MURPHY BROWNE © JUNE 21-2018


MARIE JOSEPH ANGELIQUE JUNE 21-1734


On June 21 - 1734 enslaved African woman Marie Joseph Angélique was hanged in Montreal, Quebec. She was owned by Thérèse de Couagne de Francheville after de Francheville’s husband died. Marie-Joseph Angélique was part of Monsieur de Francheville’s estate when he died in 1733 and she was inherited by his widow. Angelique was accused of setting fire to her owner’s home during an escape attempt after learning that she was to be sold. Most Canadians do not seem to know that slavery is as much a part of this country’s history as it is American history. Enslaved Africans in Canada were also brutalized and even sold away from their families. African men, women and children were enslaved throughout this country.


On April 10, 1734 a fire destroyed half of Montréal. It was alleged that Angélique committed the act while attempting to escape her enslavement. She fled but was pursued, captured and tortured until she confessed then she was hanged. The arrest, torture (including having her legs crushed and the bones in her legs shattered) and hanging of Angélique is a story that proves slavery was a legal institution in Canada (1628-1834) which lasted for more than 200 years.


Angélique, who had been born into slavery in Portugal was sold more than once before being bought by de Francheville. It is possible that Angélique did not set the fire but was an ideal scapegoat for the crime: she was an enslaved African woman, a foreigner and a social outcast. As an enslaved person, Angélique had no rights that the White citizens or government would recognize. Angélique has been described as “assertive, rebellious and incorrigible.”


After a confession was tortured out of Marie Joseph Angelique on June 4, 1734, Judge Pierre Raimbault handed down his sentence: “Marie Joseph Angelique, negress, slave woman of Thérèse de Couagne, widow of the late François Poulin de Francheville, you are condemned to die, to make honourable amends, to have your hand cut off, be burned alive, and your ashes cast to the winds.” In her 2006 published book, “The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal” African Canadian historian Dr. Afua Cooper researched court documents to tell the story of Marie Joseph Angélique. Dr. Cooper describes the scene of Marie Joseph Angelique dressed in a white chemise, forced to hold a burning torch in her hand, placed in a garbage cart, paraded through the streets then hanged and her body burned. On the way to the gallows the residents of Montreal came out in numbers to mock and curse the unfortunate woman.


Marie Joseph Angélique was born in Madeira, Portugal in 1705. She was sold to Nichus Block a Flemish merchant when she was 15 years old and taken to New England, USA. In 1725 she was 20 years old when she was sold to the French merchant François Poulin de Francheville and taken to Montreal. Imagine being born in Portugal and speaking Portuguese then sold to a Flemish merchant who spoke Dutch, then sold again to a French speaking family. At 29 years old, having been sold at least twice and having to quickly learn at least two European languages (Dutch and French) plus Portuguese Marie Joseph Angélique was on the verge of being sold once again by the widow Thérèse de Couagne de Francheville. It is little wonder she decided to flee her enslavement; no proof that she set the fire that supposedly burned half of Montreal.


The trial of Marie Joseph Angélique lasted six weeks, whereas trials in Montreal at that time usually lasted a few days. The 22 people who testified at the trial admitted that they did not see her start the fire, but they were all convinced of her guilt. The star witness who appeared suddenly after six weeks of testimony was Amable Lemoine Monière, the five-year-old daughter of Alexis Lemoine, a French merchant. The child swore under oath that she had seen Angélique going to the attic of the de Francheville house holding a shovel full of coals, just before the fire.


The five year old child’s testimony sealed Angélique’s fate despite her protestations of innocence. She did not confess until after she was subjected to inhumane torture. Marie-Joseph Angélique was hanged on June 21, 1734, in Montreal and historians are divided over whether or not she was an arsonist who burned down half of Montreal or the victim of a White supremacist conspiracy. Perhaps Angélique did start the fire as a protest/resistance against her enslavement. Enslaved Africans found various ways to protest/resist their enslavement. Most likely she was just the victim of circumstantial evidence, outright lies, rumors and racism. We will never know if Marie-Joseph Angélique was guilty of setting the fire. We do know that she was tortured into confessing after a six week trial where she consistently proclaimed her innocence. The story of Marie Joseph Angélique is Canadian history.


