OR “SIT DOWN YOU’RE ROCKIN’ THE ROCK”
“. . . where blood is once begun to be shed, it is seldom staunched of a long time after.”
JOHN ROBINSON, 1623
“So they committed themselves to the will of God & resolved to proseede,” explains William Bradford, second Governor of the Plymouth Plantation (yes, folks, that’s what he called it!) and one of the leaders of the Mayflower group of “church resisters.” His words stand as the classic articulation of the myth of the Puritan Pilgrim as it survives today.
Though the settlers who arrived in Plymouth were not the first American colonists from England, or even the most important and influential in New England, Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower are the symbols of the Pilgrim myth. And that myth goes something like this.
THE MYTH
The Puritans were a party in the Church of England who wanted to go all the way in carrying out the Protestant Reformation. They wanted to establish both a religion and a way of life based upon a strict interpretation of the Bible; that is, living and worshiping as the Bible would suggest—without all the frills the Church had added. The Church of England, a high-church and formal structure just a shade left of the Vatican, did not make it with the Puritans. However, King James I and his law-and-order men did not take well to an “underground church,” just as Department of Justice staffers are not likely to go to Fathers Dan and Phil Berrigan, George Clements, James Groppi, or the Reverend James Bevel for confession today. So after repeated busts and harassments the God-seeking Puritans split to Holland, where freedom of worship was respected, and formed the English Congregational Church in Leyden. But all the while they longed for an unmolested home under the English flag. They felt like “pilgrims and strangers” in a foreign land, and they were worried that their kids were losing contact with English culture. William Bradford felt the Dutch language was “uncouth.”
America seemed to be the answer. The Puritans got permission from the Virginia Company’s London branch, found some financial backing from a group of English merchants known as the “Adventurers,” and set sail in the Mayflower. Even the voyage across seemed to prove that God was on the side of the Puritan Pilgrims. They had originally planned to make the voyage to American in two ships. But the second ship, the Speedwell, didn’t live up to its name, proving to be neither “well” nor “speedy” as it kept springing leaks, so the entire Pilgrim group had to crowd on the Mayflower, which wasn’t in any too good a shape itself. That the leaky ship made it from England to America with a 180-ton burden proved divine sympathy was with the undertaking.
After a long, hard sixty-five-day journey, the Puritan Pilgrims finally landed on the New England shores, considerably north of Virginia, and decided to settle along what is now Plymouth harbor. Thus it turned out to be a real “mass” movement. They arrived en masse, in Mass, running away from Mass.
Only courage and devotion kept the little band of Pilgrims alive. Though ill-equipped to make it on their own in an unfamiliar land, lacking both talent and resources, they somehow survived. Pilgrim rhetoric says God provided the survival kit. Governor Bradford said, “They knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country.” And William Brewster boasted, “It is not with us as with other men, who small things can discourage, or small discontentments cause to wish themselves at home again.”
Surviving the first winter in the settlement of New Plymouth stands as one of the first “profiles in American courage.” Think of the odds, the myth perpetrators tell us. Mishaps and delays caused the Puritan Pilgrims to land in the midst of one of those terrible New England winters. Not only did nature prove to be hostile, but all the time, as one historian put it, there were “dusky savages skulking among the trees.” More than half of the band of settlers died that first winter, and “at one time the living were scarcely able to bury the dead.” (Of course, if the Puritans really took the Bible seriously, that shouldn’t have caused any concern. After all, Jesus said, “Let the dead bury the dead.”
No ship arrived with additional supplies for a whole year. Yet when the good ship Fortune did arrive, with thirty-five new mouths to feed, not one of the original survivors wanted to make the trip back to England when the Fortune set sail again. Such is the stuff the Pilgrim fathers were made of.
And, the myth continues, the Pilgrims were also the fathers of the democratic form of government America holds so dear. Upon arriving in the New World, the Pilgrims drew up the Mayflower Compact, which stated that they would be ruled by the will of the majority until England made permanent provision for the new colony.
Pulitzer-prize winning historians Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Eliot Morison sum it up this way in The Growth of the American Republic:
But they [the Puritan Pilgrims] never lost heart or considered giving up and going home. These simple folks were exalted to the stature of statesmen and prophets in their narrow sphere, because they ardently believed, and so greatly dared, and firmly endured. They set forth in acts as in words the stout-hearted idealism in action that Americans admire; that is why Plymouth Rock has become a symbol.
And Governor Bradford concluded in his annals:
Thus out of small beginnings greater things have been produced by his hand that made all things of nothing, and gives being to all things that are; and as one small candle may light a thousand; so the light here kindled hath shone unto many, yea, in some sort, to our whole nation.
So the Puritan Pilgrims, though later to be replaced by the founding fathers of the American Revolution, still remain most dear to American mythology. America the God-fearing and God-loving nation was founded by those who shared that fear and love. America is specially blessed because of her religious origins. “Land where our fathers died; land of the pilgrims’ pride; from every mountainside; let freedom ring.”
And every Thanksgiving little kids in public school assemblies re-enact that first New England feast, complete with funny hats and costumes, and always, of course, carrying muskets.
THE ROCK IS ROCKY
Of course there were too many slaves in the English colonies for the Plymouth Rock myth to sit well in the black community. To black folks the myth says, “Here was a man searching for religious freedom and the right to worship as he pleased, and on his way over to find God, he stole us.” It is a strange man who wants to establish a way of life as the Bible suggests and begins that new way of life by keeping some slaves.
But even white folks should realize the shaky foundation upon which Plymouth Rock rests. The Puritan Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth quite by accident. Call it divine intervention if you want to, but God had to pull some pretty shady deals with the Indians to make it happen.
When the Puritan Pilgrims were looking to the New World for a place to settle, their first choice was Guiana, which Sir Walter Raleigh had described so alluringly. But they soon decided that a tropical climate would not be the best for industrious Puritans. Besides, the new colony would be dangerously exposed to the Spaniards, who had proved themselves not very friendly to another group of God-seekers, the Huguenots, whom they had wiped out in Florida.
