Robert: Massa Sharecropper I brought you those chicken toes as you asked…
Massa Sharecropper: Thank you, Robert… Did you bring the chicken toenails too?
Robert: Yes suh.. they are in this bag…
Massa Sharecropper: Let’s see them. They sure look kinda funny Robert. Hey, wait a minute!! Chickens don’t have flat wide toenails!! (Robert starts running…) Come back here you varmint!! These are yo toenails!!
So although the country faced depression in 1920 and 1921, by the time the 30th president, Calvin Coolidge, came into office in 1923 things were looking a little brighter. It was the period known as the Roaring Twenties! The Roaring Twenties for white Americans was.. well roaring. Between 1920 and 1929 U.S. wealth more than doubled. Per capita, we were the wealthiest country in the world at the time. This came about mainly because of two things… the automobile and airline industry. Before then people mainly were stuck where they were born. The ramification of coming from a horse and buggy society to a motorized community was staggering. Our cities swelled and prospered over immense interstate commerce. Yep, it was on and popping… for most of us. However, there were two sectors of the economy that did not do as well. Farming and coal mining stagnated. Now while there were not that many black coal miners, there were a whole bunch of black farmers. I call them farmers, but they were better known as sharecroppers. With all that money flowing around, people were growing everything. Too bad they couldn’t grow money. Anyway, that led to overproduction and falling prices.
Leroy: Give me a cartoon of watermelons…
Clerk: That’ll be 25 cents…
Leroy: What?!! I can get a cartoon of watermelons and 5 chicken toes for that at Joe’s!!
Clerk: Well let me write down the directions so you know how to get there…
Yesiree, with falling prices and dwindling resources, besieged by racial violence and Jim Crow, African Americans down south were in it up to their necks. Fortunately, in 1923 Calvin Coolidge was elected president, and with him some relief from the blistering racism of the Roaring Twenties.
Our criteria:
10 – You can sit next to the table and watch while we play a couple of hands of bid whisk.
9 – You are able to use the word “Bro” in front of us.”
8 – You can bring something to the barbecue and we’ll put it on the table with the other food.
7 – We will wave at you if we see you on the street.
6 – We won’t side-eye or sass if you bring a watermelon to our family dinner.
5 – You can leave with a little bit of your dignity after saying “My Nigga.”
4 – If we hear you calling for help, we will call the police after we have charged our phone.
3 – We will count to three before we let the dogs out if you come to our house.
2 – We won’t pee on your statue during daylight hours.
1 – Faque Off!!
Calvin Coolidge – 10
Elected 1923 -1929
You can sit next to the table and watch while we play a couple of hands of bid whisk.
Im not sure why there are not more memorials and statues dedicated to Calvin Coolidge in black neighborhoods. When he came into office in 1923, the FBI estimated that there were 7 million… “that’s million” Ku Klux Klan members. There were about 110 million Americans in 1923, so roughly almost.. not quite.. but almost 10 percent of Americans were Kluxers. Coolidge hated the Ku Klux Klan. Now that’s saying something since thousands of Klan members marched in front of the White House during his administration in 1925 handing out souvenir hoods and rebel flags. As far as anyone can tell, he didn’t hire any to serve in his administration, although most likely they were already embedded in the federal government thanks to Massa Woodrow Wilson who left office in 1921. Now we know that during the 1920s, the lynching of African Americans was epidemic, but during Calvin’s administration, lynchings actually decreased and millions left the Klan. Now you might think that Coolidge was responsible for people leaving the Klan in droves because of his stance against them, and maybe he did have something to do with it, but the main reason was because of a dude named David Stephenson. Stephenson is thought to be the most successful hooded rat up until that time. His downfall? He tortured, raped, and murdered a white woman in 1925. They put his ass in jail for 25 years. When he got out in 1950, they hit him with another 10 years for soliciting a minor in Minnesota. Whenever I am feeling down, I like to put on my dashiki and place a bag of popcorn in the microwave to enjoy while I watch “Cross Of Fire,” on Freevee. It’s the story of his life. I especially like the part where he is hiding under the bunk in his cell drinking vodka and they bring him the news that he’s not going to be pardoned. Meanwhile, folks outside the jail are yelling for him to be strung up by both of them from the tallest tree they can find. Then he… well I’m not going to ruin it for you but like I said.. if you ever are feeling some kinda way… “Cross Of Fire.” So let’s get back to Calvin… In his first State of the Union address, he spoke of the civil rights of African Americans;
“Numbered among our population are some 12,000,000 colored people. Under our Constitution, their rights are just as sacred as those of any other citizen. It is both a public and a private duty to protect those rights. The Congress ought to exercise all its powers of prevention and punishment against the hideous crime of lynching, of which the negroes are by no means the sole sufferers, but for which they furnish a majority of the victims.”
