{"product_id":"my-face-is-black-is-true-isbn-9780307277053","title":"My Face Is Black Is True","description":"\u003cp\u003eAcclaimed historian Mary Frances Berry resurrects the remarkable story of ex-slave Callie House who, seventy years before the civil-rights movement, demanded reparations for ex-slaves. A widowed Nashville washerwoman and mother of five, House (1861-1928) went on to fight for African American pensions based on those offered to Union soldiers, brilliantly targeting $68 million in taxes on seized rebel cotton and demanding it as repayment for centuries of unpaid labor. Here is the fascinating story of a forgotten civil rights crusader: a woman who emerges as a courageous pioneering activist, a forerunner of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Fascinating. . . . Berry has brought this leader from obscurity and given her cause  the recognition it deserves. No one can fully understand the history of the reparations  movement without reading this book.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“A treat for  history lovers. . . .[Berry] paints a vivid picture of the reparations struggle in  an era when 2 millions ex-slaves were still alive. . . . Eye-opening, well-crafted.” —\u003ci\u003eThe  Plain Dealer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Remarkable. . . . Berry has done a brilliant job of documenting  the life of Callie House. . . . This is an incredible story and one that truly deserves  to be more than mere footnote in our history texts. . . . Authentic and essential.” —\u003ci\u003eTucson Citizen\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eMary Frances Berry was born in Nashville, Tennessee.  She received a bachelor’s and  master’s degree at Howard University, a doctorate in history from the University  of Michigan, and a juris doctor degree from the University of Michigan Law School.   \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Dr. Berry has received many awards for her public service and scholarly activities,  among them the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins Award and Image Award, the Rosa Parks Award of  the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Ebony Magazine Black Achievement  Award.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In addition to having been the chairperson of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission  for eleven years, Dr. Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social  Thought at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches history of American  law. The author of eleven books, she lives in Washington, D.C.\u003cb\u003eChapter 1\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePrologue\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen I was twelve, I became an outlaw, a transgressor of racial boundaries. That summer I did the ironing while taking care of the Abbotts’ infant boy. They lived in an all-white well-off Nashville neighborhood founded as a streetcar suburb in the late nineteenth century. On a July afternoon when Mrs. Abbott came home, I showed her a phonograph record I had taken from the shelf and played while I worked.  Excitedly, I told her how I just loved the music, but the more I talked, the more agitated she became. Suddenly she snatched the record from my hands and practically exploded. “You had no business touching those records, and you shouldn’t be listening to such music in the first place.” I told her I was sorry, but she still seemed angry. I knew I had misbehaved terribly, but I did not understand how or why listening to that music was wrong.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI did not tell my mother, but when I finally told my Aunt Serriner, she worried aloud that I might become labeled a troublemaker. “Gal,” she  said, “don’t be getting out of your place, stay out of those white folks’ things.” I stayed out of “white folks’ things” thereafter, or at least kept silent when I did not. However, the episode forever clouded my pleasure upon discovering Beethoven and his Symphony Number Nine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCallie House did not stay out of “white folks’ things” either. She was also a racial outlaw. An African-American laundress from Tennessee, she became the leader of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century poor people’s movement that sought pensions from the federal government as compensation for slavery. Her movement, federal officials concluded,  “is setting the negroes wild.” They thought that if they did not stop her, when African Americans understood that the government would never grant pensions, the nation would “have some very serious questions to settle in connection with the control of the race.” Consequently, the government harassed Callie House for exercising her constitutional  right to petition the government and to mobilize others in the cause.  When she would not relent, calling her “defiant,” the Post Office Department and the Pension Bureau redoubled their efforts to smear and confine her. Her organization was the first mass reparations movement led by African Americans.1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCallie House and the ex-slave movement did not accept the preachments or adopt the meek attitudes that Booker T. Washington counseled at the  time. Today, some people argue against reparations because those who experienced slavery are no longer among the living. It is worth remembering that thousands of ex-slaves devoted years to pressing the reparations cause. They organized support networks and helped one another through very difficult times. That they bore the marks of bondage, as living ex-slaves, did not help them. Whites and elite African Americans ridiculed their pleas for redress, and the government disrespected their claims.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe first homes I knew, the orphanage on Laurel Street and the house of my mother’s eldest sister, Aunt Everleaner, where I lived in the 1940s, lay a few streets away from where Callie House resided until her death in 1928. There in South Nashville, down in the valley, looking up to the state capitol on the hill, we both became troublemakers. Commercial development has, for the most part, overtaken the neighborhood, erasing every vestige, every physical structure of that time and place. The address at which Callie House lived has long been occupied by a public housing unit. This book tells her story.