Second choice was Virginia, but the Puritans soon remembered that Episcopal (Church of England) ideas had already taken root there. New England was considered too cold, but the land around the Delaware River seemed ideal. Through the help of Sir Edwin Sandys, who was sympathetic to the Puritans, negotiations were completed with the London Company for a grant of land in the Delaware River area.
Quite the opposite from nature being hostile, if it hadn’t been for certain acts of nature, Plymouth Rock would never have happened. Storms and foul weather so confused accurate measurings of latitude and longitude that the Puritans ended up in Cape Cod. Since they were not in an area under the jurisdiction of the London Company, they tried to head south but were again turned back by natural hazards. So Plymouth became the best possible site for settling considering the circumstances. Even though their land grant was no good, the Puritans thought they could easily obtain a new grant from the Plymouth Company.
Nature’s unforeseen change of the Puritans’ travel plans probably saved their lives. It so happens that some three years before the Puritan Pilgrims landed, a terrible pestilence had swept over the New England area and killed, according to some estimates, half of the Indian population between the Penobscot river and Narragansett bay. Many of the Wampanoag Indians in the area attributed this calamity to their having killed two or three white fishermen the year before. So when the Pilgrims landed, the Indians were reluctant to deal with the invaders, thinking that all white folks might have the power of the plague at their disposal. Those “dusky savages skulking among the trees” were merely looking out for the plague demon. Just keeping an eye on white folks.
When the Pilgrims landed, the Indians held a pow-wow and went through elaborate rituals, conjuring up every kind of curse imaginable, but they were superstitious enough not to resort to physical methods of attack. Thus began a phenomenon which was later to become a byword in America—religiously inspired strategic nonviolence. So the Indians left the Puritan Pilgrims alone that crucial first winter.
But that was all the time the white folks needed. At the first sight of Indians scurrying in the bushes, a platform was built on the nearest hill and a few cannon were placed there to cover the neighboring valleys and plains. By the end of summer the platform had become a fort, overlooking and protecting the harbor and the rapidly growing village.
Imagine what would have happened to the Plymouth Rock myth if nature had not intervened. The Puritan Pilgrims would have landed on course in the lands between the Hudson and the Delaware. They probably would have had problems with the Dutch. If not, they would have found themselves in the territory of the Susquehannock Indians, at the time one of the most powerful tribes on the continent. And the Susquehannocks did not have hangups about the plague demon.
PURIFYING THE PURE
What kind of stock were these Pilgrim ancestors white folks have been trying to trace their ancestry back to for over three hundred years? First of all, there is some argument among historians that the Plymouth Rock folks were Puritans at all. Some say they were Separatists, not Puritans, the latter group being the settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Those Massachusetts folks proclaimed a more “pure” rhetoric, seeing themselves and their colonial enterprise as a “beacon of light for all mankind.” I suppose that really means making the Indian’s territory “safe for democracy.”
But it is clear that the Mayflower group had no other motives for settling down in the New World than looking out for number one. They didn’t see themselves on a missionary crusade to convert the Indians as other pilgrims did. They just wanted a bit of land in which they could do their own thing. What that thing was to be we shall soon see. But whether or not Puritans or Separatists is the proper designation for the Plymouth Rock group matters little, because fewer than half of the Mayflower arrivals were pilgrims anyway. Captain Miles Standish was a non-Pilgrim hired to serve as military adviser, along with two hired seamen and fourteen indentured servants and hired artisans, thus forming the first military-industrial complex.
Brother Standish was responsible for originating an American problem which many people feel is still paramount today—the use of outside agitators who encourage looting and stealing. When the Mayflower first docked in Provincetown, Standish led a few expeditions inland to explore. When Standish and his men came across some corn buried by the Indians in underground barns, they couldn’t resist the urge to “cop” their new find, thus giving a very early answer to the Indian’s question of whether or not he could trust the white man. Governor Bradford later said that planting the stolen kernels of corn the following spring is what saved the Pilgrim fathers from starvation. Of course, a few bushels of corn were minor compared to what the white man would later steal from the Indian.
But at least Brother Standish didn’t steal Indians themselves, as an earlier white invader in the same area, George Weymouth, had done. Weymouth and his traveling buddy, James Rosier, worked for English promoters who were trying to drum up enthusiasm for settling in the New World. Colonization was seen as good business primarily, and religious considerations only came in second. To the English capitalists, if religion could get folks over there, fine. The main thing was to get white folks settled over in the land of the Indians with a tie to England, so that money-making goods would flow into the mother country.
Weymouth and Rosier did some trading with the Indians to get them used to the idea. Or, as Weymouth said, the English “wished to bring [the Indians] to an understanding of exchange” so that “they might conceive the intent of our comming to them to be for no other end.” Since the English planned eventually to get as much of the Indians’ land as possible, they wanted to make that later job easier—or again, as Weymouth said, to treat the Indians “with as great kindness as we could devise” without regard to profit.
But one day Weymouth and Rosier got the feeling that the Indians were setting them up for an ambush. Probably because of their own guilt, their [white folks’] fears came out in them, and on the suspicion of ambush alone they decided that the natives belonged “in the ranke of other Salvages, who have beene by travellers in most discoveries found very treacherous.” So the two Englishmen cut out, kidnaping a few Indians to take with them, and headed back for home shores.
Back in England, Ferdinando Georges, head man in Plymouth, was very pleased with the Indian catch. He saw them as very good for promotion. The Indians were taught the English language and then were used to make speeches about the riches of the New World and the good life to be found there. Such Madison Avenue hustling paid off. The New World was described as a veritable paradise; rivers filled with fish, jumping out in Charlie Tuna fashion just begging to be caught; turkeys falling out of the trees before you could shoot them; animals eager to give up their furs; and all manner of utopian delights.
