Black History is just history....

My daughter, Autumn, who is the equity instructional leader for the Burlington, Vermont school district is visiting this week and I was talking with her about what I should write about for Black History month and she made the point that black history is really just American history.  So, here are a random collection of historical facts.

A slave brought vaccination to the USA.

With the recent pandemic and the life-saving vaccines that have started to turn the tide, appreciation should be given to the man who brought this game-changing practice to the United States. In 1721, a smallpox epidemic struck the city of Boston. This highly contagious virus was killing hundreds during a time of lesser medical advancements, and it was an enslaved man by the name of Onesimus that changed everything. Onesimus was purchased in 1706 for Cotton Mather, a prominent Puritan minister. Though Mather held a great distrust for Onesimus, he knew that the man was clever. Amid the spreading sickness, Onesimus confided to Mather about the practice of inoculations, which had been used in Africa for centuries. Mather brought this vital information to Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, who, despite a major pushback against the idea, managed to successfully inoculate 240 people.

Black Cowboys

White Americans seeking cheap land—and sometimes evading debt in the United States—began moving to the Spanish (and, later, Mexican) territory of Texas during the first half of the 19th century. Though the Mexican government opposed slavery, Americans brought slaves with them as they settled the frontier and established cotton farms and cattle ranches. By 1825, slaves accounted for nearly 25 percent of the Texas settler population. By 1860, fifteen years after it became part of the Union, that number had risen to over 30 percent—that year’s census reported 182,566 slaves living in Texas. While Texas ranchers fought in the war, they depended on their slaves to maintain their land and cattle herds. In doing so, the slaves developed the skills of cattle tending (breaking horses, pulling calves out of mud and releasing longhorns caught in the brush, to name a few) that would render them invaluable to the Texas cattle industry in the post-war era.

But with a combination of a lack of effective containment— barbed wire was not yet invented—and too few cowhands, the cattle population ran wild. Ranchers returning from the war discovered that their herds were lost or out of control. They tried to round up the cattle and rebuild their herds with slave labor, but eventually the Emancipation Proclamation left them without the free workers on which they were so dependent. Desperate for help rounding up maverick cattle, ranchers were compelled to hire now-free, skilled African-Americans as paid cowhands.

In February 1945, the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion was established to deliver mail to American troops, government personnel, and volunteers abroad in England. At the time, many packages and letters were poorly addressed or sent to individuals with common names and little further direction. Members of the service weren’t getting their mail, which had an outsized impact on morale. Officials estimated that, with the disarray of the postal warehouse, it would take around six months for the harrowing backlog to be sorted and delivered.

African-American women were granted the opportunity to travel to serve overseas in late 1944, and the 6888th Battalion was full of eager, well-trained recruits. Led by Major Charity Edna Adams, the women of the “Six Triple Eight” spent time in Oglethorpe, Georgia preparing for service—jumping over trenches, identifying enemy crafts, and marching. Mail delivery in a war zone did not come not without danger, and the women of the Battalion faced several close calls, injuries, and even some instances of death.

Though the reaction to this battalion was mixed, the Six Triple Eight was outstandingly efficient. The battalion worked in long shifts seven days a week and created a brand new tracking system for the mail they received. Rather than accomplishing the sorting of mail in the projected six months, the recruits blew through the task in three.

Black Men and Women Fought in the Civil War

By the end of the Civil War, about 179,000 Black men served as soldiers in the U.S. Army — making up 10% of total troops. An additional 19,000 served in the Navy. Nearly 40,000 Black soldiers died over the course of the war — 30,000 of infection or disease. Black soldiers served in artillery and infantry, and performed all noncombat support functions that sustain an army. Black carpenters, chaplains, cooks, guards, laborers, nurses, scouts, spies, steamboat pilots, surgeons and teamsters also contributed to the war cause. There were nearly 80 Black commissioned officers.  Black men fighting in the Civil War have aften been depicted in movies, but little has been said about the Black women. These women, who couldn’t formally join the Army, served as nurses, spies and scouts. The most famous was Harriet Tubman, who scouted for the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers.

The Day Slavery Began

The history of black people in America begins in slavery with families ripped apart in the most brutal slavery system the world had known.On August 20, 1619, “20 and odd” Angolans, kidnapped by the Portuguese, arrive in the British colony of Virginia and are then bought by English colonists. The arrival of the enslaved Africans in the New World marks a beginning of two and a half centuries of slavery in North America.They were originally kidnapped by Portuguese colonial forces, who sent captured members of the native Kongo and Ndongo kingdoms on a forced march to the port of Luanda, the capital of modern-day Angola. From there, they were ordered on the ship San Juan Bautista, which set sail for Veracruz in the colony of New Spain. As was quite common, about 150 of the 350 captives aboard the ship died during the crossing. Then, as it approached its destination, the ship was attacked by two privateer ships, the White Lionand the Treasurer. Crews from the two ships kidnapped up to 60 of the Bautista’s enslaved people. It was the White Lion which docked at Virginia Colony's Point Comfort and traded some of the prisoners for food on August 20, 1619.