Murphy Browne © June 21-2018

GEORGE JUNIUS STINNEY

Seventy four years ago on June 16-1944 a 14 year old African American boy became the youngest American citizen ever executed. On Wednesday December 17, 2014 he was pardoned 70 years after he was killed by the state.


GEORGE JUNIUS STINNEY JR.


Murphy Browne © June 2011


George Junius Stinney Jr. was born on October 21, 1929. He would have celebrated his 82nd birthday this Friday, but he did not live to see his 15th birthday. He was executed in South Carolina’s electric chair on June 16, 1944. The 5 foot 1 inch tall, 95 pound 14-year-old African American male child was arrested on March 23, 1944 accused of killing two White girls (11 and eight years old) with a rail-road spike. His trial, including jury selection, lasted just one day. The authorities said that he confessed to killing the two girls although there are no written records of a confession.




Stinney’s court-appointed attorney was a tax commissioner preparing to run for office.
There was no court challenge to the testimony of the three White police officers who claimed that Stinney had confessed although that was the only evidence presented. Three witnesses were called for the prosecution; a White man who \”found\” the bodies of the two girls and the two White doctors who performed the post mortem. No witnesses were called for the defence. The trial lasted from 2:30 to 5:30 p.m. One report about the trial stated: "The jury retired at five minutes before five to deliberate. Ten minutes later it returned with its verdict: guilty, with no recommendation for mercy.”
No legal appeals were filed on Stinney’s behalf although the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), some church groups and labour unions appealed to the governor of South Carolina to stop the execution. No African Americans were allowed in the courtroom for the trial.




Stinney’s father was fired from his job and his parents were given the choice of leaving town or being lynched. The family was forced to flee, leaving the 14-year-old child helpless with no support and in the clutches of a White supremacist system bent on his demise. According to the records, it was standing room only in the courtroom (on April 24, 1944) with well over 1,500 White spectators. This was reminiscent of scenes where African American men, women and children were lynched for the entertainment of White men, women and children who gathered to watch the Black bodies twitch as they swung from trees until the life left them. It may just as well have been a lynching with his body hanging from a tree.




This African American male child, small for his age, had to sit on a stack of large books in the electric chair so that electrodes could be attached to his head. Stinney, at 14, is the youngest person to have been executed in the U.S. in the 20th century. It has been reported that during the electrocution, the electric shock that shook his small frame knocked the adult size mask off his head as tears streamed down his face which was contorted in the throes of death.




As in the case of Lena Baker who was executed by the state of Georgia in a dreadful miscarriage of justice and received a posthumous pardon in 2005, now, 67 years after his execution, there is a campaign on to clear Stinney’s name. In an article published January 18, 2010 by the Associated Press the story of the attempt to exonerate Stinney included this information: "A community activist is now fighting to clear Stinney’s name, saying the young Black boy couldn’t have killed the two White girls.




George Frierson, a 56-year-old member of the school board and a textile inspector, believes Stinney’s confession was coerced, and that his execution was just another injustice Blacks suffered in Southern courtrooms in the first half of the 1900s. South Carolina lawyers Steve McKenzie, Shaun Kent and Ray Chandler are supporting Frierson in the fight to obtain a posthumous pardon for Stinney.
In 2011 Canada, young African Canadian males may not be at risk of execution in the electric chair but they are overrepresented in the criminal justice system. Many African Canadian youth who should not have been captured by the system are trapped there because of their race.




