Author: Aaron James

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Opinion The Last Word

Minority Rule: Want Real Majority Leadership? Vote!

CREDIT: Wikimedia Commons

Imagine living in a country where a minority group that comprised a mere 6 percent of the population was in complete control. A country where a full 94 percent of the populace had no say whatsoever in their own governance. Does this sound like some future dystopian version of America, given our present trajectory? Sorry. This was the political reality of America at the time of the first presidential election in 1789.

Many of those who signed our Declaration of Independence would have argued that the phrase “all men are created equal” only referred to land-owning Christian white males. At the time, the Colonists were still bound to that lowest form of oligarchical governance, the monarchy. The above statement was not penned as an enlightened declaration of inclusion, but solely to invoke a political break from that monarchy.

Wikimedia Commons

Thomas Jefferson

Thankfully, Thomas Jefferson, though himself a slave owner, was also a student of the Enlightenment. He understood that the prophetic words, however he had to spin them at the time, would eventually come to be taken more literally. Fifty years after the signing, Jefferson said of the Declaration: “May it be to the world the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.”

At the time of the Revolution, free Americans were divided into two classes. You were either somebody, which almost exclusively meant being born into wealth and privilege, or you were nobody. And nobodies, even white male nobodies, were not allowed to vote. Additionally, prior to 1828, some states’ “religious tests” required voters to be professed Protestants. The last vestige of the property ownership exclusion was not abolished until 1856. Even then, some states continued to disallow non-taxpaying citizens the vote for another half-century.

The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 opened the voting booth to naturalized, non-native-born citizens. Although the Fifteenth Amendment extended the right to vote to former male slaves in 1870, most Southern states — Tennessee being foremost among them — concocted such Jim Crow-era stumbling blocks as poll taxes and literacy tests that persisted until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Women, regardless of race or status, could not vote prior to ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. The final expansion of American voter eligibility did not occur until 1970, when the minimum voting age was lowered from 21 to 18.

Now try to imagine living in a country where only 43 percent of the population was in control. Even after all of our incredible progress in the ensuing 227 years since the first presidential election, that’s the percentage of the total population who voted in 2016. Certainly an improvement, but still hardly representative.

So here we are, 20 years into the 21st century, and still we have to ask ourselves to what degree do “ignorance and superstition” continue to rule our lives? Although Tennessee ranks 14th in the nation in terms of our number of eligible voters, we are 49th when it comes to actual voter turnout. In 2016, 2.4 million Tennesseans stayed home and did nothing, which is not only inexcusable, but unacceptable. The next time anyone tries to convince you that Tennessee can’t be “flipped,” consider the fact that nearly twice as many of our people failed to uphold their civic duty as voted for Trump in 2016.

As we continue to transform into a more enlightened and egalitarian nation, the pace of this effort will be wholly dependent upon the action, or inaction, of every eligible voter. We can only “assume the blessings and security of self-government” when every person who can legally vote, votes. Without question, 2020 will be the single most significant election since 1860 — the election that was immediately followed by the bloodiest decade in American history. And the outcome could very well be determined by those who, in the past, for whatever reason, have chosen not to participate.

If you care about your country, if you care about preserving democracy for future generations, your job this election is not only to vote, but to motivate every other citizen who sat out 2016, especially those who would not have had the right to vote in 1789, to vote in 2020 like their lives depended on it.

Voter registration deadline is October 5th. Early Voting is October 14th through October 29th. Last day to request an absentee ballot is October 27th. The election is November 3rd.

Aaron James is a seventh generation Tennessean, retired architect (Texas and New York), self-published author, and Independent Centrist candidate for U.S. Senate.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Stepping Up in Memphis

Deputy Chief Sharonda Hampton, in her recent address upon being appointed the new head of Memphis Police Department’s homicide division, said “We can do our part, but we can not do it without the community. I challenge everyone to step up.” 

Speaking as one of many working to revamp Neighborhood Watch in Cooper-Young, I couldn’t agree more.

For over a century, the economic vacuum of eastern sprawl has sucked the life out of the rest of the city, leaving behind little more than blight and urban decay in many neighborhoods. It started with the first “white flight” suburb of Annesdale Park, picked up speed with the plotted demise of the trolley car and subsequent rise of the automobile, and took off like a fighter jet with the post-WWII baby boom and German-inspired roadway improvements.