People remembered Thomas More’s description of a utopia located somewhere in the New World, and America seemed to be it. All kinds of folks were attracted to going there, not just the God-seekers. Convicts from the jails of Middlesex and other counties in England for example. As early as 1617 convicted criminals were saved from the gallows in England to “yeilde a profitable service to the Commonwealth in parts abroad.” By 1670 the good folks in Virginia were quite upset at the great number of “fellons and other desperate villianes sent hither from the prisons of England.” They petitioned their council for law and order to prevent the “barbarous designs and felonious practices of these wicked men,” and to see to it that English promoters stopped sending “jailbirds” into the New World.
America also proved to be a convenient “fresh air fund” for England—get the kids off the streets and into the colonies. Poor folks in general and kids in particular, with whom England was “pestered,” were sent to the colonies. King James himself sent off a group of “Duty boys” on the ship Duty: “divers young people” of whom the king wrote to Sir Thomas Smith, a leading English promoter, January 13, 1619, “who wanting imployment doe live idle and followe the Court.” Some towns saw America as a convenient answer to the poverty problem, recognizing that a one-way ticket was a cheap form of relief and a good way of getting rid of indigents.
Thus in the colonization of America the English government and the capitalists worked hand in hand. Colonization was good for business and a way of getting rid of undesirables. King James was glad to get rid of the Pilgrim fathers because he had vowed either to whip them into line or to run them out of the country. After all, they were dissenters, opponents of the Church establishment. Anything the promoters could do to make the trip enticing had governmental approval.
It is like the “Join the Army—See the World” slogan syndrome today. Hearing that propaganda, one would think army life is just one big vacation. The army promoters do not tell you about the war. When the real word of war filters back, young folks are not so easily enticed. It was the same with the criminals and children in England when the word came back about the sufferings and hardships in the New World. The vital statistics of colonization, those who died either in or on the way to the New World, were so appalling that “some of the children designed by the City [of London]” refused to make the trip. To die from epidemics and getting acclimated to life in America was not a happy prospect even to vagrants and criminals; and to many such folks the thought of the trip over was no better than life in prison or death on the gallows.
Even today, the army is used as a way out for youthful offenders. Teenage gang leaders are told, “The best place for you is in the army.” Soldiers go into the service for various reasons—to avoid being drafted, to get army pay because they can’t get a job at home, and so on—not just for the pure patriotic reasons of duty to or love of one’s country. Just as colonists came to America for various reasons other than the search for religious freedom that the myth of American history extols.
Of course the English promoters had an advantage over the army promoters today. The English didn’t have to buck television. Had there been a news team with cameras in the colonies and on the ships going over, most people would have given up on the colonizing idea when they saw the first TV special. Army promoters have faced the problem of Huntley and Brinkley, or Walter Cronkite, bringing the Vietnam war into every American living room each night. Young folks see the killing at first hand. And they are not about to fall for the “Join the Army—See the World” line.
People underestimate the power and influence of television. Many folks are upset about crime in the streets and rioters looting television sets. They ought to see it as retribution, since television is largely responsible for such acts in the first place. I don’t know what kind of a hoodlum I might have been if we had had television when I was a kid. I went to bed hungry every night, unless I was lucky enough to grab a biscuit my brothers didn’t see me take. But if I had gone to bed and turned on the Tonight show, where one commercial showed me more food than our family saw in a month, who knows how much stealing I might have done the next day. And in a country, the richest country in the world, where more than a quarter of the population goes to bed each night underfed and hungry, crime in the streets could be seen as reparations. Nobody in America should be allowed to walk the streets safe until the problem of hunger is solved.
Think of the insult to poor folks in America when the government pays Senator Eastland of Mississippi $10,000 a month not to plant food crops and pays a poor black baby in Mississippi $8 a month to survive. As long as that continues, crime in the streets of Washington, D.C., will never begin to equal the crime on Capitol Hill.
The way Americans seem to think today, about the only way to end hunger in America would be for Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to go on national television and say we are falling behind the Russians in feeding folks. Just let a team of Russian sociologists go into hunger-ridden areas of America and say the same things publicly that certain United States senators have been saying, and the entire nation would be outraged enough to demand some changes.
Since the Nixon administration seems to be concerned more about “crime in the streets” than eliminating poverty and hunger in America, the least President Nixon could do is effect some personnel changes to mollify the situation. Like making Vice President Spiro Agnew head of the poverty program. Poor folks would still be hungry, of course, but at least their appetites would be spoiled.
But America continues to be interested more in taking pot shots at the moon than in shooting down hunger. America is concerned more with the possibility of moon folks than with the reality of hungry poor folks. That priority doesn’t even make sense scientifically. It ought to be easier to place food in a man’s stomach than to place a man on the moon. At least in the feeding process you have gravity working on your side. Food digests and is expelled from the body in accord with the law of gravity. With moon shots it is an uphill struggle all the way.
Just think of the insult to poor folks watching their government spend $24 billion to go to the moon to collect a few pounds of rocks, only to see those rocks ground up and fed to some white mice. Not only were there no black astronauts, but NASA didn’t even have sense enough to get those mice from a ghetto dweller. The black ghetto can supply the NASA laboratories with any kind of rats or mice they need—black, brown, white, albino, or queer.
But getting back to the lessons of history, I suppose we could say that Miles Standish started the whole ugly process—stealing food from the mouths of Indians to keep the colonizers alive. And America has been living off the oppressed ever since. The Puritan Pilgrims themselves were in great need of purification.
BIBLES AND BULLETS
Or maybe decontamination would be a better choice of words. The plague that wiped out nearly half the New England Indian population was undoubtedly a disease introduced by white Europeans. Modern authorities are reluctant to try to diagnose the disease, since historical scraps of evidence are both vague and contradictory. There is general agreement on what it was not: yellow fever, smallpox, jaundice, or typhoid fever. It could have been measles, bubonic plague, or perhaps even a combination of diseases that hit various tribes of Indians simultaneously. At any rate, the Pilgrims seemed to be immune, though they were probably carriers. Yet the Pilgrims saw themselves as carrying the gospel of Jesus Christ rather than disease. The plague, they felt, was divine action, showing that clearly God was making room for his people.
