Where are our Tubmans?
This Bill Has Come Due
By James R Smith
To all those who have been pulling down statues of Confederate losers, congratulations.
You know we have more work to do. Number one in the reordering of our symbols should be kicking that slave owner and indian killer, Andrew Jackson, off our twenty dollar bills and replacing him with “General” Harriet Tubman.
Plans were made a decade ago to make the switch in 2020. Then, along came Trump who said, not in my administration. So, let’s kick both Jackson and Trump out of the public consciousness. And let’s get Biden on record that he will follow through by putting Harriet Tubman on the Twenty as soon as he takes office. We need this to let us feel good about our currency.
Putting Tubman on the $20 bill will mean a lot more than dragging murdering Southerners off their horses. While a few thousand people might notice that General so-and-so is not where he used to be, billions will take careful note of the Tubmans they have just been handed, or pulled out of the ATM machine.
There could be no better upgrade. Before the civil war, Tubman ran an underground railroad that helped hundreds of slaves escape to Canada. She risked her life over and over so others could be free. Harriet Tubman had planned to join John Brown at the Harpers Ferry uprising but fell ill and couldn’t participate. Instead of the beginning of the end of slavery, Brown was captured and executed. During the Civil War, Tubman commanded troops in raids on Southern plantations. Her tactical brilliance became a model for the Union army. In one expedition, known as the Combahee River Raid, she and her troops freed more than 700 slaves.
Andrew Jackson, on the other hand, was a low-life bully who was hated by Blacks and Indians, alike. He was in the aristocracy of the slave-holding South, where he owned huge plantations in Tennessee and Mississippi. It is estimated that during his life he owned more than 300 slaves.
During his life, Jackson was known as an Indian fighter. He fought a war with the Muscogee (Creek) nation in 1813-14, killing 800 warriors in one battle. He also invaded Florida, a Spanish territory at the time, without any instructions from the U.S. government, in order to fight the Seminole Indian tribe. When he was elected president in 1828, he said his first priority was the forced removal of the “Five Civilized Tribes,” from their age-old homes in the Southern states to Oklahoma. By 1833, the tribes began their 900-mile trek into the wilderness. It became known as the “Trail of Tears.” Of the 60,000 Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Chickasaws and Choctaws who began the removal, approximately 15,000 died.
That is the man who is on our Twenty Dollar Bill. We need marches, media buzz and a boycott of the Twenty until there are Tubmans everywhere.
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About those statues
There is a list of Confederate monuments and memorials, that are still standing, on Wikipedia. Many have been taken down by protesters, and some by cities and counties, but more remain. The public attitude toward the monuments, and to their removal, has shifted dramatically with the mass protests of 2020.
Picture a Black family taking a day for an outing or a picnic in a local park, when suddenly they look up and see a statue of a slave owner or otherwise oppressive person staring down at them. What do they tell their kids? This is supposed to be a day of fun and bonding, not a history lesson. Other descendants of slaves may have to look at their ancesters’ tormentors on their daily route to work or to a store. It would be similar to children of concentration camp victims in Germany having to look up at a smiling Goebbels or Himmler or Hiltler. Why did it take 155 years since the end of the Civil War to take them down? Of course, some are not that old. According to the list of Confederate monuments, some were erected as recently as the 1960s.
___________________________Rosa Parks waits for her bus in Eugene, Oregon
But we can’t leave empty pedestals behind. Quick, before the land they are on becomes a new Taco Bell. We should come up with a procedure and financing to put up real people’s heroes who will continuously remind us of the cost of freedom. Each community should receive public funding to hire progressive sculptors to create monuments that will make us proud. Voters should be urged, before the vote, to consider worthy candidates of all ethnic groups and genders. After a choice is made, schools should hold classes about why this or that person is worthy of a statue or other form of memorial.
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After All These Years, U.S. Must Abide By A Treaty With Native Americans
The Supreme Court, July 9, affirmed that Indians are a sovereign people, when they have a treaty to prove it. By a 5-4 decision, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and surprisingly, Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, sided with the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma by deciding they have certain sovereign rights because they live on a reservation.
Gorsuch, who wrote the majority decision, pointed out that the Congress had never revoked the tribe’s reservation rights, therefore they still exist. For those who wanted to deny that the tribe, as a group, had sovereign rights, embarrassing facts kept emerging, such as that there is an elected tribal government, including a supreme court. The tribe’s annual budget is about $350,000 and there are hundreds of employees.
The caseat issue was not political, but concerned a convict named Jimcy McGirt, who is a member of the neighboring Seminole Nation. He committed sexual crimes, including child molestation, in the territory of the Muscogee Nation. For this, the state of Oklahoma sentenced him to a prison term of 1,000 years plus life. He sued, saying the state had no jurisdiction. Gorsuch and the other four justices upheld his suit on the grounds of the sovereignty provisions of the 1830 treaty, which the U.S. had been trampling on for nearly 200 years. All other Native Americans who were tried by Oklahoma state courts and are being held in prison are being held illegally. It is likely that McGirt will be transferred to Muscogee or federal jurisdiction, where another trial will be held under the auspices of the tribe or federal government.
Another case, Sharp v. Murphy, testing the validity of the tribe’s reservation status was also resolved in line with the McGirt decision. The decisions mean that Oklahoma now has limited jurisdiction over nearly half of its previous domain.
The Muscogee tribe was forced to vacate their ancestral lands in Georgia and Alabama in the 1830s and move to Oklahoma, where they were given a reservation. Most of their original lands became the property of rich, white slave owners. The four other “Civilized Tribes,” the Cherokees, Seminoles, Chickasaws and Choctaws, also had their land stolen and were given reservation status, as well. Therefore, they will probably benefit from this decision. It may also apply to all other tribes with reservation status throughout the country. The decision could spark the beginning of a new upsurge in Indian political consciousness like the one led by the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the last century.
_________Trail of Broken Treaties - American Indian Movement (1969-1973)
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