The recent case (August 12, 2011) of a 6’ tall, 60-year-old African Canadian man who was locked in a cruiser and aggressively interrogated by a White female police officer who thought he fit the profile of a suspect described as "Black, in his 20s and 5’ 6” illustrates this. Although the 60-year-old reportedly showed the police officer the long scar from his recent (May 2011) heart transplant surgery she refused to believe he was not the suspect. If this is happening to a 60-year-old imagine what the experiences of the youth are. Those in our community who work with youth trapped in the criminal justice system have told some horror stories of what they have witnessed.




With this happening in 2011 imagine what happened to African Canadians at the time Stinney was executed in South Carolina and even before. While White Canadians believe the myth of a post-racial Canada and point accusing fingers at their relatives in the U.S., the reality is very different for racialized people in Canada, especially African Canadians. Even if Stinney had been born in Canada the chances are that he would have met a similar fate at that time on this side of the border.




In the novel, George and Rue, published in 2005, Dr. George Elliot Clarke wrote about the execution of brothers George Hamilton (23) and Rufus (22) in Fredericton, New Brunswick on July 27, 1949. The Hamilton brothers were found guilty of killing a White taxi driver as they robbed him. George and Rue is a fictionalized work about the lives of two young men who travel from their birth place in Nova Scotia to Fredericton, New Brunswick, a town in which, even though African Canadians lived there, they found to be “too suspiciously White to be trusted”. The character, Rue, was so disturbed by the Whiteness of the town that he “schemed to apply black paint to the statue of Bobby Burns on the Green – either that or smash it to bits.”




In telling the story of George and Rufus Hamilton Clarke humanizes the two young men whose lives were reduced to a criminal act and the revenge of the White society that surrounded them. At the end of the book Clarke writes of a similar crime committed by two White men in Quebec just six months (December 1949) after the Hamilton brothers were executed in New Brunswick. However, these two White men went a step further, they bought guns and ammunition with the stolen money and went on to rob a bank. The two White men were not executed because, as Clarke writes in George and Rue, “Ninety minutes before their hangings, word came their sentences’d been commuted to life in prison. George and Rue – black – had no such white luck.”


Murphy Browne © June 2011

MEDGAR EVERS ASSASSINATED JUNE 12-1963

Murphy Browne  © Wednesday June 8- 2016

MEDGAR EVERS ASSASSINATED JUNE 12-1963 

 “In the state of Mississippi many years ago

A boy of 14 years got a taste of southern law

He saw his friend a hanging and his color was his crime

And the blood upon his jacket left a brand upon his mind

Too many martyrs and too many dead

Too many lies too many empty words were said

Too many times for too many angry men

Oh let it never be again

His name was Medgar Evers and he walked his road alone

Like Emmett Till and thousands more whose names we’ll never know

They tried to burn his home and they beat him to the ground

But deep inside they both knew what it took to bring him down

The killer waited by his home hidden by the night

As Evers stepped out from his car into the rifle sight

He slowly squeezed the trigger, the bullet left his side

It struck the heart of every man when Evers fell and died.

And they laid him in his grave while the bugle sounded clear

Laid him in his grave when the victory was near

While we waited for the future for freedom through the land

The country gained a killer and the country lost a man.”

 

Excerpt from “Ballad of Medgar Evers”, sung by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Freedom Singers, composed by Reverend Matthew Jones, Sr.

 

The Reverend Matthew Jones, Sr. composed the “Ballad of Medgar Evans” to commemorate the life of civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, who was lynched on June 12, 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi. Medgar Wiley Evers was an African-American civil rights activist from Mississippi who worked to end segregation at the University of Mississippi and gain social justice and voting rights.

Evers was born on July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi, the third of five children of James and Jesse (née Wright) Evers. He grew up on his parents’ farm in segregated Mississippi and was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943 at age 18. He fought in both France and Germany during World War II and received an honorable discharge in 1946.

In 1948, he entered Alcorn College (now Alcorn State University) in Lorman, Mississippi. During his senior year, Evers married a fellow student, Myrlie Beasley. They later had three children: Darrell, Reena and James. The couple moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, where African-American entrepreneur Dr. Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard hired him to sell insurance for his Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company.