The general attitude of the Pilgrims toward the Indians was that they were heathens who needed to be saved. Popular mythology of the time saw the Indians in America as descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel, and therefore in special need of conversion. The Reverend Thomas Thorowgood, for example, argued this opinion in his Jewes in America, or Probabilities that the Americans are of that Race, published in London in 1650. He offered as evidence similarities between Jews and Indians in speech, customs, and ease of childbirth. Pushing the conversion and missionary idea, Cotton Mather wrote in his Magnalia Christi Americana in 1702: “Though we know not when or how these Indians first became inhabitants of this mighty continent, yet we may guess that probably the devil decoyed those miserable savages hither in hopes that the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ would never come here to destroy or disturb his absolute empire over them.”
So once again the Bible was used to cover up the “discovery” of a land that was already occupied. Not only occupied, but being used at the time. The Pilgrims felt they had “spiritual” benefits to offer the Indians—the gospel of Jesus Christ—and the Indians had certain “temporal” benefits to offer them, namely land. The Pilgrims seemed to feel that was a fair exchange.
But the Bible has always been cleverly used in colonization efforts. In fact, the history of the performance of white Christian missionaries in Africa first aroused my own personal curiosity about the strange power of the Bible. When the white Christian missionaries went to Africa, the white folks had the bibles and the natives had the land. When the missionaries pulled out, they had the land, and the natives had the bibles. Now that’s a pretty good trick if you can pull it off. I’ve often wondered if I could try the same pattern with the Board of Directors of General Motors. I’d walk into the board meeting with my Bible under my arm. If I could find the magic formula that worked so well for the missionaries, when I left the meeting, I’d own the corporation and each director would have a Bible.
Of course, the magic formula that worked so well for the Pilgrim fathers was guns and gunpower. Genocide became the substitute for conversion. Folks in America today, both black and white, who say it looks like this country is getting ready to start practicing genocide simply do not know their American history, as any Indian can tell you. America is just now getting ready to expand her group.
When the Indians first decided to pay a visit to the Plymouth Plantation at the end of that first winter, the first to come calling was an Indian named Samoset who had learned some English from fishermen on the coast and was inclined to be friendly. He came with words of welcome. He was later followed by Chief Massasoit, accompanied by a group of feathered and painted warriors. The Chief and the Governor smoked the pipe of peace, while Miles Standish and a half-dozen musketeers stood by just in case.
Later on when the Chief of the Narragansett Indians, Canonicus, decided to check the Pilgrims out by issuing a challenge, gunpowder again proved to be the answer, though it was not fired. Canonicus sent a messenger to Governor Bradford with a bundle of arrows wrapped in snakeskin. Bradford sent back the same snakeskin wrapped around some gunpowder and bullets. Canonicus could have mustered two thousand warriors, but the bluff worked, giving the Pilgrims a little more time. The Indians didn’t know what the stuff was and carried it gingerly out of camp. Considering their experience with white folks to date, I’m not surprised they were suspicious. After all, it might have been plague powder.
It is hard to imagine what America might have developed into had there been no guns from the very beginning. The Pilgrim fathers would have had to approach the Indians from the standpoint of pure morality, rather than from a standpoint of puritanism, which always had in the background thoughts of acquisition, colonization, and profit. Just as it would be difficult to imagine what a nonviolent army could accomplish today. If thousands of American troops appeared on the battlefields of the world totally unarmed. Or if America gave up the space and arms races and instead began really feeding starving peoples the world over, sending out technical and medical teams to wipe out disease everywhere rather than military supplies and assistance. A new kind of race among nations could be initiated. America could stand proudly before the eyes of the world and say to Russia, “Instead of matching us rocket for rocket, or missile for missile, let’s see you match us in morality, humanitarian act for humanitarian act.”
But the Pilgrim fathers chose instead to bring and use their guns. And the severity of that usage shocked the Plymouth Pilgrims’ dearest friend and spiritual leader, John Robinson, who had been pastor of the church in Leyden, Holland, but remained behind when the congregation sailed for America. He received a report of the Pilgrims’ retaliatory attack upon the Indians, after an earlier Indian attack caused by the wrongdoings of another Englishman in the area, Andrew Weston. In a letter to Governor Bradford, Robinson wrote:
Concerning the killing of those poor Indians, of which we heard at first by report, and since by more certain relation. Oh, how happy a thing had it been, if you had converted some before you had killed any! Besides, where blood is once begun to be shed, it is seldom staunched of a long time after. You will say they deserved it. I grant it; but upon what provocations and invitements by those heathenish Christians [Mr. Weston’s men]. Besides, you being no magistrates over them were to consider not what they deserved but what you were by necessity constrained to inflict. Necessity of this, especially of killing so many (and many more, it seems, they would, if they could) I see not. Methinks one or two principals should have been full enough, according to that approved rule, The punishment to a few, and the fear to many. Upon this occasion let me be bold to exhort you seriously to consider of the disposition of your Captain, whom I love, and am persuaded the Lord in great mercy and for much good hath sent you him, if you use him aright. He is a man humble and meek amongst you, and towards all in ordinary course. But now if this be merely from an humane spirit, there is cause to fear that by occasion, especially of provocation, there may be wanting that tenderness of the life of man (made after God’s image) which is meet. It is also a thing more glorious, in men’s eyes, than pleasing in God’s or convenient for Christians, to be a terrour to poor barbarous people. And indeed I am afraid lest, by these occasions, others whould be drawn to affect a kind of ruffling course in the world.
Robinson’s words remain a healthy reminder today. The “staunch” fouls the air we breathe more than any industrial form of air pollution. As America sends her troops all over the world to make it “safe for democracy,” who is going to guarantee the Indian at home that he is safe from his neighbors?
