Susanna of Alabama meets Oh Oh Bama

The first stanza and refrain of Stephen Foster’s Oh, Susanna reflects the minstrel tradition of the 1840s, a thick mock African-American dialect used by white folks on vaudeville with faces painted black:
[I] I came from Alabama wid my banjo on my knee,
I’m g’wan to Louisiana, my true love for to see
It raind all night the day I left, the weather it was dry
The sun so hot I frose to death; Susanna, don’t you cry.
Oh! Susanna Oh! don’t you cry for me
I’ve come from Alabama
Wid mi banjo on my knee.[/I]

The song was heralded as the nation’s second national anthem, popularly promoted by the West Coast’s forty-niners of the California gold rush. The peppy tune followed many pedagogical lessons, not the least of which were from the teachers that the United States sent to territories on its Westward, ho! toward Manila and onward to Mumbai.

No Boy and Girl Scout camper around a bonfire would miss out on the tune, and Hollywood’s Barbara Stanwyck, Joel McCrea, Walter Brennan, Buddy Ebsen would get the world snapping its fingers and strumming its banjo to this polka-like beat and rhythm. Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny, and the Clampetts of Beverly Hills would commit the coup d’grace and consign the song into the global repertoire of recognizable tunes.

The songs seldom heard second stanza, especially after the Civil War, goes:

[I]I jump’d aboard the telegraph and trabbled down de ribber,
De lectrick fluid magnified, and kill’d five hundred Nigga.
De bulgine bust and de hoss ran off, I really thought I’d die;
I shut my eyes to hold my bref — Susanna don’t you cry.[/I]

In the same era that Oh, Susanna became famous, the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Roger Taney would pen the majority opinion on the Dred Scott v. Sanford case. A former slave living free in Illinois moves to Missouri, and was taken back as a slave. Dred Scott sues for his freedom rights under the American Constitution. Sandford prevailed.

Of the West African descendants, Taney wrote: [I]“They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery. . . . He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it.”[/I]

Frederick Douglass was pleased that at least, opposition to the decision would propel the issue of slavery to the forefront. Abraham Lincoln did pick up the cudgels and would accuse the Democratic Party of cuddling the slave owners of the South.

Our very own Ambrose Bennett more than a century later would pose under a portrait of the Supreme Court Justice Taney, and understandably, though perhaps, ungraciously, produced the universal symbol of disdain and disgust, the raised middle finger!

Mid-March 2008, when the incendiary racial language of Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, became more divisive than the civility of silence then practiced by the presidential candidates, Obama rose above the fray and delivered what is now dubbed his race speech in the Independence Hall of Philadelphia.

Here was a man who would not hesitate to confront the issue and do so with intelligence and evidence of erudition. Even lawyer John W. Dean of the Watergate fame, writing on FindLaw Writ, had this to say: “With his speech addressing race in America, Obama has done something that few politicians are willing to do: speak with compelling intellectual honesty. Rather than fuzzy-up difficult and troubling questions about race, he confronted them directly. Rather than avoiding issues that are typically ignored, he brought them forward for public discussion. Most strikingly, he did this with nuance, great tact, and conspicuous intelligence.”

Race is a given in our global genetics. Melanin production has been noted as a body defense to ultraviolet rays from the sun in the environment. Racism and racialism is humanity’s codification of social stratification based on the color of one’s skin. In 10,000 years of human civilization, we are now just raising the question on whether these codifications may now be discarded. Or, at least, expunged from legal codes and cultural practices.

As late as 1968, as a student of Southern United Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, the same year teacher Laura Lane Welch—who became GWB first’s lady—would receive her bachelor’s degree, several students and I spent a whole semester boycotting and protesting a washateria in the shadows of the Central Expressway Hilton because it had a prominently displayed front sign, accompanied by the Confederacy flag, that said: “for WHITES only.”

Forty years later, we would hear a candidate speak with candor, and without apology: “I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners—an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible. It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts—that out of many, we are truly one.”

Hail to the Chief! Michelle. Malia. Sasha. And the throng that partied around D.C. this weekend, on to Tuesday. But as Joe Biden was quick to point out, on Wednesday, the work on the New Declaration of Independence begins again.

[I]Oh Oh Bama, we cry our joys with thee,
Yes, we come from Mariana, our islands do serve tea![/I] [B]Jaime Vergara[/B] [I]via e-mail[/I]