Town’s Black History celebration; ugly scene at Concord AME Zion Church
Resistance from repression did not begin with the Civil Rights era — it was there from the beginning in Africa, Dr. Cynthia Fleming, a University of Tennessee, Knoxville professor, told an audience during Town of Farragut Museum Committee’s Black History Month Program in Farragut Community Center Sunday afternoon, Feb. 26.
(See related photos in West Side Faces)
The program also featured the presentation of Colors by Sunsphere Squadron Civil Air Patrol, music by W. James Taylor and a reading of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from a Birmingham jail by Edmund Terry, a student representative to the Farragut Museum Committee.
“‘…I am here in Birmingham because injustice is here,’” Terry read the late Rev. King’s explanation in response to public clergymen’s criticism of his methods of protest and resistance.
“‘Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town,’” Dr. King wrote in his letter as read by Terry. “‘Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid. .…I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
“‘We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,’” King further stated as read by Terry. “‘Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.’”
“I’ve experienced segregation, I know what that feels like,” Fleming said.
While she has endured discrimination during her lifetime, she also has seen resistance.
Fleming took the audience on a journey from the 1600s, when Black people — mostly young men — were taken from their homes in the interior of West Africa, forced to march to the coast and then loaded on slave ships to either the Caribbean or North America.
“They did resist, but they were outgunned,” she said. “They faced diseases, such as scurvy and fixed melancholia, on the slave ships; being bartered off to slave owners, beatings, rape, names changed and food deprivation as slaves; the refusal to allow them to hold land or vote after the Civil War — but they resisted.
“They found ingenious ways to resist,” Fleming added.
“Many ran away with help of abolitionists. There were white people with a conscience who tried to help. The Quakers, a religious group, were among those who helped. Slaves, such as William and Ellen Craft, would save money from skilled work, or slaves would mail themselves to freedom like Henry Brown.”
Moreover, “Black cooks poisoned people,” Fleming said. “Others pretended to be sick.”
One woman, tired of being raped, killed her master and threw him into the fireplace of her cabin. “They never gave in completely,” she said. Even with the Supreme Court ruling of Dred Scott vs. Sanford, which ruled “once a slave, always a slave.”
In 1865, with the 13th Amendment, followed by the 14th and 15th Amendments that outlawed slavery and gave Black people the right to become citizens, then the right to vote, they faced oppression and the Ku Klux Klan — but she said they remained hopeful.
One of their biggest forms of resistance came with their drive to get an education. “They knew it was something that kept them from having, so they wanted it,” Fleming said.
However, Fleming said World War II in the 1940s was a turning point in America, as the United States took the lead in foreign affairs and Black men fought along white men.
“Black men have fought in every single conflict, but they still were not allowed to vote,” she said. “They were seething with anger.”
They faced “lynchings” but they were motivated to resist.
Fleming is the first Black woman to earn a doctorate in history from Duke University and the first Black woman hired as a flight attendant. She joined UT in 1982 as part of its history faculty, earning tenure in 1987 then spending the next 10 years overseeing the growth of UT’s African-American Studies program.