By the time Congress introduced the Fair Housing Act of 1968 — which sought to undo more than three decades of forced segregation imposed by the National Housing Act of 1934 — it was too late, the momentum of economic realities and political will was too deeply engrained.

Now, a decade and a half into what was supposed to be our Jetsonian future, the phenomenon of eastern sprawl is fueled by “anyone who can afford it” flight, leaving increasingly desperate segments of our population left to endure entire swaths of worsening decay.

The 2010 census lays out in clear detail the precise pattern of this flight. On a recent two-hour bus tour hosted by newly elected (and very promising) city Councilwoman Jamita Swearengen, whose District 4 encompasses the very heart of our inner city, I couldn’t help but gaze in utter bewilderment at what I saw. The fabric of inner-city Memphis is ripping to shreds. And there is nothing any one person can do about it — not Hampton, not some new exorbitantly salaried police director, not even the mayor himself.

On the leadership side, we have to stop chasing the tail of the almighty dollar out the Poplar corridor and refocus our energies on making the inner-city population feel like something other than third-class citizens. It’s time for the vortex of the economic engine to close back in on itself, for the city to recognize its two greatest, and presently most overlooked resources: the tens of thousands of inner-city residents ripe for gainful employment and the thousands of inner-city acres ripe for redevelopment.

On the citizen side, we have to follow precisely what Hampton advises. We all have to “step up,” and there is no greater, or more proven, method for doing so than Neighborhood Watch. Those not familiar with the developmental history of Memphis are left no choice but to believe that things simply are the way they are, and there is nothing they can do about it. But nothing could be further from the truth. Just as a home is more than a mere collection of sticks and plaster, so too is a neighborhood — or a city — more than a mere collection of domiciles. It’s time for us all to do our duty, for ourselves and for each other.

Don’t get me wrong, although my family ties to MPD date back to the 1870s, prior to my most recent involvement with Neighborhood Watch, the closest I ever came to a police station was when my Boys Club was in the former Mounted Police horse barn on Barksdale behind the Midtown Walgreen’s. This does not lessen my commitment to civic duty. We all owe allegiance to the men and women in blue, but until we are ready to uniform 75 percent of the population and assign them in rotating shifts to guard the remaining 25 percent of us, we must, each and every one of us, accept the responsibility of being stewards of the community.
To learn more about how to start or revitalize a Neighborhood Watch program in your community, contact your local MPD precinct, the office of Memphis Area Neighborhood Watch, or visit www.nnw.org. Or better yet, visit our website at www.cywatch.org. Drop us a line, and one of us will be glad to walk you through what we have learned so far.

Aaron James is a retired architect whose family roots in Memphis and Shelby County date to 1827. He is researching his family for a soon-to-be self-published book (www.facebook.com/AmericaAFamilyPerspective).

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

A Stained Heritage

Bolivar Bulletin, June 26th, 1891: “J.R. Cottingim, of Teague, discovered a negro section hand playing cards last week with his boys, aged twelve and fourteen years. He procured a shotgun and emptied the contents in the breast and shoulder of the negro. The negro is fattening. Cottingim has not been arrested.”

It’s difficult to say which is more appalling — that a man was murdered for such an innocent offense, that the perpetrator went unpunished, or that the local paper printed such a braggadocio account. This story smacks not only of a hate crime, not just part of a conspiracy of suppression, but of complete and utter indifference.

The favored son of a privileged family, enjoying the unlimited excesses of a limited sphere of reality, acting entirely as he pleased, with no regard to the consequences that did not exist.

J.R. Cottingim was a third great-uncle of mine. In surfing online digital newspapers for word of my third great-grandfather, Leonidas Cottingim, I found this quaint tale of my great-great-grandmother’s brother. In light of the recent insanity in South Carolina, I thought I might share some of what family research has revealed about the white-supremacist mindset. 

Nineteenth-century America was burdened with a rigid social caste system, which was nothing more than the festering carcass of the centuries-old feudal system imported by our founding fathers. Having roots that run the gamut of said system (Laura Bush is a sixth cousin; my maternal grandfather was a sharecropper’s son) has provided a rare opportunity to study the phenomenon from various perspectives.

