are honoring the water protectors at Standing Rock and in so doing, they found unity. Supaman explained that "When Taboo (Black Eyed Peas) reaches out to you to make a song with other amazing artists, this is what happens! This song is extra special to me because I was honored to rap my part in the Apsaalooke language (shout out to my brother Wes for helping me out) Stand up! Please share. A'ho!" Taboo echoed this sentiment, ""My tribe is Crow, and our traditional enemies are the Lakhotas, and they shared a [peace] pipe together at [Standing Rock], they haven't done that in a long time."

What could bring about such unity? Well an 1851 treaty relationship was set up between the Lakota and the successor state of America. It is shown below:

You can see that the treaty has been broken. But even the initial treaty was flawed for they ignored Laokta Indigenous Nation law and attempted to find signers for a treaty when the Lakota made decisions by consensus. The treaty was broken straight away by the invaders who traveled off their routes and through the Lakota nation. Ten years later gold was discovered and like the black gold of today, all bets were off, all treaties ignored and the invading army could plunder. In 1868 another treaty was forced with yet smaller lands. Then in 1874 more gold was found and once again the invaders invaded the Lakota Nation. Thus the government worked to better confined the Lakota to smaller lands and created the Standing Rock Reservation in 1875.

Here is an image of an early Council meeting at Standing Rock:

Unfortunately supplies were scarce at Standing Rock so Sitting Bull and other leaders began hunting and living outside of the lands. On June 25, 1876, the successor state attacked an encampment that included many women, children, and old people. Following relentless unprincipled assults on women and children, by the winter of 1877 all the Lakota returned to Standing Rock. The Lakota were now confined to a reservation and were regarded as prisoners of war by the successor state. In the meantime the reservation had shrunk considerably. The successor state took the Black Hills from the Lakota and extinguishing their hunting rights in the un-ceded territory. Upon hearing of the annexation of the Black Hills, Henry Whipple, the government appointed chairman of the commission that was unsuccessful in obtaining consent of the Sioux to relinquish these lands and rights, said, “I know of no other instance in history where a great nation has so shamefully violated its oath.” The commission’s report to Congress elaborates with this statement and underscores the commission’s lack of power in the process:

Our country must forever bear the disgrace and
suffer the retribution of its wrongdoing. Our
children’s children will tell the sad story in
hushed tones, and wonder how their fathers dared
so to trample on justice and trifle with God.
(BIA, Annual Report, 1876)

The successor state, remained uncontent and in 1883 the government issued a set of so-called Indian Offenses that strictly forbade all traditional ceremonies which aimed straight at the center of Dakota and Lakota spiritual life. All traditional lifeways and ceremonies were banned by law. These included give-aways, the sun dance, rites of purification, and social dancing, to name a few. These rights were only recently returned in 1978. And President Jimmy Carter stated that the Indigenous Nations must be consulted before their sacred sites are destroyed, which they are not doing for this pipeline. President Jimmy Carter said:

In the past, Government agencies and departments have on occasion denied Native Americans access to particular sites and interfered with religious practices and customs where such use conflicted with Federal regulations. In many instances, the Federal officials responsible for the enforcement of these regulations were unaware of the nature of traditional native religious practices and, consequently, of the degree to which their agencies interfered with such practices.

Not content with religious breakup of the Lakota, they attacked the nation as well with successive land grabs:

There was organized resistance to this land grab at Standing rock! The Dakota and Lakota at Standing Rock overwhelmingly opposed the reduction of their reservation. Appointed spokesmen, Matȟó Watȟákpe , Phizí, and Mahto Ocinsica spoke eloquently in opposition to the Sioux Bill. However, the commissioners, aided by Agent McLaughlin, applied unrelenting pressure to the Dakota and Lakota of Standing Rock to get their assent to the break-up of the Great Sioux Reservation. Sitting Bull, though not an appointed spokesman, openly opposed the land cession and urged the people not to be intimidated and not to sign away the land.