In 1954, the year of the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which purportedly desegregated schools in the USA, Evers resigned from the insurance business. He subsequently applied to and was denied admission to the University of Mississippi Law School. His unsuccessful effort to integrate the state’s oldest public educational institution attracted the attention of staff at the national office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Later that year, Evers moved to the state capital of Jackson and became the first state field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi.

As an extremely effective state field secretary of the NAACP, Evers recruited members throughout Mississippi and organized voter-registration efforts, demonstrations and economic boycotts of White-owned companies that practiced discrimination. He also investigated crimes perpetrated against African-Americans, most notably the lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy who was murdered by two White men for allegedly whistling at a White woman in August, 1955 in Money, Mississippi. Evers consistently investigated the rapes, murders, beatings and lynching of African-Americans in Mississippi and reported the horrific crimes to a national audience, while also organizing economic boycotts, sit-ins, and street protests in Jackson.

On June 12, 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi, Evers was leading a campaign for integration when he was shot and killed by a White assassin in front of his home. His wife and three small children heard the shots (he was shot in the back and a bullet ricocheted into his home) and witnessed him taking his last breath in the driveway of their home. The domestic terrorism that defined the era had claimed another victim. He became another martyr of the struggle. The martyrs include activists who were targeted for death because of their civil rights work, random victims of White vigilantes determined to halt the movement and individuals who, in the sacrifice of their own lives, brought new awareness to the struggle.

During the years of the Civil Rights Movement, African-Americans struggled to outlaw the discrimination of their people and gain voting rights. African-Americans were the victims of horrifying acts of violence at the hands of White Americans and the Jim Crow Laws ensured their disenfranchisement. The American government through agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sought and failed to destroy the integrity and might of African-Americans who were fighting for their rights.

It is truly amazing in hindsight that African-Americans in spite of the savagery of the White resistance, especially in the southern states, continued their struggle for civil rights. One of the reasons they were able to continue was the power of the music of the era. As we recognize Black Music Month throughout June it is important to remember the role music played in the Civil Rights Movement. Black Music played a paramount role in the Civil Rights Movement. Black Music was one way African-Americans could express their feelings to each other and the world. Black Music provided spiritual support and was used as a tool for peace as the movement led by Dr. King advocated peaceful, nonviolent protest. Black Music unified African-Americans under a common goal to stop the abuse, discrimination and exploitation of their people.

During the Albany Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. acknowledged: “The freedom songs are playing a strong and vital role in our struggle.”

When asked about the importance of the song “We Shall Overcome”, Dr. King responded: “One cannot describe the vitality and emotion this one song evokes across the south land.”

This song unified African-Americans and gave them hope that one day they would overcome the discrimination to which they were subjected. The Albany Movement was a desegregation coalition formed in Albany, Georgia, on November 17, 1961, by local activists, SNCC and the NAACP and ended in summer 1962. The organization was led by William G. Anderson, a local African-American doctor of osteopathic medicine. In December 1961, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) became involved in assisting the Albany Movement with protests against racial segregation. It was the first mass movement in the modern civil rights era to have as its goal the desegregation of an entire community and it resulted in the jailing of more than 1,000 African-Americans in Albany and surrounding rural counties.

Black Music during the Civil Rights Movement also served as a reminder of the tragedies and hardships African-Americans were experiencing. In March 1964 at Carnegie Hall, Nina Simone sang “Mississippi Goddamn” as a reminder of the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, where four African-American children were killed. Simone, a versatile musical genius, excoriated the Jim Crow South and celebrated the strength of the African-American community as it struggled against discrimination with “Mississippi Goddamn”.

On the morning of September 15, 1963, Ku Klux Klan members planted and detonated a bomb in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama, killing four African-American girls. African-American musician John Coltrane wrote the song “Alabama” in response. In “A Change is Gonna Come” a self-penned song initially recorded for a benefit album to raise funds for the SCLC, Sam Cooke used his voice to protest racism and encourage faith in the possibilities for a more egalitarian USA.