The most difficult challenge anyone can face is a challenge to his or her belief system. 

A white supremacist was and is nothing more than a person conditioned to that particular mindset, lacking sufficient education or cultural perspective to realize they were spoon-fed an irrational premise. But for as long as they held to this belief, even the lowliest white man could more readily accept his station in life, as long as he had the black man to look down upon — casually overlooking the fact that he could never equal his betters, regardless.

My uncle was conditioned to think of himself as above the law and his victim to think of himself as unworthy. The newspaper editor was conditioned to stoke the flames, and apparently everyone in late-19th-century Hardeman County accepted it all as the normal course of events. 

Socially fabricated frailties such as economic division and racial separation, along with the mindset required for their acceptance and perpetuation, are also matters of conditioning. But when an entire social structure buys into a particular way of thinking, who among them has the wherewithal to know any better?

Thankfully, we have finally reached a point in our social evolution where we can break the bonds of ignorance. One more reason to be proud of Memphis is the fact that so far we have avoided the sorts of insanities that have recently troubled other parts of the country. 

But if we were to fall prey to such, I would be among the first to show up to defend 21st-century reason against 19th-century delusions — to protect those who only wish to live in peace from those who seek violence for the sake of violence.

So I say to those who still hold to my ancestor’s misguided and antiquated beliefs: It is time to accept that we are evolving away from discernible races. A hundred years from now people won’t even know black, white, yellow, or brown. We’ll all just be a smoother shade of caramel. Along the way, maybe we will achieve a little socioeconomic normalcy while we’re at it. A few may find the transition difficult, but that is one minority we can definitely live without. If you insist on racial purity, I would suggest you go live with the Inuit, although I doubt they would have you.

Education, perspective, and time are the enemies of the irrational mindset. What would be revealed about us by an objective review of what we have been conditioned to accept and perpetuate? What will history say about what we so loosely call society? It’s not about casting stones or lashing out, it’s about finding the strength within ourselves to see beyond. To know for ourselves what is right and to act on those beliefs.

Aaron James, a retired Memphis architect, has spent the past few years researching his family for a soon-to-be-published book titled America: A Family Perspective.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

The Man Who Saved Nathan Bedford Forrest

Private William H. Terry

At a time when the image of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest is shrouded in both mystery and controversy, and a debate rages as to whether the hero of yore should be considered a villain to be scorned, this remarkable account by a descendant of one of Forrest’s calvarymen sheds light on both the man and his likely place in history.

William H. Terry was a young man of privilege from middle Tennessee when he signed up to join the Confederate Cavalry on October 30th 1861. He soon found himself part of an elite military unit of 40 well-mounted, well-heeled, and well-armed men, handpicked from some of the finest families of the region. After the raw recruits were initially drilled and trained at Carnton Plantation south of Franklin, they were assigned the designation of Company F, relocated to Camp Cheatham in Robertson County, and on December 11th, joined the 8th Battalion Tennessee Cavalry with Lieutenant Colonel James W. Starnes at their head.

The battalion was immediately attached to Major General William J. Hardee’s Central Army of Kentucky headquartered at Bowling Green. Two weeks after establishing their base camp near Russellville Kentucky, orders came to confirm reports of Union troop movements in the vicinity of Rumsey and Calhoun on the Green River. On December 26th, Starnes headed north riding with Company F being led by Captain McLemore, and by the next afternoon was face to face with the enemy in the tiny hamlet of South Carrolton. After a brief skirmish, Starnes and his men sought refuge in the direction of Greenville, where they were treated by the local townsfolk to a belated Christmas dinner. It was there, on the morning of December 28th, less than two months after joining the war, that Private Terry met the soon to be infamous Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Forrest, headquartered in Hopkinsville, had also been ordered to reconnoiter in the direction of Rumsey. The command, now 300 strong, left Greenville headed north on the Rumsey Road (181), with an advance guard led by Captain Merriweather, Forrest with two companies of men at the head of the main column, Major Kelly with two companies in the center, and Starnes, having been assigned command of the final two companies, in the rear. Captain McLemore and his Company of Tennesseans provided the rear guard for the main force. When word came from the scouts that Union troops had been spotted just a few miles ahead, the pace of the well trained cavalry mounts hastened as word quickly spread through the ranks. Starnes and McLemore, frustrated by the pace of Kelly, surpassed the slower troops and soon found themselves with Merriweather and Forrest as part of a mostly unorganized band of compatriots eager for a fight.