Samuel Sewall saw well what was happening back in 1700, and suggested a better approach in a letter to Sir William Ashhurst:
I should think it requisite that convenient Tracts of Land should be set out to them; and that by plain and natural Boundaries, as much as may be; as Lakes, Rivers, Mountains, Rocks, Upon which for any English man to encourach, should be accounted a Crime. Except this be done, I fear their own Jealousies, and the French Friers will persuade them, that the English, as they encrease, and think they want more room, will never leave till they have crouded them quite out of all their Lands. And it will be a vain attempt for us to offer Heaven to them, if they take up prejudices against us, as if we did grudge them a Living upon their own Earth.
Those boundaries became “reservations,” as the Indians were “crowded quite out of all their lands.” And the reservations remain shameful pockets of squalor, hunger, poverty, and disease. The Pilgrim fathers, and their English sponsors, were indeed out to acquire land and goods, and guns were essential to such acquisition.
THE COMPACT MAYFLOWER CABINET
While the Mayflower was anchored in Cape Cod, the free adult males gathered in the ship’s cabin and drew up what was known as the “Mayflower Compact.” Since the Plymouth Rock settlers did not have a charter, it was to govern them until other provisions were made. Said the compact:
IN YE NAME OF GOD, AMEN! We whose names are underwritten, the loyall subjects of our dread soveraigne Lord, King James, by ye grace of God, of Great Britaine, Franc & Ireland, king, defender of ye faith, &c., haveing undertaken, for ye glorie of God and advancement of ye Christian faith and honour of our king and countrie, a voyage to plant ye first colonie in ye Northerne parts of Virginia, doe by these presents solemnly and mutually in ye presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine our selves together into a civill body politick, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of ye ends aforesaid; and by vertue hearof to enacte, constitute, and frame such just and equall lawes, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meete and convenient for ye general good of ye Colonie, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.
The document was signed by forty-one men.
Historians have said this Mayflower Compact of 1620 “stands with the Virginia Assembly of 1619 as the foundation stones of American institutions. Nothing like these happened anywhere else in the world for almost two centuries.” That historical observation is probably true.
Governor Bradford, of course, would not have claimed to be setting any democratic standards. It was his belief that men are elected to office to govern, and that their decisions should not be subjected to public review. With such a belief, he would fit in well with the modern-day Presidents. Having been elected to office, Bradford could say with conviction that his decisions “will in no way whatsoever be affected” by demonstrations of the populace.
The little group who met in the ship’s cabin to sign the Mayflower Compact symbolizes the exclusiveness that continues to mark American institutions. They were free, adult males. That excludes women, youth, and poor folks (or servants). In fact, Governor Bradford had to write back to his capitalist backers in England, the Adventurers, to assure them that such exclusion was indeed being practiced. Such wild rumors of the kind of democracy being allowed in the colony were circulating in England that, in 1623, Bradford sent personal word that women and children were not voting. I guess it was just assumed that servants had no say, but the Adventurers seemed to be worried that a women’s liberation and a youth movement were taking root in their colony.
Thus the symbolic foundation for institutional racism and exclusion today. Basically, black folks in America do not hate white folks. Of course, you have some black folks who hate turnips. What blacks folks in America hate and resent are the stinking white racist institutions.
I suppose white folks’ arrogance makes them think they are black folks’ problem. But, really, individual white folks are insignificant. Individual expressions of racism never hurt me. A man has a constitutional right to call me a “nigger,” under the Bill of Rights. That’s freedom of speech. But that man better not spit in my face while he’s saying it. Institutional racism in America continues to spit in the face of black folks and choke us to death.
Let me give an example of the insignificance of individual white folks. If all the white folks in America disappeared overnight, leaving no one but blacks, Puerto Ricans, Indians, Chicanos, and Orientals, and we continued to have to take those college entrance exams in white educational institutions, we still couldn’t get in. And it would have nothing to do with the presence of individual white folks. The American system has compressed black folks into condensed, overcrowded urban areas called ghettos, and in such an atmosphere, black folks have had to develop their own culture in order to survive. Yet when a black kid takes the college entrance exam, he does not find one question relating to that black culture. What does a black ghetto kid know or care about the Eiffel Tower or the governments of Europe? But ask him about the failure of the poverty program or if the model cities program has eliminated rats and roaches, and I’ll bet he knows the answer. An Indian youth will not be asked any questions on his college entrance exam about life on the Indian reservation where America has forced him to live. He will be asked a question like “What was Abraham Lincoln’s mother’s name?” If we really wanted to find out how dumb the rest of Americans are, we should let the Indian write the college entrance exam. “What was Sitting Bull’s grandma’s name?”
I meet so many black folks who say, “I just don’t understand these black students today. When I was in college, we fought to integrate the dormitories. Now these black students say they want separate facilities.” I can understand such black folks because they were in the same bag I was in when I went to a predominantly white college. I didn’t have to take the entrance exam. I happened to be the third fastest half-miler in the country, so the coach didn’t want to take any chances on my passing a racist exam. Every time I would try to get into the line waiting to take the entrance exam, they’d snatch me out of line saying, “We already took the exam for you.” I didn’t know what they meant until I saw my entrance application one day with the notation, “The boy runs good.”
Even the menu of the cafeteria of my college reflected institutional racism. The first time I went into the cafeteria I felt like Colonel Sanders at a vegetarian convention. I began to look for something I was used to eating. There was no watermelon in sight. Instead of liver and onions, I found steak and mushrooms. And the steak was so rare the blood was running out. That’s white folks’ food. Down in the black ghetto, the meat we get is so bad we cook it done-er than well.
Of course, if some white colleges knew how unhealthy soul food is, and how many years it is cutting off the lives of black folks, soul food would be “required eating” for all black students.
But I was so glad to get into a white college that I didn’t mind all those “coon” notes the white students used to stick under my door, or those little “nigger” signs they used to leave on the wall. But the young black students today have a different attitude. They are struggling for dignity and manhood. And they are saying, “Before we take all these damn insults, let us live by ourselves.” These young black kids have decided they are not going to be America’s niggers any more, so they are demanding to be taught who they are. They are sure their history goes back further than slavery. If the average white student knew the true history of black folks, he would discover that his own momma comes closer to being that “nigger” than black folks. Black students are realizing that a man without knowledge of himself and his heritage is like a tree without roots.