On June 6, 1924, Calvin Coolidge became the first sitting president to speak at a black university, Howard University. His graduation speech was entitled ” The Progress Of A People.” In it, he talked about the accomplishments “colored” people have contributed since the Civil War. Now saying the word “colored” and “Civil War,” in the same sentence was some dangerous shat, and for real, for real could only be said in front of “colored” audiences. “Colored audiences,”… seeing the word colored in the history books was something I use to equate with racism. However, it was not. We used the word colored to refer to ourselves back then. When whites used it, it was kinda like a term of respect, because a lot of white folks back then were still using the “N-word” when referring to us. It was just the way they talked. Certain dialects were more annoying than others when they used the n-word… If you are in NY, then they would call you a “nigg@r”… by the time you got to South Carolina… it would change to “nagg@r” and deep down in the south where there be hanging.. it was “naga!” So yeah, colored was a little bit more respectful. I still remember being called colored. Then it changed to negro in the 60s… to black in the 70s and finally to African American around the 80s. Nowadays I fluctuate between black and African American. I’m usually black when I get pissed off at some racist that went there, and African American the rest of the time. Anywho, Calvin Coolidge was as one author put “devoid of prejudice,” and I agree. In addition to African American civil rights, he also was a champion of Native Americans’ civil rights, signing the Indian Citizenship Act (ICA). Now Ima tell you this is one reason they don’t want CRT taught in schools… did you know that before they enacted the ICA, if you were a Native American and left the reservation, you were no longer an American citizen. Step off that reservation and you were a bloodthirsty savage… yep, they got real with it then. Coolidge also was a champion of immigration defending it in a speech declaring that immigration was a “harmonious” benefit for the country.
Calvin Coolidge returned to Vermont at the end of his administration where he died on January 5, 1933, at the age of 60. He is buried at Plymouth Notch Cemetary in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. Pull up a chair good friend and tell me what you think about this hand…
Home Sweet Home
Enslavia: Pull up in this yard Arthur… This is where my cousin Yip lives…
Yip: Is that Enslavia pulling up here in Blackity…!? Well, it sure enough is!! Hey, cuzin!!!
Enslavia: Well ain’t you a sight for sore eyes!! Looks like you’ve been putting away mo than yo fair share of Aunt Yap’s pine needle and mountain beaver stew!! Come on and give me a hug!! This here is Arthur… we be running away from the law… and need yo help…
Yip: Well ya’ll must be tired. Let’s go get them coats off and have some of that pine cone and mountain beaver stew you were talking about!! Then we will see what we can do…
(A little later)
Aunt Yap: It sure is good to see you again Enslavia… How’s your mom?
Enslavia: She doing good… only got 97 more years…
Aunt Yap: That’s good… Well, ya’ll pull up to the table, and let’s get into that pine needle and mountain beaver stew!!