During the initial engagement just south of Sacramento Kentucky, Starnes and McLemore – now in the thick of it – were ordered to flank left, while Kelly – whose men had come up after Forrest had briefly checked the general advance – ordered to flank right. Forrest himself shares what happened next (as recorded in his report of December 30th): “The men sprang to the charge with a shout, while the undergrowth so impeded the flankers that the enemy, broken by the charge and perceiving the movement on their flanks, broke in utter confusion, and, in spite of the efforts of a few officers, commenced a disorderly flight at full speed, in which the officers soon joined. We pressed closely on their rear, only getting an occasional shot, until we reached the village of Sacramento, when, the best mounted men of my companies coming up, there commenced a promiscuous saber slaughter of their rear, which was continued at almost full speed for 2 miles beyond the village, leaving their bleeding and wounded strewn along the whole route. At this point { Union} Captain Bacon, and but a little before Captain Burges, were run through with saber thrusts, and Captain Davis thrown from his horse and surrendered as my prisoner, his shoulder being dislocated by the fall. The enemy, without officers, threw down their arms and depended alone upon the speed of their horses.”

The only mention that Forrest makes of Private Terry in his report is to count him by name among the day’s losses. However, General Thomas Jordan, in his 1868 book The Campaigns of Lieut.-Gen. N.B. Forrest, which was compiled from Forrest’s personal journals and correspondence, writes: “Private W.H. Terry, of Lieutenant-Colonel Starnes’s detachment, riding with his commanding officer { Forrest}, after conspicuous gallantry, while engaged single-handed with a Federal trooper whom he was hammering with his exhausted rifle, was run through the heart by Captain Davis; and thus fell one of the most daring members of the command.” It was H. Gerald Starnes, in writing of his ancestor’s contribution to the Confederate cause, who describes Private Terry as “spurring his horse to Forrest’s side”, as the Lieutenant Colonel was fighting off a coordinated attack. It was immediately after killing Terry that Captain Davis – who had in fact been thrusting for Forrest – was thrown from his horse and captured. One can only speculate how the sword that sent Terry to his Maker could have changed the course of history had Davis remained unencumbered, in what history as we know it marks as Forrest’s first cavalry engagement.

Alexander Great Terry, the now fatherless infant son of Private Terry, would grow to become my mother’s, biological father’s, father. As a Southern White male, whose roots in this country run as deep as those of the country itself, I neither feel undeservedly proud nor unjustly ashamed of my heritage, I simply try to understand it. I am, however, compelled to offer a few words of reason as regards the recent affront to all things Confederate.

It is unfortunate that we live in a world of ignorance and hate. It is unfortunate that there are those among us who pick and choose fragments of history out of context, to twist and manipulate to fit their own means. The world as we know it is the end result of everything that has ever happened throughout the entire course of human history, not just those few events we were forced to memorize in high school. If we have any hope of continuing to advance as a people, we must learn to learn from out past mistakes, not through vitriol and self-righteousness, but through understanding. And we must accept when it is time to move on.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was one of the most effective leaders on either side of the Civil War. It was only right that Memphis of a century ago should want to honor her adopted son. But that Memphis no longer exists. We have to accept that Forrest Park is a thorn in the side of a large percentage of our population, black and white. Just as Charleston is evolving to deal with a flag that had been twisted into a symbol of hate, so too must we deal with this. It is time to return the General and his wife to Elmwood where they were initially interred. And the statue, which is considered one of the finest equestrian public park statues in the country, should go with them. And if there’s no room in their old family plot, they’re welcome to mine.

Aaron James is a retired architect turned writer and historian from Memphis, who has spent the past two and a half years researching his family for his soon to be self-published book entitled “America: A Family Perspective.” You can follow his progress and latest findings on the book’s Facebook page at: www.facebook.com/AmericaAFamilyPerspective.