THE SAN BERNARDINO
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AMERICAN
“A Man In Debt is So Far A Slave” -Emerson
NEWSPAPER A Community Newspaper Serving San Bernardino, Riverside & Los Angeles Counties Volume 51 No. 45
February 25, 2021- March 03, 2021
Mailing: P.O. Box 837, Victorville, CA 92393
Office: (909) 889-7677
Email: Mary @Sb-American.com
Website: www.SB-American.com
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them and these will continue till they have resisted either with words or blows or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance those of whom they suppress. —Fredrick Douglass (1849)
Elizabeth Keckley, Thirty Years a Slave, Four Years in the White House NNPA NEWSWIRE — In the book, “Behind the Scenes or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House,” Elizabeth Keckley, details her life as a slave who purchased her freedom and then worked in the White House for two U.S. first ladies – Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of President Abraham Lincoln, and Varina Davis, the wife of President Jefferson Davis.
In Celebration Of Black History Month
By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent @StacyBrownMedia
A Black woman’s memoir published 153 years ago still tops Amazon’s books sales chart. “Behind the Scenes or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House,” by Elizabeth Keckley, currently stands as the 24th most popular book in Amazon’s category of U.S. Civil War Women’s History. The historical work was perhaps the bluntest and most controversial of its era. Keckley detailed her life as a slave who purchased her freedom and then worked in the White House for two U.S. first ladies – Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of President Abraham Lincoln, and Varina Davis, the wife of President Jefferson Davis. A seamstress to both Davis and Lincoln, Keckley practically lived in the White House during the Civil War. Because Keckley made her close relationships with the Lincolns so public, the reaction nearly ruined the Lincolns’ reputation and almost destroyed Keckley’s life. In the 166-page memoir, Keckley recalls an intimate scene between President and Mrs. Lincoln after learning their son, Willie, had died in 1862. “I assisted in washing him and dressing him, and then laid him on
the bed when Mr. Lincoln came in. I never saw a man so bowed down with grief,” Keckley wrote. “He came to the bed, lifted the cover from the face of his child, gazed at it long and earnestly, murmuring, ‘My poor boy, he was too good for this earth. God has called him home. I know that he is much better off in heaven, but then we loved him so. It is hard, hard to have him die.’” Immediately after President Lincoln’s 1865 assassination, Mary Todd Lincoln sent for Keckley. According to WhiteHouseHistory.org, when Mrs. Lincoln was later “drowning in debt,” she reached out to Keckley to assist in selling off her wardrobe and other items to raise money. Because the auctions failed to solicit any funds for Lincoln, Keckley reached out to prominent African Americans for assistance, including asking leaders in the Black church to take up offerings for her former boss. “She even asked Frederick Douglass to take part in a lecture to raise money, although the lecture ultimately did not come to fruition,” the White House historians wrote. The book was not well received
by Lincoln or the American public. Whites turned on Keckley for disclosing conversations and her relationship with Mrs. Lincoln. Mostly, they claimed it violated social norms of privacy, race, class, and gender. “Her choice to publish correspondence between herself and Mary Lincoln was seen as an infringement on the former first lady’s privacy,” historians wrote. Keckley addressed her critics in the preface to her memoir: “If I have betrayed confidence in anything I have published, it has been to place Mrs. Lincoln in a better light before the world. A breach of trust – if breach it can be called – of this kind is always excusable,” Keckley penned. “My own character, as well as the character of Mrs. Lincoln, is at stake since I have been intimately associated with that lady in the most eventful periods of her life. I have been her confidante, and if evil charges are laid at her door, they also must be laid at mine, since I have been a party to all her movements,” she added. Keckley continued: “To defend myself, I must defend the lady that I have served. The world has judged Mrs. Lincoln by the facts which float upon the surface, and through her have
partially judged me, and the only way to convince them that wrong was not meditated is to explain the motives that actuated us.” Born in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, in 1818, Keckley endured years of beatings and sexual assault as a slave. She bore her slave master’s child, George, and was then given away to her owner’s daughter, who moved her to St. Louis. Keckley learned the art of dressmaking and, in 1852, married James Keckley, whom she believed was free. Before her marriage, she negotiated a $1,200 price to buy her freedom but discovered she couldn’t raise the money for herself, her son, and her husband. However, customers to her small seamstress shop loaned Keckley the money to purchase freedom for her and her son, and in 1860, she moved to Washington, D.C. “She left Washington in 1892 to teach domestic skills at Wilberforce University, but ill health forced her to return and spend her final years in the Home for Destitute Women and Children, which she had helped to establish,” historians wrote. Elizabeth Keckley died in 1907 after suffering a stroke.
Editorial
A Question for Black Americans : Vaccine or Body Bag? By John E. Warren, Publisher, The San Diego Voice & Viewpoint Today there is a crisis in Black America that is greater than the Tuskegee experiment itself. That experiment for more than 30 years deliberately used Black men as lab rats to test the effects of syphilis on men infected with venereal disease. It took over 30 years, but the experiments were discovered and exposed. The people conducting those experiments were all White. But some things have changed. One such change is the presence of Black scientists engaged in research affecting Black people. Today in the case of the development of a vaccine to fight COV19, a female Black Scientist named Dr. Kizmekia Corbett, at the National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Center has led the research. She has been the lead scientist in the development of one of the two vaccines currently being used. But Black people, who are at the greatest risk of dying from Covid 19, have the lowest rate of receiving the vaccine, it appears, for two reasons: one, we have logistical issues of appointment, locations and transportation; and two, we actually have people refusing to take the vaccine in spite of current scientific data developed by a Black scientist that proves the vaccines save lives. No one is thinking of forcing any of us to take the vaccine if we decide not to. But we should understand that the virus and
its developing mutations, which have taken almost 500,000 lives in the United States alone, appears to come down to two choices: the vaccine or a body bag. The body bag is what we use to remove the bodies of those who die, regardless of the cause. Those who refuse to take the vaccine should know that you become possible transmitters of the virus, if not affected directly yourself. This means that family and loved ones can die as a result of contact with those who have not taken the vaccine as a means of stopping the transmission of the virus. This also means that until such time as we have full vaccinations of the entire country, those of us who have not had the vaccine yet will have to rethink our personal relationships with those close to us who refuse to take the vaccine. Let us not forget that each person has a right to refuse the vaccine, but that right must not get confused with our right to choose to live. The choice really is between the vaccine and the body bag. We know the body bags will go to those who did not take the vaccines first, but will their refusal cause others among us to die and get a body bag also?
President Biden Applauded for Reopening Enrollment at Healthcare.gov through May 15th By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, about 9 million uninsured Americans are estimated to obtain free or subsidized health insurance during the special enrollment period. After four years of the previous administration’s efforts to destroy the Affordable Care Act (ACA), President Joe Biden has moved swiftly to repair damage done to President Obama’s signature legislation. The Biden administration has reopened enrollment at Healthcare. gov through May 15 – though the timeline varies depending on the state – to ensure that everyone has
an opportunity to obtain coverage. The move is especially important as the nation continues to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic that has claimed more than 480,000 American lives. Marcela Howell, president and CEO of In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s continued on page7