There's a gremlin at the Westminster "Y." He (and I'm pretty sure it's a he) has been depositing hateful pamphlets in the men's locker room.
One was titled "Subversive Mosques: Why Barack Obama Won't Declare War on Radical Islam." The latest is dubbed "Racial Agitator in the White House." As you can easily discern from the titles, the pamphlets are full of over-the-top, apocalyptic bombast crafted in such a way as to frame the president as the worst person ever to inhabit the office. The David Horowitz Freedom Center is the publisher. Horowitz is a former Marxist turned neo-con, probably because it pays better. Among the accomplishments in his checkered career are his own claim that he committed treason in 2000, and a 2002 book on reparations for slavery that was totally debunked when his research was checked.
The 40-page "Racial Agitator" pamphlet claims that Obama is at the heart of this country's racial divisiveness; that it "was his lever for transforming America and staying in power"; that he turns political disagreements into racial conflicts; and that, "faced with political setbacks," he has "given up on being the president of the United States of America to become the president of Black America, Latino America and other divided and conquered Americas."
As I read the pamphlet's purple prose that grew more strident with every page, I was reminded of how Obama's election was supposed to be a harbinger of our living in a post-racial society. But then began an avalanche of white vs. black incidents, from Trayvon Martin's murder to the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates for breaking into his own home, and from the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, to the fatal injuries of Freddie Gray, followed by the Baltimore protests and the Black Lives Matter movement. Today, the nation and our state appear as divided as ever.
There is much irony in this, given last Sunday's 150th anniversary of the 1864 Maryland constitution. In this document, drafted by the General Assembly on Nov. 1, 1864, the so-called "Free State" finally abolished slavery. Many are unaware that this epochal feat had not been accomplished by President Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863. It is true that his executive order declared that all slaves "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free," but it applied only to the Confederate states. Enslaved African-Americans in the border states of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri and the newly independent territory of West Virginia were not affected and were still considered the property of their owners. The U.S. did not formally abolish slavery and involuntary servitude until the passage and ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865. Maryland's constitution beat this by 11 months.
When the Civil War erupted, slavery was a well-established institution in Maryland. An 1837 assessment of real and personal property in district 2, which included Uniontown and New Windsor, listed 95 slaves worth an estimated $22,335. If you dine at Taneytown's lovely Antrim or take your kids to the Shriver farm and mill in Union Mills, it is instructive to realize that these locales were once plantations worked by slaves.
The Emancipation Proclamation also allowed African-Americans to join the Army and Navy to fight for their freedom. By 1865, 200,000 "freedmen" would serve, though in segregated units. Despite their shedding blood and dying for the Union, these citizen-soldiers did not yet have the right to vote. Black males in Maryland had to wait until 1867 to be granted suffrage.
The road since then has certainly not been paved with gold. Blacks can rightly cite a litany of grievances, ranging from segregated facilities and Jim Crow laws in the South to red-lined neighborhoods, job discrimination and inferior schools in the North. Here in Carroll County, schools weren't integrated until 1955.
On the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, black writer James Baldwin wrote to his nephew, "You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon." For some African-Americans, including our president, it may even be 150 years too soon. Sure blacks enjoy the same freedoms as we do, but some bigots are still enslaving them with poisonous prose meant only to sow prejudice and hate. When will that chain be broken?
Frank Batavick writes from Westminster. His column appears Fridays. Email him at fjbatavick@gmail.com.