In 1889 the Lakota at Standing Rock were in poor health, starving, and were witnessing relentless assaults on their Lakota way of life. The 1889 land grab by the successor state accentuated the grievances of the Lakota. Sitting Bull correctly predicted the successor state would not honor its promises. Against this backdrop, word of the Ghost Dance was spreading among the Lakota during the summer and fall of 1889. The Ghost Dance was a pan-tribal religious movement originating from the vision of a Paiute man in Nevada named Wovoka.

The successor state upset that their 1882 religion ban was broken by the Ghost Dance and that Sitting Bull was opposing further land thievery assassinated Sitting Bull at Standing Rock on December 15, 1890.

Fourteen days later the successor state expanded their butchery at Čhaŋkpé Ópi Wakpála to the south of Standing Rock. At the Čhaŋkpé Ópi Wakpála Massacre of December 29 1890, 300 men, women, children and elderly were assassinated.

After Sitting Bull’s death and the massacre at Čhaŋkpé Ópi Wakpála , Standing Rock Lakota were forced onto small plots of land by 1906. As always, farming was problematic on the Great Plains; Standing Rock farmers were challenged by drought, grasshoppers, and poor land. Standing rock children were removed from their families for years at a time to boarding schools. Parents who objected to sending their children to boarding schools were dealt with harshly. Often food was withheld and fathers were jailed until they relented and put their children in school. One such school in Carlisle Pennsylvania has graves to those who died alone far away from their families to this day, had a philosophy:

“We accept the watch word. There is no good
Indian but a dead Indian. Let us by education and
patient effort kill the Indian and save the man.”

Over the years there has been a real struggle to hold onto the land base as well as maintain the culture, lifeways, spiritual traditions, and language. So, even as invaders continued to rob land and invade the boundaries of the Standing Rock Reservation, outward changes came about in the lifestyle of the Lakota people—now the people lived in log cabins, they wore “citizen’s dress,” and their children attended schools. But high value was still put on maintaining language and through language maintaining those unique qualities that identified the people as Lakota.

By the late 1920s Standing Rock lands were dangerously overgrazed. A severe drought had caused widespread crop failure. Livestock was wiped out and the land was severely eroded. The once lush and bountiful lands of the Plains, after 50 years of federal management, were a barren, desolate, and dusty land. The Great Depression forced some of the Standing Rock people to sell their allotments to survive, and many were again forced to accept rations or die of starvation.

In 1914 the tribal council adopted a constitutional form of government to make decisions on a local level. Today Standing Rock is governed by a tribal council elected from eight districts on the reservation.

In 1948, the Army Corps of Engineers began construction of the Oahe Dam. Despite intense opposition from the Standing Rock Lakota Tribal Council, 160,889 acres of prime agricultural and rangelands were flooded, and 25 percent of the reservation populace was forced to move to other parts of the reservation. The impact on the reservation has been significant both in economic and psychological terms. The same Army Corps that was pushing through today for black gold.

As we approach the 126th anniversary of Sitting Bull's assassination next week, we can see that the need to protect their water was established in their 1851 treaty and well before then by their Indigenous sovereignty of these lands and waters.

Perhaps in the New Year will be a realization of Wovoka's vision as unity brings the removal of the black gold invaders:

On January 1 1889 he had a prophetic vision during the solar eclipse which entailed the resurrection of our ancestors and the removal of the invaders from Standing Rock. In order to make the vision come true, he taught that we must live righteously and perform a circular dance which was called the Ghost Dance. Wovoka's teachings spread quickly among many Native American peoples.

Here at Time Travel Tours, we believe a knowledge of history can help with reconciliation today, as it helps us cross the great gap between of knowledge separating peoples.

There should be no confusion about Easton's courthouse monuments

2016-12-05T01:29:00.001-08:00

As local and national governmental and non-governmental organizations contemplate decisions regarding Easton's courthouse monuments, the public debate is increasingly around one issue: Are the 81 kidnappers and craddle robbers worthy of honor in America today?