In the process black folks are being called racists themselves. So many interviewers these days ask me, “Mr. Gregory, what do you think about separatism in the black community?” When white folks get so concerned about separatism, let them get the Indian off the reservation. That is a pure example of separatism, but it seems to be all right with white folks as long as the white system is doing it.
It would be an entirely different matter if the Indian were advocating separatism. If the Indians held a press conference and announced on national television, “We like the reservation and don’t want any more white folks on it,” white folks would call out the army.
Institutional white racism permits some Jews to get upset because they found out that black anti-Semitism exists in the black ghetto. Every Jew in America over fifteen years old knows another Jew who doesn’t like “niggers.” Now they find out some black folks don’t like Jews, why are they so upset? Because in a white racist system the underdog is never permitted to do the same things the man on top does.
Anti-Semitism has always existed in the black community. Many black folks in America who were raised in a large urban area heard their own momma unconsciously make an anti-Semitic statement. Now it is out in the open, and I am personally glad it has been exposed. Such exposure is the only way to begin to solve the problem. If I had cancer, I would want to know it. That’s the first step in trying to find a cure. I hope everything we are doing wrong in the black ghetto reaches the level of public exposure. It is the only sane and sensible way to begin to solve the problem.
The institutional racism of the transportation industry is illustrated by the fact that for many years the only job opportunity on railroad trains open to black folks was the category of pullman porters. As long as we’ve had trains in this country, black folks have never been permitted to drive them. I know some white folks think black folks are dumb, but you really don’t need much sense to drive a train. All you have to do is follow the tracks. Yet if all pullman porters got together one day and made a public announcement saying, “We don’t want to drive your old white trains, or take up your white tickets,” the whole country would be upset and would be saying such an announcement was “reverse racism.”
Since I travel a lot, I am reminded of this country’s institutional racism every time I open my passport. Listed in the passport are the communist countries prohibited for American travel by the United States government—Red China, North Vietnam, and Cuba. Do you think it is an accident that they just happen to be nonwhite communist countries? Americans are permitted by their government to travel to Moscow. Yet every American boy who is killed in Vietnam dies from a bullet supplied by Russia. Every pilot shot down over North Vietnam is the victim of Russian-supplied weaponry. But Russian communists are white.
So black folks do not hate individual white folks. But they do hold white folks individually responsible for the system. A simple illustration will clarify the distinction. Suppose you came by my house with your little daughter, and while you were visiting me, my dog jumped on your daughter and bit her. Who are you going to sue—my dog or me? Of course you would sue me, even though I didn’t bite your daughter. But I would be responsible for the actions of my dog. In like manner white folks are responsible for white racist institutions. Not that all white folks are racists, but all white folks are responsible for the system because it is theirs.
Now suppose you brought your daughter by my house, and my dog jumped up on the couch and bit both your daughter and mine. You would not be so angry with me, because you would realize we both have a similar problem. Then if my dog jumped at your daughter and I reached out to grab the dog and in the process was severely bitten myself, you wouldn’t be mad at all. That is what black folks are saying to white America. Black folks are very upset about being continually bitten by this mad-dog-racist system. And they will stay upset with white folks until they either change the dog’s habits or put themselves in a position where the dog will bite them, too.
Institutional racism and exclusion dwells deep within the soul of America. Though cries for true freedom have echoed in the wilderness throughout American history, democracy continues to be used as a cover for human liberation. Perhaps it is because those who came to these shores claiming to seek God mistakenly believed that God had already found them. As God’s supposedly special elect, they felt free to trust their own impulses. They did not seem to realize that where human life is truly celebrated, where men and women are respected for their humanity, there God finds fit company for divine companionship and is pleased to dwell.
PROPERTY RIGHTS VERSUS HUMAN RIGHTS
Edward Potts Cheyney sums up the colonization motives this way:
The propriety companies of Virginia, Massachusetts, New Netherland, Canada, and other colonies were primarily commercial bodies seeking dividends, and only secondarily colonization societies sending over settlers. This distinction, and the gradual predominance of the latter over the former, is the clew to much of the early history of settlement in America. The commercial object could only be carried out by employing the plan of colonization, but new motives were soon added. The patriotic and religious conditions of the times created an interest in the American settlements as places where men could begin life anew with new possibilities. Hence the company, the home government, dissatisfied religious bodies, and many individuals, looked to the settlements in America with other than a commercial interest.
But commercial preoccupation, having been the initial stimulus for colonization, was too deeply entrenched in the American psyche to be replaced by pure humanitarian motives. Some early forms of colonial democracy, for example, gave voting status only to property holders. Profit motives and the dollar wove their way into the American fabric, and the thread can be traced up to the present moment in American history. Americans continue to display more allegiance to the Jolly Green Jesus than to the Lord of the Church.
Perhaps the Bible itself first indicated this trend. The book of Joel says that young men shall prophesy and the old men will dream dreams. That is precisely the situation in America today. The youth have become the prophets and their parents are dreaming—of money.
Wherever the dollar is held supreme and capitalistic interests dominate, a higher value will always be placed upon property rights than upon human rights. I do not advocate destroying the capitalistic system, but I do say that all Americans should work like hell to put the capitalists into their proper place under the United States Constitution and not on top of it. This country is not governed by the United States Constitution, nor does it function under the democratic process. As long as the capitalists are in control, we will always give property the priority over humanity.
The cigarette industry is a good example. The cigarette industry has been told that there is strong evidence of a direct link between smoking and cancer; yet they fight the FCC to keep their commercials on television and radio. A little kid watching a cigarette commercial sees a cowboy riding a horse stop against the background of a beautiful western sunset, light up a cigarette, and say, “I always smokes me a Marlboro.” Imagine the effect upon that young mind. The kid knows he can never have a horse, but he can get the cigarette. It wouldn’t be so bad if the cowboy rode his horse to a stop right in the middle of a cemetery, lighted up his cigarette, looked around and said, “This is Marlboro country.”
