May. 10, 2019
PBS Pinchback Speaks With Clarity On The Struggles Of Black America in 1880
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.