The pirates statue was thrust into the spotlight by the first African Descent American being honored in front of the Talbot County Court House along side them. One worked for and won the liberation of the imprisoned half of the Eastern Shore the other gave their life to keep them and their children's children confined in concentration camps. One returned to address the liberated in 1878 in the Talbot County Courthouse to encourage and uplift them giving them his famous "Self Made Man" Speech. The other worked day and night to keep the liberated in as close to an enslaved state as possible only ratifying the 15th amendment providing them a right to vote in 1972, over a hundred years after their liberty was won. As a consequence, the standard of what is honorable began appearing in multiple articles, tweets and blogs.

Since the Easton government’s endorsement of the pirate statue, there has been growing questioning about the city's intentions regarding justice. The issue appears poised to dominate the next city election as many office holders have pledged to endorse and adopt the pirate standard of justice.

Unfortunately, the public debate about honor has been confused and conflicted. Honor is at once demonized as a cultural threat to be feared or embraced as illustrating a commitment to social justice as a basic right.

As long as the confusion lasts, the future more likely holds episodes like that of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina than relative success stories like that of the Easton 2011 Frederick Douglass Returns unveiling ceremony.

We need to shift the dialogue.

Three basic understandings must inform our public discourse about honor.

First, honor is already an established standard of the US Constitution. A daughter of the Eastern Shore Liberation community, Gloria Richardson, whose family had suffered concentration camp imprisonment on the Eastern Shore, whose Grand father Herbert M. St. Clair was the first American of African Descent to be elected to any office on the Eastern Shore in the late 1800s, led the 1963 Civil Rights demands of the Eastern Shore. Aside from many sons and daughters of the prison wardens and jailers calling her an "outsider", they criticized her for advising her fellow citizens to boycott the "vote" on wether to give African Descent Americans Civil Rights or not. She refused to vote, because, their humanity was beyond question. This wasn’t new; it had been present in the 15th amendment of 1870, even if Maryland would not ratify that amendment until 1972.

Honor is part of the US Constitution. We need to stop pretending it is new. We should have long ago started talking about how to implement it.

Second, our economy cannot afford delay in sorting out what honor means and how to implement. In the Eastern Shore we have a great opportunity to make the full use of the potential of all its citizens or to continue subjecting business to the massive risk and uncertainty which is created when half our citizens have to have their full potential cancelled.

This reflects the basic fact that honor isn’t some abstract legal concept — it is a real interest in justice that entitles the liberation communities of the Eastern Shore to the full economic benefit of the markets and opportunities.

Simply stated, honor's relationship to the economy is like a building storm — every time we misuse people without honor, the storm strengthens and increases in force.

As in real life, you never simply ignore the storm. If you do, the consequences are massive, perhaps irreversible. The smartest course is to take action to mitigate exposure and damage. Honor is the clear, legally endorsed path to facing the building storm of honor. Rather than being feared, honor should be embraced and aggressively implemented, as the solution to a basic common challenge.

Third, in Easton we have extensive experience of distinct communities — with distinct churches, civil organizations, and potential marriage partners — having to structure how to align and harmonize their respective decisions for matters to move forward.

While different language is used, this is intrinsic to the operative model of human relations between European and African descent micro-communities that is the functional reality on many matters in Easton.

What is different now is that it is Frederick Douglass is now the one standing tall on our most sacred ground. Our struggle with this says more about our society’s need to come to terms with Easton’s concentration camp past, lingering racism and need to achieve recognition and reconciliation, than the idea that honor is something still in debate.

What these points illustrate is that we are having the wrong conversation. We should not be debating whether honor is relevant or necessary. Rather, we should be focused on how we implement it collaboratively and constructively. Implementing honor will require a host of mechanisms — agreements, policies, protocols and new structures and processes.

We should get on with the work of building those, rather than endless, and ultimately obsolete, political debates.

To complete this reconciliation, perhaps it should not be a discussion about the pirate statue but perhaps it should be about the 9000 Liberation Boys who escaped their concentration camps and fought for and won the freedom of their families from enslavement forevermore as United States Soldiers serving in the United States Colored Troops.