Mayor Daley of Chicago once illustrated his preference for property over humanity. During a tense period of ghetto rebellion he ordered his police to shoot all looters to kill. He never said shoot murderers to kill or shoot dope pushers to kill: murderers and dope pushers deal with human life; looters deal with property.
But to be honest with you, that statement was one of the few statements by Mayor Daley I could agree with. In fact, I sent him a telegram. It read: “Dear Mayor: Your statement pertaining to shooting all looters to kill I agree with wholeheartedly if you make one stipulation. Let’s make it retroactive and let’s first put the gun in the Indian’s hand.”
The dollar gets more respect than human beings. If you lived in the state of Illinois and decided to drive your car down South, there are certain sections where some “Yankee-hater” might shoot you driving down the highway because you had “Land of Lincoln” on your license plate. Yet that same “Yankee-hater” would not burn a five-dollar bill which has both Lincoln’s name and his picture on it.
Even our legal system illustrates the worship of the dollar. If a man kills another man and goes into court accused of first degree murder, he can enter a plea of temporary insanity. But if a man forges a check or embezzles some money, he could never go into court and plead temporary insanity. The man who takes human life might be judged insane. The man who tampers with money or property will never get off that easy.
The national furor over a series of bombings and bomb threats, attributed to militants of the left wing, is another good example of the higher value placed upon property than upon human life. A quick analysis of such bombing incidents reveals that bombs were placed in buildings, triggered to go off at night when the buildings were empty. In many instances warning calls were placed to make sure the buildings were emptied. Newspapers all over America ran editorials saying how vicious and irrational such bombings were.
At about the same time, in Danbury, Connecticut, some bank robbers held up a bank and set off a series of bombs to occupy the attention of the police, thereby enhancing the chances of a clean getaway. They blew up an automobile, during the day, parked in the middle of a crowded shopping center where mothers were shopping with their little babies. Not only was human life threatened but the innocent, defenseless lives of little children. Yet there were no newspaper editorials deploring that act. Most Americans could understand the rationale behind the Danbury bombing. The thugs were after some money, and they would do anything to make sure they got it.
Worship of the dollar produces some strange reactions. If two men broke into an old lady’s house, killed the old lady, and found out she only had a nickel, most people would place a higher value on the lady’s life than the nickel and would say, “It was awful for those inhumane beasts to kill that old woman for a nickel. They ought to get the electric chair.” But if the same two men broke into the old woman’s house, killed her, and found ten million dollars, everybody would say, “She didn’t have any business having that much money in the house.”
So money and property continue to take precedence over pure religious interests in America. The church has become a wealthy property holder, and every time Americans spend their money they are reminded “In God We Trust.”
THE MARKS OF COLONIZATION
The marks of colonization, whether in the Third World or the American colonies, are aggrandizement and slavery or servitude. As many as two-thirds of the original labor force of the English colonies in America were white indentured servants. Under the indenture system a man made a contract with the shipping company for free passage, agreeing to let the ship’s captain sell his services for a number of years to the highest bidder. Hundreds of thousands of white men from England, some religious dissenters, some paupers and prisoners came to the New World in this manner. After the period of service was up—two to seven years—the law required that a man be given a suit of clothes, a little plot of land, some light subsistence, and the status of freedman.
Beyond indenture, the cold, hard capitalistic fact of a land-rich but labor-scarce economy brought with it, from the very beginning, the institution of slavery. Colonists in the New World had three categories of slaves. First, Indians were taken as prisoners of war. English colonists followed a sort of international law of the time that Indians were free men. They could be exploited but not enslaved, except Indians taken in combat or convicted of some other crime. Second were Moors, Turks, and some Jews whose slavery was justified on the grounds that they were all non-Christians. Black folk constituted the third category of slaves. Colonists saw a lot of things wrong with black folks. They were non-Christians and therefore heathens, but black folks were also considered savages, set apart from the rest of humanity, doomed by the curse of Noah to a life of perpetual slavery.
American mythology states that originally black folks were treated the same as white indentured servants; that slavery did not appear until certain colonial statutes of the 1660s; and that the good colonial church folks would have practiced racial equality if they had been left alone to pursue their better instincts. Some very early legal statutes indicate that black folks were the victims of racial discrimination at the outset of colonization. In Virginia, between 1630 and 1646, statutes and resolutions appear: (1) accusing a white man of defiling his body and dishonoring himself because he had intercourse with a black woman; (2) prohibiting black men and no one else from carrying guns; and (3) wording the text in such a way as to indicate that the black man was in the same category as an object and not as a human being. The 1646 Virginia Treaty with the Indians requires that Chief Necotowance “bring in the English prisoners, And all such negroes and guns which are yet remaining either in the possession of himselfe or any Indians.”
The real clincher comes in a 1652 Rhode Island statute which begins, “Whereas, there is a common course practised amongst Englishmen to buy negers, to the end that they may have them for service or slaves forever. . . .” The statute goes on to insist that “no blacke mankind or white” could be made to serve “longer than ten yeares.” Any man violating that statute was to “forfeit to the collonie forty pounds.”
