The Humanist Group

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  Slavery by Another name doesn’t masquerade as a novel but the story is well-told and the characters drawn from history help us consider the realities of a black person’s fearful existence in the era of post-emancipation neoslavery. “Where mob violence or the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black citizens periodically, the return of forced labor as a fixture in black life ground pervasively into the daily lives of far more African Americans.” In Slavery by Another Name, Doug Blackmon chronicles the shocking details of a turn-of-the-century secret service investigation into post-emancipation slavery that led to large-scale indictments of white southern convict leaseholders and their conspirators and the judicial decisions that amounted to little more than slaps on the wrist and enabled atrocities to continue into the 1940s. Notorious and powerful perpetrators were acquitted or merely fined (at affordable costs that their profitable industries made back using forced labor), despite almost ritual abuse of men, women, and children held in slavery on dubious, trumped-up criminal charges or in debt peonage, which had been made a federal crime in the late 1860s. Many southern lawyers succeeded at arguing that slavery had not actually been made a crime since no statutes had yet been made despite the emancipation proclamation and the thirteenth amendment. Indeed, where federal investigators initially stirred near panic among slaveholding farmers when they first arrived in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, the impotence of the investigations was becoming richly obvious. Blackmon’s research reveals the incomprehensible, that a federal grand jury (made up of mostly white but a also a few black jurors) and a federal judge, hoping to deter others and who convicted some of the slaveholders in 1903, actually failed to champion the cause of protecting Americans from being enslaved, laying a merely symbolic sentence on the men who went right out and did their dirty work again up until World War II! President Teddy Roosevelt, his administration, and many northern critics even dropped the cause as it eventually became overwelmingly difficult to pursue, especially considering the intimidation factor brought on by prominent white citizens threatening anyone who spoke up, accusing them of being “nigger lovers.” There were a few heroes that Blackmon depicts, such as Alabama’s U.S. Attorney Warren S. Reese, who seemed to stick with the project longer than most despite severe backlash from his southern peers. Admittedly, I was inclined to believe that pre-war slaveholders treated slaves in a manner that guarded their health and strength as a valuable investment. After emancipation, however, this book depicts a different mindset; gone was the sense of preserving a valuable possession that provides a lifetime of hard work, replaced by the expendable convict that any white man could produce simply by nabbing another black man off the street and falsely accusing him of a petty crime. Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery’s grip on U.S. society–its intimate connections to present-day wealth and power, the depth of its injury to millions of black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end–can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life. This Pulitzer-prizewinning book reveals facts that should be incorporated into every American child’s history curriculum. Many of us were never made aware of slavery that went on after the Civil War and halfway through the 20th century. Regardless of our collective moral conscience, those in positions of political or fiscal power over human beings, regardless of either’s race or ethnicity, have always and will continue to exploit humans for forced labor. According to news stories in National Geographic, NPR, and Time, slavery is by no means an artifact of the past; it’s alive and well in the 21st century, in democracies such as our nation and throughout the world. Check the WRL catalog for Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II A PBS documentary film based upon the book and Blackmon’s research was aired in February, 2012, and has been made available for streaming from pbs.org.  
   
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06202008/profile2.html  
                         
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                                A Few Latter-Day Bigots
Bull Connor
George Wallace
Orval Faubus
Sheriff Jim Clark  - possibly the worst of all
          
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Play together - just click both.

   Discussion with Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins  

  
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Resources:

Web:                      graypanthers
                             brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/maggie_kuhn.html
Books:                   No Stone Unturned

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A humanist group - so sagacious,
In their readings were simply audacious.
Though they always found time
For writers sublime,
They avoided the merely salacious. (Bill Tuohy)

There was an old preacher from Maine
Who truly was not so humane.
He ranted and raved
That souls would be saved
When women in their homes remained.  (Diane Bauman)

Stuck with the name Stoutenborough
Early I learned to my sorrough
That spelling it out
Means living in doubt
That I'll finish it sometime tomorrough. (Don Stoutenborough)

If you've wondered from whence comes the source
Of most politicians discourse,
Your search is now ended, 
You'll find it's descended
Unchecked, from the rear of a horse.  (Sally Rosoff)

With these immigrants what shall we do?
They take precious jobs, it is true.
Plant our fields, cook our food,
Clean our homes, raise our brood --
Endanger self-sufficiency, too! (Elaine Grist)

Bill once thought as clear as a bell,
But now things are going to hell.
Though mostly intact,
The bell is now cracked;
Sometime later he'll be but a shell. (Committee!)

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.  Shelley (1792-1822)
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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                            

                          The Humanist Group

Humanism, as I see it, is a secular ideology which espouses reason, ethics and justice while specifically rejecting supernatural and religious dogma as a basis for morality and decision making. Where rationality does not provide an answer, we do not resort to supernatural explanations.
Our Humanist Group subscribes to a philosophically secular, non-theistic point-of-view towards our origins and our lives, so that an ethical and moral approach to appropriate actions is of critical concern to us. And while we subscribe to non-supernatural origins of the universe and of our existence, and much admire the new and developing cosmology, our supreme aim in life here-and-now is to contribute, as best and while we can, to a more decent and accepting society that embraces the well-being of all humanity.
For me, at least, atheism and agnosticism are not enough since they are silent on the larger questions of values and meaning. If there is no meaning in life ordained from on high, then what meaning can we work out for ourselves? If an afterlife – an eternal life if you will – is simply illusory, then how do we do our best with the only life we will ever have? 

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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly In his characteristically provocative fashion, Dennett, author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, calls for a scientific, rational examination of religion that will lead us to understand what purpose religion serves in our culture. Much like E.O. Wilson (In Search of Nature), Robert Wright (The Moral Animal), and Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene), Dennett explores religion as a cultural phenomenon governed by the processes of evolution and natural selection. Religion survives because it has some kind of beneficial role in human life, yet Dennett argues that it has also played a maleficent role. He elegantly pleads for religions to engage in empirical self-examination to protect future generations from the ignorance so often fostered by religion hiding behind doctrinal smoke screens. Because Dennett offers a tentative proposal for exploring religion as a natural phenomenon, his book is sometimes plagued by generalizations that leave us wanting more ("Only when we can frame a comprehensive view of the many aspects of religion can we formulate defensible policies for how to respond to religions in the future"). Although much of the ground he covers has already been well trod, he clearly throws down a gauntlet to religion. (Feb. 6)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

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