The undeniable and hard-won successes of the Civil Rights Movement in ridding the South of statutory segregation and disenfranchisement did not create a society free of racism or racial discrimination in which genuine equality of opportunity could flourish. The movement nevertheless did go hand in hand with the rejuvenated sense of African-American pride and empowerment. Since then there have been several movements and individuals who continued the work of the martyrs and Black Music has continued to play a part in the successive movements.

The activism that led to the founding of Black Lives Matter and the United Nations declaring 2015-2024 the International Decade for People of African Descent are just two examples. There is always hope.

“Too many martyrs and too many dead

Too many lies too many empty words were said

Too many times for too many angry men

Oh let it never be again”

 

Murphy Browne  © Wednesday June 8- 2016

FANNIE LOU HAMER

Murphy Browne © June 11-2018


FANNIE LOU HAMER


On June 12, 1963 Fannie Lou Hamer who is one of my sheores was released from jail in Winona, Mississippi. Hamer and other activists were arrested and viciously beaten (she suffered permanent kidney damage, permanent damage to her left eye and a permanent limp) but that did not prevent her from continuing her quest to ensure her community gained their civil rights. Hamer was an African-American civil rights leader and political activist who worked to improve the lives of African-Americans despite experiencing extreme racial injustice, including state and police violence. In 1961 Hamer, like thousands of African-American women living in Mississippi, was sterilized without her knowledge by a White doctor as part of the state of Mississippi's plan to reduce the population of African-Americans.




In 1962 Hamer began working to help African-Americans register to vote. She was harassed, fired from her job and received numerous death threats. After becoming a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1963, Fannie Lou Hamer decided to attend a pro-citizenship conference by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Charleston, South Carolina. The busload of activists stopped for a break in Winona, Mississippi. Some of the activists went inside a local cafe, but were refused service by the waitress. Shortly after, a Mississippi State highway patrolman took out his billy club and intimidated the activists into leaving. One of the group decided to take down the officer's license plate number. The patrolman and a police chief entered the cafe and arrested everyone. Hamer was taken to the county jail where she was severely beaten. In the cell where she was placed two inmates were ordered, by the state trooper, to beat her using a blackjack. The police ensured she was held down during the almost fatal beating, and when she started to scream, beat her further. Hamer was groped repeatedly by officers during the assault. When she attempted to resist, she states an officer, "walked over, took my dress, pulled it up over my shoulders, leaving my body exposed to five men." Another in her group was beaten until she was unable to talk; a third, a teenager, was beaten, stomped on, and stripped. An activist from the SNCC came the next day to see if they could help, but was savagely beaten.

 Hamer was released on June 12, 1963. She needed more than a month to recuperate from the beatings and never fully recovered. Though the incident had profound physical and psychological effects, including a blood clot over her left eye and permanent damage on one of her kidneys, she returned to Mississippi to organize voter registration drives, including the "Freedom Ballot Campaign", a mock election, in 1963, and the "Freedom Summer" initiative in 1964.




She helped to organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) "Freedom Summer" in Mississippi in 1964 and became Vice-Chair of the "Freedom Democrats" which was organized to challenge the all-White, anti-civil rights delegation to the Democratic National Convention (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07PwNVCZCcY.) In 1969, Hamer co-founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative, which helped struggling farmers acquire land. She was actively involved in grassroots Head Start programs and in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign. She helped convene the National Women's Political Caucus in 1970 and when the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) created the Fannie Lou Hamer Day Care Center, she became the chair of its Board of Directors. Fannie Lolu Hamer transitioned to the ancestral realm on March 14, 1977 at 59 years old. She was buried in her hometown of Ruleville, Mississippi. Her tombstone is engraved with one of her famous quotes, "I am sick and tired of being sick and tired."


Hamer's life is documented in several biographies, including This Little Light of Mine: the Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, written by Kay Mills and published in 1993.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhu_uxRR2og


Murphy Browne © June 11-2018