The first "Black" president?

"let us stop trivializing our presence by using the phrase 'first Black president', when talking about Barack Obama, as if we have finally contributed and accomplished something here in the USA."

Dear friends,

African Americans have fought in every conflict in the history of this country. There is no single group here who can say that, especially since the descendants of the original rulers of this country have rarely fought; instead, they have only enjoyed the fruits of the labor of others. Besides, the original British only came here to share their spoils with the British crown, They did not come here to start a new country.

During the French and Indian wars, we fought side by side (troops weren't segregated yet) in securing the provinces. During the War of Independence, we fought on both sides of the conflict (and the American troops were always led by "Black" fiddlers), We also fought on both sides of all of the other wars in this country, leading up to World War 1. After that, we only fought on one side.

Crispus Attucks, like Obama was of African and European descent. He was the first person shot on the Boston Commons during the Boston Massacre that started the War of Independence. Many Black men accompanied Paul Revere, when he and they road their horses through the streets of Boston and vicinity yelling, "The British are coming!". See Lorenzo Johnston Greene's "The Negro in Colonial New England", where he wrote, “When Paul Revere and William Dawes aroused the Massachusetts countryside on that memorable night of April 18 - they called Negro as well as white Minutemen to the defense of American liberties.” The aforementioned "Negroes" had names like Peter Salem of Framingham, Job Potomea and Isaiah Barjonah of Stoneham, and Cuff Whitemore of Cambridge, to name a few.

We did not just pick cotton and tobacco. We built ships - and homes. Many of the early doctors of Colonial New England were Black barbers who used leaches to "bleed" patients. That is from where the red and white striped poles outside of barber shops originated. It meant that the barber "bled" people, because there were few actual doctors and few citizens could afford them anyway. "Bleeding", almost always done by Black barbers in both Colonial and post-Colonial times, was thought to help heal diseases. This practice lasted through much of the 18th & 19th Centuries.

Finally, our contributions like hygiene, politeness, American table manners, and secular music, are of no small order either, and are enmeshed in the total social fabric of American society. So please, let us stop trivializing our presence by using the phrase 'first Black president', when talking about Barack Obama, as if we have finally contributed and accomplished something here in the USA. As the great anthropologist Melville Herskovits put it almost three generations ago, in his classic book, The New World Negro, "The difference between the English man and the American is the Negro laugh". Cheers!

G. Djata Bumpus