Not that slavery was accepted unchallenged, of course. Men of compassion will always raise their voices in protest. The Germantown Mennonite Resolution Against Slavery of 1688 represents an early voice of protest in colonial America. It said in part:
In Europe there are many oppressed for conscience-sake; and here there are those oppressed which are of a black colour. And we who know that men must not commit adultery—some do commit adultery in others, separating wives from their husbands, and giving them to others: and some sell the children of these poor cretures to other men. Ah! do consider well this thing, you who do it, if you would be done at this manner—and if it is done according to Christianity! You surpass Holland and Germany in this thing. This makes an ill report in all those countries of Europe, where they hear of [it], that the Quakers do here handel men as they handel there the cattle. And for that reason some have no mind of inclination to come hither. And who shall maintain this your cause, or plead for it? Truly, we cannot do so, except you shall inform us better hereof, viz.: that Christians have liberty to practice these things. Pray, what thing in the world can be done worse towards us, than if men should rob or steal us away, and sell us for slaves to strange countries; separating husbands from their wives and children. Being now this is not done in the manner we would be done at; therefore, we contradict, and are against this traffic of men-body. And we who profess that it is not lawful to steal, must, likewise, avoid to purchase such things as are stolen, but rather help to stop this robbing and stealing, if possible. And such men ought to be delivered out of the hands of the robbers, and set free as in Europe. Then is Pennsylvania to have a good report, instead, it hath now a bad one, for this sake, in other countries; Especially whereas the Europeans are desirous to know in what manner the Quakers do rule in their province; and most of them do look upon us with an envious eye. But if this is done well, what shall we say is done evil?
If once these slaves (which they say are so wicked and stubborn men,) should join themselves—fight for their freedom, and handel their masters and mistresses, as they did handel them before; wil these masters and mistresses take the sword at hand and war against these poor slaves, like, as we are able to believe, some will not refuse to do? Or, have these poor negers not as much right to fight for their freedom, as you have to keep them slaves? . . .
Judge Samuel Sewall, who wrote the first abolitionist tract in America, is remembered in the history books, but not for his denunciation of slavery. Rather, he is remembered as one of the presiding judges at the Salem witch trials. Perhaps that is America’s way of getting back at Judge Sewall for his defense of black folks. In The Selling of Joseph (1700), Judge Sewall demolished the existing proslavery arguments by insisting that the inherent immorality of slavery outweighed any possible benefits derived from a system of bondage. Incidentally, for those inclined to want to see Judge Sewall as the first hip white man, he still felt blacks were not the equal of whites. Against the argument that black folks were the descendants of Ham and therefore under the curse of slavery, Sewall said they were really descended from Cush. To those who said black folks were brought out of a pagan country to a place where they could hear the gospel of Jesus Christ, Judge Sewall replied that “evil must not be done that good may come of it.”
Another proslavery argument insisted that African tribes wage war upon one another and that slave ships bring lawful captives taken in such wars. Sewall brought down that argument with a hometown illustration. Said the judge:
An unlawful war can’t make lawful captives. . . . I am sure if some gentlemen should go down to the Brewsters to take air, and fish, and a stronger party from Hull should surprise them and sell them for slaves to a ship outward bound, they would think themselves unjustly dealt with, both by sellers and buyers. And yet it is to be feared, we have no other kind of title to our Negroes.
One man who saw the inherent hypocrisy undergirding English colonization and said so publicly was Roger Williams. Williams arrived in the New World with his wife Mary on February 5, 1631, landing at Nantasket, outside Boston. A religious purist through and through, Williams turned down a good job as teacher at a Boston church because he “durst not officiate to unseparated people.” After a short time at the Plymouth Plantation as a pastor’s assistant, Roger Williams became minister to a Salem church.
Governor Bradford and other Pilgrim officials held Williams in high regard when he first came. In a short time they were trying to run him out of the colony. Bradford made the mistake of asking Roger Williams to do some writing for him. Williams prepared a treatise extended by King Charles. It was no good. Roger Williams correctly believed that the land belonged to the Indians. No kings, wrote Williams, including Charles, were “invested with Right by virtue of their Christianitie to take and give away the Lands and Countries of other men.” Needless to say, it was an unpopular view. It placed the Pilgrim fathers in the category of invading land grabbers rather than free religious spirits. Popular opinion held that all land “discovered” in the name of European monarchs automatically became their property.
Such a view is like my wife and me walking down the street and coming across you and your wife parked in your brand-new automobile. My wife says to me, “That sure is a beautiful car. I sure would like to have one.” So I answer, “Well, Lillian, let’s discover it.” The feeling you would have as we took over your car gives some idea of how the Indians must have felt.
So Roger Williams insisted that the Plymouth colonists had no right to be there, that their title from the King was no good, and that the only legitimate claim they could ever have would have to be worked out in a deal with the Indians. Having dropped his bombshell, Williams went back to Salem. In a short time, Roger Williams was in hot water with the officials of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It seems they didn’t like his treatise any more than Governor Bradford did. Three passages especially irked the Massachusetts officials. In one passage Williams called King James a liar, “because in his patent he blessed God that he was the first Christian Prince that had discovered this land.” Then he charged King James with “blasphemy for calling Europe Christendom, or the Christian world.” Finally, Williams used some particularly uncomplimentary passages from the Book of Revelation to apply personally to King Charles.
The Massachusetts Bay officials tried to get Williams to reject what he had said and take a loyalty oath, but of course he refused. Williams said he had written the treatise for Governor Bradford’s personal use, and that the Governor could burn the paper up if he wanted to. So in 1635 Roger Williams was sentenced to “dep(ar)te out of this jurisdiccòn within sixe weekes” because he had “broached & dyvulged dyvers newe & dangerous opinions, against the authorities of magistrates & yet maintaineth the same without retraccòn.”
Roger Williams was banished, and he went out to found the colony of Rhode Island. The Pilgrim fathers refused to admit their guilt in dealing with the Indians—a guilt which should haunt Thanksgiving Day school assemblies today. The Indian kept the little Mayflower group alive. The Plymouth Plantation’s own “house Indian,” Squanto, who came to visit in the company of Chief Massasoit and stayed, taught the pilgrims how to plant, where to fish and hunt, and how to fertilize the ground.
When the fall harvest yielded a bountiful supply of blessings, the Indians, whose religion was rooted in a gratitude for nature’s provisions, taught the pilgrims to give thanks with a feast of celebration. Americans have continued that feast ever since, but even as Thanksgiving dinners are consumed, the Indians starve on reservations.
If there is a garbage can in heaven, it must be reserved for American Thanksgiving Day prayers.