Happily Easton's own Frederick Douglass speaks from the past in words so current that we must decry the education system that prevented all of Easton's citizens from having carefully studied his words years ago. On May 30th 1871 speaking at Arlington he spoke of honor:

"We are sometimes asked, in the name of patriotism, to forget the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life and those who struck to save it, those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty and justice.

I am no minister of malice. I would not strike the fallen. I would not repel the repentant; but may my “right hand forget her cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,” if I forget the difference between the parties to that terrible, protracted, and bloody conflict.

If we ought to forget a war which has filled our land with widows and orphans; which has made stumps of men of the very flower of our youth; which has sent them on the journey of life armless, legless, maimed and mutilated; which has piled up a debt heavier than a mountain of gold, swept uncounted thousands of men into bloody graves and planted agony at a million hearthstones — I say, if this war is to be forgotten, I ask, in the name of all things sacred, what shall men remember?

The essence and significance of our devotions here to-day are not to be found in the fact that the men whose remains fill these graves were brave in battle. If we met simply to show our sense of bravery, we should find enough on both sides to kindle admiration. In the raging storm of fire and blood, in the fierce torrent of shot and shell, of sword and bayonet, whether on foot or on horse, unflinching courage marked the rebel not less than the loyal soldier.

But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause. We must never forget that victory to the rebellion meant death to the republic. We must never forget that the loyal soldiers who rest beneath this sod flung themselves between the nation and the nation’s destroyers. If today we have a country not boiling in an agony of blood, like France, if now we have a united country, no longer cursed by the hell-black system of human bondage, if the American name is no longer a by-word and a hissing to a mocking earth, if the star-spangled banner floats only over free American citizens in every quarter of the land, and our country has before it a long and glorious career of justice, liberty, and civilization, we are indebted to the unselfish devotion of the noble army who rest in these honored graves all around us."

Slavery to the White House: The USCT Heritage of First Lady Michelle Obama

2015-01-13T21:31:00.000-08:00

On January 6, 2015 the African American Civil War Museum announced as part of a great expansion, that the museum will use $3.4 mm to add three new exhibits, a multitude of new artifacts and a state of the art theater to enhance the visitor experience. One of these exhibits, "Slavery to the White House: The USCT Heritage of First Lady Michelle Obama," will explore the story of two of the First Lady's ancestors, Jerry Sutton/Sutter 55th USCT and Ceaser Cohen, 128th USCT, both of which are listed with their respective Regiments on the African American Civil War Memorial Wall of Honor at Vermont Avenue and U Streets in the Nation's Capital.

Just days earlier, on December 31, 2014, Mayor Vincent Gray announced his selection of Roadside Development Team to redevelop the historic Grimke School site in the U street corridor, which includes the plan to double the size of the museum.

Author Rachel Swarns brough Michelle Obama's heritage to light in "American Tapestry," a book about the ancestors of the First Lady.

The mission of the African American Civil War Museum is to preserve and tell the stories of the United States Colored Troops and African American involvement in the American Civil War. They utilize a rich collection of primary resources, educational programming and technology to create a meaningful learning experience focused on this pivotal time in American history.

If you have not visited the Museum and Monument before there is the following unparalleled opportunity:

Grand Review and Parade, May 15 - 17, 2015

Three main civil war sesquicentennial closing events in Washington, DC in 2015

1. The Lincoln Second Inaugural in March 7, 2015

2. The Lincoln Funeral March in April 18 - 21, 2015

3. The Grand Review and Parade on May 17, 2015

Calling all regiments of USCT: Grand Review and Parade May 17, 2015

All USCT Regiments are asked to begin preparing to join 6 - 10,000 regular re-enactors for the Grand Review Parade on May 17, 2015 by recruiting heavily to increase your ranks and by supporting the "Rally on the High Ground" to revivify the memorial in Washington.

Calling All USCT Descendants: Grand Review and Parade, May 17, 2015

Your individual registration covers your attendance to any of the planned workshops that will be hosted, entrance to the Civil War Camp Barker Experience, The forum at the US Capitol, and the Candle light Vigil at the African American Civil War Memorial. Tickets to the Camp Barker Prayer Breakfast and the Officer's Ball are sold separately. Click here to register!