Enslavia: Here Arthur.. let me fix your plate…
Arthur: Thanks.. I’ll just have some of the mountain beaver and rice… I don’t want any pine needles…
Enslavia: You so silly… ain’t no mountain beaver in this stew… we just call it that because we have to fight them for the pine needles… besides … it sounds more appetizing than just “pine needle stew…” (Everyone at the table starts laughing)
Arthur: What!? Okay… I’ll just take some rice then…
Enslavia: Okay.. but that’s not rice…
Arthur: Not rice? What is it??
Enslavia: Wood shavings… folks down here can’t afford rice… here try some…?
Arthur: I’m sorry… you know something, now that I think about it, I’m really not that hungry…
Aunt Yap: Most city folks I invite to eat at my table say the same thing you just said… they not hungry… that is until I show them this…
(Five minutes later…)
Enslavia: Arthur would you like me to put some more pine needle stew on your… uh…rice?
Arthur: Yes… (Crunch!! Crunch !! Crunch!!) please…
Herbert Hoover: 5
Elected 1929 – 1933
You can leave with a little bit of your dignity after saying “My Nigga.
Unfortunately for Herbert Hoover, the Great Depression will always be synonymous with his name. So usually when people think of the Great Depression, they think of it in terms of the United States. They think it was something that happened here. In reality, although it started in the States, the Great Depression was the first worldwide economic depression. More than a quarter of the industrialized countries’ workforces were out of jobs. Here in America, no group was immune from the effects of the worldwide economic disaster. However, African Americans had less of a financial cushion to fall back on. Okay, we didn’t have any cushion to fall back on. Since we were the last hired, we were the first fired and that didn’t mean all that much, since most of the jobs relegated to blacks were menial positions. Still having money for chicken toes was better than nothing.
Clerk: Boy I was looking out that window on the 60th floor and I saw some dirt on the ledge… We pay you a lot of our hard-earned money to keep this place clean… not many boys like you have a decent job making 10¢ a week… We should be giving that money to a red-blooded gawd-fearing white man!! Now if you wanna keep putting that chicken toe on yo table, then I wanna see a nigra hanging down from the roof on a rope with a dustpan in his hand singing Swannee River!!
Black Janitor thinking: How about if I swing down from the roof singing Swannee River and shove this dustpan up your dusty….
Clerk: Boy did you hear me!!
Black Janitor: Yes Suh!! Right away suh…
Yep, things were mighty tough for us during that time. In 1932 unemployment in the African American community reached 50 percent! In Atlanta, the unemployment rate for us was 70 percent! At the same time, unemployment rates in the white community were at 25 percent. Earlier I was joking about a sharecropper named Robert, and I wasn’t far off the truth about times being hard. Although he chose to stay and wait it out, hundreds of thousands of black sharecroppers left the South because of debt and persecution in what is called the Great Migration. The Great Migration started around 1916 but accelerated during the Great Depression. I thought I did an article about the great migration, but I can’t seem to find it. We will definitely get back to this because it is such an integral part of who we are. Fully one-third of all the African American living in the South left to go to cities in the North, Mid-West, and West. We talking about millions of black folks! Anywho, although there were some significant achievements for blacks under the Hoover administration, such as he appointed more African Americans to federal positions than the two previous presidents, he also removed them from leadership positions in the Republican Party. He did this to appease the Southern voters and to arrest Democratic political dominance in the South. I mean if you are trying to woo southern voters, you can’t send black Republican leaders down to Dixie while they still got the smell of Atlanta burning in their nostrils. Some black leaders backed this all-white approach assuring others that it was only temporary. However, many of us were outraged! With the South rhetorically ordering “moes” to swing off rooftops and clean ledges while whistling Dixie, well black people started looking at Republicans in a different light. Sure Lincoln had freed our enslaved ancestors, but what have you done for us lately? The plight of African Americans during the Great Depression brought on a new activism. In 1935 Mary McLeod Bethune organized the Council Of Negro Women, in 1936 the first meeting of the National Negro Congress took place at Howard University, a coalition of diverse African-American organizations. In 1937, young black men formed the National Negro Youth Congress which went about registering voters and organizing boycotts. We were tired.. we were hungry and we were mad. For the first time in nearly seventy years of loyalty to the party of Lincoln and his Republicans, we turned to new leadership in our struggle for equality and civil rights. The man we turned to was Franklin D. Roosevelt and he was a Democrat…
Mr. Uglys
Private: It sure is good getting outta that hospital. Now, I want you to take me back over there… I got some scores to settle!