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eChapter 1\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWe Need a Movement\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eWe are organizing ourselves together as a race of people who feels that they have been wronged.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCallie House\u003cbr\u003e(1899)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCallie House knew hard work. Born a slave, now a washerwoman and a widow with five children, she was at the bottom of America’s social and economic ladder as she stood proudly before a cheering crowd of African Americans. The National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association had just elected her its first and only female officer.  Addressing the convention delegates who had honored her with their votes, she talked about the thousands of people she had met on the road in the cause of compensation for slave service. House spoke of organizing local branches and collecting petitions to submit to Congress. She told them of her long hours spent “among strangers laboring to the best of my ability for the rights which my race is justly entitled to.” This woman of modest means but great courage would soon become the association’s leader. For her work, she would be praised by poor African Americans, ridiculed by the race’s elites, and targeted by high government officials, who feared her influence with the masses, and eventually land in jail. But on this November day in 1898, as she stood before supporters, newly elected assistant secretary of the nation’s largest reparations movement, all things seemed  possible.1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCallie House came to prominence in the period historian Rayford Logan labeled the nadir, the lowest point along the long, rough road African Americans had traveled since Emancipation. Women were legally barred from voting, and black men suffered disenfranchisement through subterfuge and violence. Booker T. Washington advised against political activism. But many like Mrs. House chose another course. By the early twentieth century, her organization, the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, according to federal officials, would swell to about 300,000, determined black people petitioning a government that barely recognized their existence and demanding a law ordering reparations for slavery.2\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThrough cajoling and explaining, House inspired the old ex-slaves to exercise their rights as citizens to demand repayment for their long suffering. She urged them not to give up despite continued oppression and listened as they shared stories about their lives under slavery. Often in tears, aging and ailing men and women recalled being treated  as less than human during their years of unpaid labor for masters who sexually abused slave women, broke families apart, and who had “the power to whip them to death.”3\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlthough steeled for the effort to gain reparations, House and her  cohorts were living in desperate times and still reeling from a bleak, awful past. House’s life experiences made her intimately familiar with the plight of those she referred to as the “ignorant, bare footed and naked” among her fellow ex-slaves. From family accounts, she was born  into slavery in Rutherford County near Nashville, Tennessee, in 1861.  (Her birth, like that of other slaves, was not officially recorded.)  There, in a landscape of rolling hills, cereal and tobacco production, and horse farming, slave owners depended upon the labor of the approximately 13,000 blacks who constituted about 50 percent of the total population of the county.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhether slaves had masters who, as one Tennessee slave put it, “gave them rations and warm clothes to wear” or scraps and rags that did not  cover their nakedness, their lives in bondage etched indelible memories of suffering and abuse. A collective consciousness born of brutal experience shaped the reactions of Callie’s family and other slaves  when freedom finally came. One Tennessee ex-slave remembered that on the plantation where she lived they could go to church, where they were admonished to obey their masters. She went to services “barefoot with a rag tied around her head and a dress that came up to her knees,” which was all she had to wear. She also was “whipped with a bull whip” and was not ashamed to say, in old age, that she “still had scars on her  back put there by the master.” Another Tennessee ex-slave told of being sold away from her husband, whom she had never seen again. At the slave yard they told her to take off her clothes and roll down the hill so the prospective buyers “could see you had no bones broken or sores on  you.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe coming of the Civil War finally brought freedom but not an immediate response to the suffering. In 1862 and early 1863, when Callie House was a toddler, the Union Army swept through Tennessee,  which had joined the Confederacy. In their wake the slaves made a mass  move toward freedom. Her family was among the thousands of so-called  contraband—slaves who either ran away or whose masters fled at the Union approach—in their wake. When the Union soldiers, whom the  children called “the Blue Men,” came, slave men, women, and children followed along behind them. The women did laundry and cooking for the soldiers; the army gathered up the black men to work as laborers, digging ditches and building fortifications. Refugees slept where they could and ate what they could find. Then the Union decided to recruit blacks as soldiers. Callie House’s father, Tom Guy, like many other freed men, probably joined the Union Army in the 29th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment. The unit served in the area at the Battle of Stones  River at the end of 1862 and the beginning of 1863. In heavy fighting that the Union won, more than a third of the Union and Confederate troops were killed, wounded, or captured. In November and early  December 1864, the 29th Regiment also helped repel the Confederate drive into Tennessee, ending at Franklin just south of Nashville. The fighting and the federal occupation devastated farms and communities in much of the surround-ing area, including Rutherford County. The numbers of refugees—contraband—fleeing slavery increased to a torrent.