"God wept; but that mattered little to an unbelieving age;..

"God wept; but that mattered little to an unbelieving age; what mattered most was that the world wept and still is weeping and blind with tears and blood. For there began to rise in America in 1896 a new capitalism and a new enslavement of labor."
W.E.B. Du Bois - Black Reconstruction, 1935

< This is your Captain, Please replace <1896> with {2005}. Thank you. We now return to your regularly scheduled program. >

from "A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn..


"...black man, who came to teach at Atlanta University, W.E.B. Du Bois, saw the late-nineteenth-century betrayal of the Negro as part of a larger happening in the United States, something happening not only to poor blacks but to poor whites. In his book 'Black Reconstruction", written in 1935, he said:

"God wept; but that mattered little to an unbelieving age; what mattered most was that the world wept and still is weeping and blind with tears and blood. For there began to rise in America in 1896 a new capitalism and a new enslavement of labor."

Du Bois saw this new capitalism as part of a process of exploitation and bribery taking place in all the "civilized" countries of the world:

"Home labor in cultured lands, appeased and misled by a ballot whose power the dictatorship of vast capital strictly curtailed, was bribed by high wage and political office to unite in a exploitation of white, yellow, brown and black labor, in lesser lands..."

Was Du Bois right - that in that growth of American capitalism, before and after the Civil War, whites as well as blacks were in some sense becoming slaves?

on edit: oops

AND ARE THEY TRYING AGAIN???!!


Discuss

31 min.

anybody?

He wrote:

"Our country is at war. The war is critical, dangerous and world-wide. If this is our country, then this is our war. . . But what of our wrongs, cry a million voices with strained faces and bitter eyes. Our wrongs are still wrongs."

I will. That book makes me so depressed that I can only read like a chapter at most before I have to quit.

away my copy to my brother a couple of Christmas's ago. This last Christmas I gave him John Dean's book, Worse Than Watergate. My brother handed it back to me and said he'd just give it away if I didn't take it back. What can I say?

His wife is now a HR "arbitrator", she used to work directly underneath the HR VP at Halliburton Corporate Hdqtrs, and well my brother, he works for some "medical company".

Nice job.

The pain was intense when he handed me back Dean's book this last year. I wish I could just ask him back for my copy of "A Peoples History", I'll just replace it, but I'd like my original back.

Usually, I read about 2 books a week. I opened People's History almost three weeks ago, and I'm at pg. 217. It's great though, so intense, and so much info, you have to put it down and really THINK about it for awhile, let in sink in.

Gets me mad sometimes too.

against the rising black work force. I think that he was concerned about the exploitation of white fear of an empowered black working class.
He wrote in " Dusk of Dawn" that, Negroes are expected to join the labor movement and go as far as they can to become capitalists to evicerate the "color line" And the problem that he saw was that as they rose they would be confronted with new threats of denial of the tools of opportunity and even pitted against themselves, rich blacks against poor. In that, he recommended that Blacks find their own motivations for advancement in the capitalist system as consumers and not as mere instruments for the producers and profiteers. He saw their role as consumers as a lever for "democratic control over the industry".

I watched Travis Smiley's State of the Black Union on CSPAN last weekend, and they touched on this a bit. We need to connect all those scattered dots and create a web of strength. All colors and creeds need to come together to defeat these power mongers.

We need to understand that this is not so much a race issue, as it is a class issue. The 'Have's and Have More's' want to keep as many of us as possible at the very bottom of the pile. They feel safer that way.

Why do I have this vision of a chimp standing on a huge pile of bodies, chattering and scratching and declaring that he is the King of the Mountain?
<sigh>


edited

It feels as if we're in the middle of History repeating
itself. That's why it feels so bad. The forces of greed,
lust for power are just very strong. We must get better
at telling the truth than they are at lying.

"Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living."
Mother Jones