Driver: Suh, you can’t even cross yo legs yet… They said if they see you again at their door, they said that folks gonna be flying flags at half mast…
Private: Oohh.. I’m so scared… We gonna make a stop before we get there… Take me to Mr. Uglys!!
Driver: Mr. Uglys!! Folks don’t go there unless it’s really serious!
Private: That’s right.. and this is really serious! I’m not leaving there until they tell me where Enslavia is!! … and I hope they don’t know!
(Arrive at Mr. Uglys)
Mr. Ugly: Hello sir what can I do for you?
Private: I’m fixing to go over some varmint’s house and settle some scores!! What do you have for me?
Mr. Ugly: Well that depends. We have PU’s on sale.. and then we have the exclusive UWI’s… which are a bit more expensive.
Private: Hmm… What’s the difference?
Mr. Ugly: Well there is a great deal of difference!! If you just going out to make a statement then the PU is for you. You just going out to be “Plain Ugly…” That’s what the PU stands for… it’s the usual thing… cap a few asses and leave…
Private: Hmm… I wanna be more serious!!
Mr. Ugly: Then you need a UWI!! When folks see a UWI, they know you mean business!! That’s the real gangster shat!!
Private: What does the UWI stand for?
Mr. Ugly: That stands for “Ugly With It.” That means you going out there and you gonna get “Ugly With It!!” That’s the shit that ends up on the nightly news and the anchors start crying!!
Private: Well then that’s what I want!! I wanna get Ugly With It!!
Mr. Ugly: Okay, very well… let’s wrap this up Mr. Private… (ring, ring, ring,) One moment… I have to get this… ‘Yes… Okay… The pack you ordered… Yes, I can leave them there… Okay see you later…’ I’m sorry Mr. Private… well here you are sir, the proud owner of a UWI… I would get some practice in before taking that out… it shoots up to 250 rounds a clip… but the downside is it takes a couple of minutes to reload… but who is going to need to reload after shooting 250 caps… right?
Private: Yeah right!! Thanks! Okay driver, first to the range, and then I’m going over there and get real “Ugly With It!!”
(Later…)
Private: I’m backkkkk….. Come on out you cowards!!… I want you to meet my liddle friend!!! (Private unleashes a barage of bullets… the windows shatter… the door falls off and the house catches fire!!) I’m going around back in case they try to escape!!! Driver bring me another round of clips!! (Private rushes around back to cut them off!!)
Meanwhile…
Mr. Ugly: Hello? Yes, this is Mr. Ugly… I’m calling to see if you got that pack of Siberian Wolf Dogs..? You did… What? Someone tried to break into your house through your backyard!!? You had to let them out on him!! Oh, my gawd!! I hope everything is alright!! Oh… you see one of them with a gun in its mouth… Well, I’m so glad things worked out… Why yes we do… I can drop a shovel off on my way home… You’re quite welcome! Yes, I’ll see you later.. thanks for your business! Goodbye…
Franklin D Roosevelt – (8)
Elected 1933 -1945
You can bring something to the barbecue and we’ll put it on the table with the other food.