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHouse’s family and other African Americans tried to gain and maintain  their freedom without being demoralized by the uncertainty all around  them. African-American mothers and fathers begged Union officials to  help them regain their children and reunite their families. At the same  time, some former slave owners tried to regain or retain  African-American children as slaves, even after abolition had come, by  taking them as apprentices without their parents’ permission, or simply  assaulting any parent who came to claim a child. A soldier stationed in  Nashville in August 1865 begged his wife from Clarksville to join him.  She did not want to leave before rescuing their daughter, who was still  claimed by her former owner as a slave. The Freedmen’s Bureau agent  gave her an order for the child’s release. The former slave owner  complied, but as mother and child started down the road he overtook  them and “beat her with a club and left her senseless on the ground  after which he returned home with the child.” The former slave owner  was arrested by Bureau officials and fined $100 for having “maltreated”  her. However, in the meantime her soldier husband thought she had  forgotten him, and he “married” another woman. Bureau officials refused  to help dissolve the new “marriage” because upon seeing that some of  the children of his original wife were “mulattoes” and others were  “black,” they did not believe the soldier could have fathered all of  them. The beleaguered mother was treated as a loose woman who could not  be helped.7\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe chaos and confusion, the elation over freedom, the struggle to  survive, and the scars of their bondage shaped ex-slaves’ thinking  about the meaning of abolition. Freedom for Callie and other ex-slaves  would have been very different if the Union had kept its promises to  give them land confiscated from Confederate slaveholders. The  reparations question could have been settled at once. For the  ex-slaves, the promise of land was real, not just something they  imagined or hoped for. General William Tecumseh Sherman made the  promise when thousands of freed people followed the troops when he  marched his army from Atlanta to the sea in 1864–1865, laying waste the  Confederacy. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton heard reports that Sherman  had been heartless and shown indifference to the poverty-stricken  condition of the newly freed people. Stanton came to Savannah in  January to meet with Sherman and talk to African-American leaders about  their needs. Twenty blacks selected by Union authorities, deacons, and  ministers, three quarters of whom had been slaves, came to the meeting  and let national leaders know that land was their major priority. When  asked how they could best support their families, their self-selected  leader, sixty-seven-year-old Baptist minister Garrison Frazier from  Granville, North Carolina, replied, “To have land and turn in and till  it by our labor.”8\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith Stanton’s support, Sherman approved the request. He issued Order  Number 15 of January 16, 1865, designating the rich sea islands and  plantation areas from Charleston to Jacksonville, thirty miles inland,  for settlement by the freedmen. Each adult male could claim a  forty-acre tract. The March 3, 1865, Freedmen’s Bureau Act repeated the  promise that each freedman would be assigned “not more than forty  acres” of abandoned or confiscated land at rental for three years and  an option to purchase at the end of that time with “such title thereto  as the United States can convey.” Word of the promise spread quickly  among the ex-slaves.9\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBy June 1865, 40,000 freedmen had been settled on the coastal lands and  were growing crops. The promise of forty acres and a mule seemed a  reality. However, any hope that this policy would expand to the rest of  the South proved to be an illusion. After President Abraham Lincoln was  assassinated, President Andrew Johnson gutted the policy. He issued an  amnesty proclamation on May 29, 1865, pardoning many rebels and  restoring their lands to them. Abolitionists tried to stop the policy  change, but to no avail. The government dashed the sea island  freedmen’s hopes after their hard work tilling land they thought was  theirs. General Oliver Howard, who later founded Howard University, was  ordered to either persuade or force blacks occupying the land under  Sherman’s orders to abandon their claims to their former owners and  return to work for them as laborers. Incredulous, the freedmen cried  out at the betrayal. The accusation: that the government would “make  freedom a curse to us, for we have no home, no land, no oath, no vote,  and consequently no country.” Years later Wiley Childress and other  aging ex-slaves recalled with still burning anger that “before Freedom  the slaves were promised forty acres of land when freed but none ever  got it.” He had also never heard of anyone “getting money” for their  labor from the government.10\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlthough the rumors of land distribution continued to spread among the  freedpeople, the government failed to keep the promise in the sea  islands, middle Tennessee, or anywhere else in the South. House’s  family worked and scrimped to help themselves with no government  assistance. Members of Callie House’s family and other ex-slaves, such  as ex-slave Ellis Ken Hannon, “dun all kinds of jobs. Anything that  came along,” to stay alive. By 1866, Reverend John Savary, an  abolitionist traveler in the South, reported the beginnings of the  sharecropping and crop lien system, which soon gained a stranglehold on  the freedpeople. He knew they would have great difficulty improving  their status if they had no land and no capital: “They will continue to  work on from day to day, and from year to year, without more than  enough to keep soul and body together.”11","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301398139109,"sku":"NP9780307277053","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307277053.jpg?v=1767733256","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/my-face-is-black-is-true-isbn-9780307277053","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}