United Way & Combined Federal Campaign - United Way Campaign # 9506
Combined Federal Campaign # 45509. Click here for more ways to support the museum.

Contact Time Travel Tours DC timetraveltoursdc@gmail.com to live out the Underground Railroad to the White House Living History Experience and visit First Lady Michelle Obama's ancestors monument to their Civil War Service.

Harriet Tubman's Freedom Church

2014-09-25T21:43:00.001-07:00

While Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross in 1822 on a forced labor concentration camp in Dorchester County Maryland, she enjoyed freedom in Canada. The 1850 Drapetomania law made Philadelphia unsafe for her as a headquarters for her Underground Railroad work, so she moved to worship and live in St. Catherines, Canada (pictured above). Harriet Tubman made her first trip to St. Catharines with eleven freedom seekers in December 1851. The Salem Chapel, British Methodist Episcopal (BME) Church was her place of worship. Over the next decade, from St. Catharines and a few locations in the US, Harriet Tubman would return mostly to Dorchester and Caroline counties in the State of Maryland and either guide or give escape instructions to those held in concentration camps, including her immediate family members.

Salem Church not only still holds worship services, many of the freedom seekers children still attend services there and were responsible for building this beautiful memorial to her. Amongst them is, Harper Wells who is a direct descendent of a freedom seeker who arrived in Canada's Niagara Region in 1850. Her great, great grandfather, Jack Black, fled forced labor and captivity in Kentucky with his brother and nine-year-old sister. They hiked thousands of kilometres alone by night, slogged through swamps and swam across rivers. They eventually crossed the Niagara River near Buffalo and settled along the northern shore at Ontario's Fort Erie.

"It was absolutely amazing," Harper Wells says, "to look at Fort Erie's 1851 census and there was (my great, great grandfather's) name."

With no money or means of transportation, many freedom seekers travelled in darkness, simply following the light of the North Star and searching for signposts -- trees bearing crude charcoal or mud markings that pointed the way to freedom. The Underground Railroad system included a number of code words and terms used to keep operations covert: "Stockholders" referred to abolitionists who believed in freedom for all; "human merchandise" meant runaway slaves and refugees; a "depot" was a safe stopping point (safe house) along the way; and "the other side" referred to the north side of the Niagara River in Canada, where concentration camps were prohibited since 1834.

Harper Wells paints a vivid picture of Harriet Tubman, a freedom seeker who settled in the Niagara area, but returned covertly to the Southern U.S. an incredible 19 times to guide an estimated 300 people to freedom. While visiting the church attended by Tubman, Harper Wells mentions the bounty issued on this courageous woman -- $40,000 to the bounty hunter who could cure her of Drapetomania, said to be the highest ever put on a freedom seeker.

Known as "Moses", Tubman used the Eastern Shore, Philadelphia line that ran through New York State. She worked closely with notable UGRR operatives such as; Thomas Garrett, William Still, Stephen Myers, Gerrit Smith, Jermaine Loguen, Fredrick Douglass and others. When coming into Canada, she often crossed the border at the Suspension Bridge in Niagara Falls, NY. Once through customs she made her way to St. Catharines. This town was firmly established as the last stop of the Philadelphia UGRR line and Hiram Wilson was the primary agent.

In 1860, Harriet Tubman helped establish the Fugitive Aid Society in St. Catharines and served on its executive committee. This group assisted the freedom seekers as they arrived.

Years later, answering why she chose St. Catharines as her final escape destination after the passing of the US 1850 Drapetomania laws, Harriet Tubman said, "I wouldn’t trust Uncle Sam with my people no longer; I brought them all clear off to Canada".

In honour of her heroic deeds and her international connection to St. Catharines, Harriet Tubman was designated a Person of National Significance by the Government of Canada in 2005. The commemorative plaque was erected on the grounds of the Salem Chapel, BME Church she attended.

Contact Time Travel Tours DC to live out the Underground Railroad to the White House Living History Experience and visit the birthplace of Harriet Tubman.