Franklin D Roosevelt served an unprecedented 4 terms as president of the United States. He led the nation through the Great Depression and World War II. Not many Americans will ever forget two of the most memorable quotes in political history when get said during his State of the Union speech at the start of the Great Depression, ” We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” and then again with the attack of Pearl Harbor, when he said, “Yesterday, December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States Of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the naval and air forces of the empire of Japan.” Now as far as blacks go, FDR opened up opportunities we hadn’t seen since the days of Reconstruction. The first thing he did was end Prohibition. So Prohibition banned the sale, manufacture, and transportation of liquor. It’s hard to believe it but we were legally dry from 1920 until 1933. In those thirteen years, prohibition made more millionaires than Bernie Madoff. Of course, Bernie’s millionaires were just on paper, but I’m just saying people made a lot of dough selling illegal hooch. In the late 1920s, Al Capone made 100 million dollars a year from liquor distribution, bars also known as speakeasies, and prostitution. That’s 1.4 billion dollars in today’s money! I’m not going to even talk about JFK’s father… because if I do the FBI will be so far up mine… I’ll be lacing up my nose. Naw, I ain’t fuquing with that… So yeah FDR ended Prohibition in his first 100 days. Now when we talk about the New Deal and FDR, many people think it was just one program. Actually, there were two New Deals. It was the second New Deal that helped out African Americans. He created the “WPA,” the Works Project Administration. The WPA provided jobs for unemployed Americans… and as I told you earlier, no one was more unemployed than us. WPA projects weren’t allowed to compete with private industry, so they focused on building things like post offices, bridges, schools, highways, and parks. Tens of thousands of black men were hired to work on these projects. He also created my favorite… Social Security.” He created the NLRB, “National Labor Relations Board, which helped unions prevent businesses from treating their workers unfairly. It was the New Deal that turned tens of millions of black Republicans into Democrats. We flourished under FDR. We owned homes, cars, and businesses, and for the first time a burgeoning black middle class. Well maybe “middle class” is taking it too far… it was probably more of a “lower middle-upper lower class…” but still it was better than where we were. He once said to a crowd at Madison Square Garden in New York, “The forces of ‘organized money’ are unanimous in their hate for me… and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match, [and] I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces have met their master.” Yes, they really didn’t like FDR. I’d go so far as to say if given a chance to string one of us up from the tallest tree they could find… they would settle for FDR hanging from a light fixture in the basement. It was FDR that cemented the base of our civil rights coalition together, by bringing African Americans, the white working class, and left-wing intellectuals to the same table. The foundation still holds today. That’s not to say that there were no problems, but what they did agree on was that government intervention was good for the people, the economy, and the nation. Now while he did all these things for us, I couldn’t give him a ten. That’s because FDR had a dark side. For one thing, he signed the National Housing Act of 1934. The law said that FHA underwriting standards to qualify for mortgage insurance had a whites-only requirement excluding all racially mixed neighborhoods or white neighborhoods in proximity to black neighborhoods. This one provision kept neighborhoods segregated for almost 50 years until the Fair Housing Act was signed in 1968. It also perpetuated redlining. Redlining is when investors refuse to invest in neighborhoods classified as hazardous or that have significant numbers of racial and ethnic minorities. It was called redlining because they would draw a red line around areas that investors should not invest in. Roosevelt also deported over one million Mexicans out of the country, although sixty percent of them were born here. They were the only group excluded from the benefits of the New Deal. Remember the internment camps of World War II? That was Roosevelt too. Not even 24hrs after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt was rounding up Japanese Americans and locking them away as potential spies saboteurs, and traitors. Not only that, when ultra-fiend Adolf Hitler was killing Jews by the millions, Roosevelt refused them immigration to the US. Do you know where he suggested that they go… to Africa. I don’t know where he got that from.. but yeah, he told them to go to Africa. So although he was a godsend for African Americans, he did have prejudices. Still I have given him an 8 because he planted the seeds that propelled my family and millions of other African Americans closer to life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
In Other News
Enslavia: Hey Aunt Yap… Whatcha laughing about?
Aunt Yap: I’m just reading about this fool that tried to break into somebody’s house and they let some kinda man-eating wolf dogs out on him…
Enslavia: Really!!
Aunt Yap: Yes… they say his hand was still attached to the gun when they pulled it out of the dog’s mouth… The commissioner says he worked for him and they are going to fly the flags at half-mast tomorrow…
Next Week ” By The Numbers -Civil Rights”
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