Speaking & Teaching

Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback was born free 182 years ago on May 10, 1837, in Macon, Georgia. His parents were Eliza Stewart, a freed slave, and Major William Pinchback, his mother's former master, and a white southern slave-owning planter. Today, on my blog I will bring the words of PBS Pinchback during the presidential campaign of James Garfield in 1880. This was the election after the 1876 presidential election in which the Republican Party had all but given back the south to the racist Democratic Party. It was also the start of another century of a different kind of slavery, viler, more oppressive, and denigrating to the descendants of a system of slavery that supposedly ended in 1865.

P.B.S. Pinchback served as Governor of Louisana for a sum total of 34 days during Reconstruction. He was the only black man who served as governor of a southern state during Reconstruction. Pinchback was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1872 along with being nominated to the US Senate both first in the State of Louisana. He was never allowed to serve in the Senate but Pinchback was a spirited supporter of black rights throughout his natural life. PBS Pinchback could have chosen to lead a "passing life" like his sister but his path was a path defined by his acceptance of his mother's race.


America's historical reality can be so much different than what is taught in the classroom or shows up in our schools' history books. Can you imagine this scenario, on December 31, 1862, all 11 rebellious Confederate States decided to drop their​ weapons and end the Civil War. If this would have happened according to the Proclamation of Emancipation set to become effective on 12:01 am on January 1, 1863. The enslaved peoples in those 11 eleven states would still have been held in bondage. Well, 14 years after that proclamation slavery rebounded in another form more vicious than what had occurred in the previous 2 1/2 centuries. Think about that for just a moment and the desperation men like PBS Pinchback felt climbing this mountain for deceit that this country presented them with?

Join me and listen to PBS Pinchback discuss with clarity the hopeless situation that life presented our black ancestors without this nation enforcing reconstruction policies.​

#theblackmanwhoreadsaloud

John Brown was born May 9, 1800, he celebrates his 219th birthday today. When I was in school, John Brown was always depicted in my history books as a crazed, maniacal white man who had no true virtue. He only thirsted after blood and had a limited level of humanity. As I got older and did my own research on John Bown I came to realize how virtuous, honorable and dedicated John Brown was. He lived a pious life and thought that all mankind no matter the color of their skins deserved to be treated equally. In a time when the overwhelming majority of blacks were deemed inferior and was shackled and chained to the insane institution of slavery. John Brown wanted to break the bonds of those chains so that my black ancestors could walk as freedmen.

More than any other white person it was John Brown who sacrificed his life and that of some of his sons to bring freedom to the enslaved blacks being held in bondage in the southern United States. His failed attack on the Harpers Ferry Federal Armory was an instrumental event that strengthened the demand by abolitionists in this nation to finally settle the issue of slavery once and for all. It was that failed attack along with John Brown's public hanging that aroused the level of dissension and conflict between the North and the South, which forged the movement to that penultimate battle of North versus South in a great Civil War. As a result of his death, a tribute was written honoring John Brown. This historical poem was used to motivate northern troops as they headed into battle against the tyrannical Confederate forces.

Today The Black Blackman Who Reads Aloud pays tribute to The Most Honorable John Brown by reciting two versions of the epic poem "John Brown's Body". I hope you will listen to the recitations and understand the magnitude of the sacrifice and determination to the cause of black freedom that John Brown was dedicated too. Had it not been for John Brown, it may have been decades before our ancestors achieved freedom. I am sure that John Brown's Body still stirs with the increasing degree of injustice our black communities still suffer from even in 2019. As the poem says John Brown's Body is smothering in the ground, it burns forever eternal until true equality is reached in this nation.

#theblackmanwhoreadsaloud