A Red Record, No Going Back, and more...
Dear Friend,
One hundred five years ago this Saturday, my grandfather arrived in the United States from the Dutch-colonized Caribbean isle of St. Eustatius, “Statia”— a young man alone and bound for New York.
The seaman’s journal listing all landing crews had gone out of business with the war, World War I, and no other paper thought to call it news.?But his arrival could hardly have been more momentous.?For the first time in more than twenty years since the politics and economics of world domination separated a mother and her son, Grandpa and his mom would be together again.?At last.
As a child, I learned a great deal from Grandpa.?But, not until after his death did I learn about him.?With memories of our days together guiding me forward, I went in search of Grandpa.?Navigating my way through questions adrift like fragments of a raft after a great squall, I went to sea . . . to see.
Because he came ashore in New Bedford, Massachusetts “in the teens,” I traveled to that city’s weathered old library. Twenty-four years after his death, I churned pile after pile, reel after reel of microfilm until my Grandpa came miraculously into view—a crewman aboard the whaling schooner?Margarett.?Immigration docket date: July 22, 1918.
Grandpa was a whaler? Grandpa and thousands of other Black men from Cape Verde and the Caribbean. They were the whalers.
A whole chapter of history opened its dusty pages to me.?I spied land—the view from land:?those days of little-choice for Black men; those years of empire, of White Man’s Burdens, of the power-hungry gone power-mad.?Who, but the most desperate for work and a long-lost mother, would go whaling at all—much less go whaling with a world at sea and at war?
For four harrowing months, dodging the torpedoes of WWI and wreckages of the less-fortunate, Grandpa sailed the seas. Yet, incomparable storyteller that he was, all he ever said of those days was that it was a “difficult crossing.”
Nantucket weather bureau records and the?Morning Mercury?recount what he could not. The “moon shone brightly,” a weatherman wrote as the?Margarett?approached New Bedford harbor that Sunday night when a German U-boat shelled nearby Cape Cod.?Four barges and a tug were destroyed as a disbelieving crowd watched, helplessly, from the beach. The “moon shone through fog during early evening,” the weatherman wrote as Grandpa landed the next night. By the time I knew him, he could barely voice the words “New Bedford.”
For years I’ve re-staged his landing for my mind’s theatre—his, and the several other embarkations and arrivals of my other grandparents and my father, then a toddler.?I see their first on-shore steps in the harbor lights of New Bedford and New York.?I am in awe of the obstacles they faced and the decisions they made; risking their lives for a chance at life.
Were they not there, I would not be here.?Had each not dared to dream, who or what could I possibly be??I think of my grandparents and I know who I am:?I am the immigrants’ child and grateful to be.
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Pictured top:??Grandpa, William Landsmark; his mother, Jane Van Ter Poole; the whaling schooner,?Margarett??(circa 1920s).
50 BOOKS THAT CHANGED?THE STORY OF AFRICAN AMERICA: a recommended reading list
BOOK #14
A RED RECORD by Ida B. Wells
A RED RECORD by Ida B. Wells—human rights activist, pioneering investigative journalist, newspaper publisher, co-founder of the NAACP, and one of the bravest,?baaaddest,?people anytime anywhere—is a book you’ll absolutely want to put down; then think better of it.?This, particularly as parallels to the past few years’ unrelenting wave of unwarranted police and civilian murders of unarmed Black citizens become glaringly evident.
In March 1892, in one horrific event, Ida B. Wells suffered the loss of three friends to lynching:?Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart. The charge against the men: committing “an affront to a White woman.”?Their real crime:?as co-owners of the People’s Grocery Store in Memphis, Tennessee, they were too successful for their White competitor and his friends in the press, police, and courts to bear.?In 1895, compelled by that experience, Wells published her landmark study, “A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States.”
In an era when Black people were “discouraged” and increasingly prohibited from testifying on their own behalf if a White person said otherwise, Wells defied racist and sexist restrictions on Blacks and women.??Researching, writing, and publishing the first such study (rare to this day), she documented the reign of terror the Supreme Court unleashed with its 1896?Plessy v. Ferguson?decision “legalizing” segregation.?Together with Mary Church Terrell (activist, organizer, daughter of a wealthy ex-slave, wife of the first Black federal judge), Wells launched the Anti-Lynching Movement that nearly made the two women victims.
The book was published in 1895 with an introduction written by Frederick Douglass in the last year of his life.
ON THE SHOW
NO GOING BACK:
LIVE FROM THE SUSAN B. ANTHONY MUSEUM & HOUSEThis summer, we’re on a hiatus with a mission: reaching into our archive from seven years of THE JANUS ADAMS SHOW to bring you:?12 Shows THEY Don’t Want You To Hear About Stories THEY Don’t Want You To Know.
This week we commemorate the 175th?anniversary of the Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls. Live from the Susan B. Anthony Museum and House in Rochester, New York, we remember one of the most ardent feminists of her day.?Arrested in the foyer of that home for “voting while female,” (surprise!) Anthony wasn’t at the convention.?She did, however,?devote her life to embodying its deepest principles and organizing others to do the same.?
Notably—speaking of A RED RECORD (above)—among her friends were both Ida B. Wells (who was a frequent guest of Anthony’s family home) and Frederick Douglass (the only man or woman to call for voting rights for women at the convention).
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REMINDER . . .
?THE JANUS ADAMS SHOW airs and streams live at a new time: Saturdays at 11:00 am (eastern time) on?WJFF Radio Catskill. Click LISTEN LIVE on the home page.
AND ONE MORE THING . . .
Do you have an elder or ancestor who traveled to the United States by sea, sailing into the Port of New York between 1892 and 1954??You’re in luck.?What once took weeks or more to research in crumbling old files, is now digitized and available to all on the?Ellis Island?website.?With these records, families can research a loved one’s immigration to the United States by name, date, passenger ship; discover who the person was coming to live with and even how much money they were carrying upon arrival.?And, because Ellis Island was the JFK International of its day, you can also research the comings-and-goings of all who passed through Customs during those years.
The West Coast experience, 1910-1940, is preserved on?Angel Island.?There, you can explore the arrivals of people from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, Russia, and Asia; and?read immigrant remembrances?in their own words.
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Pictured here:?Three women from Guadeloupe arrive at Ellis lsland aboard?S.S. Korona?(April 6, 1911). Photo by Augustus Sherman. Reprinted courtesy National Park Service, Statue of Liberty National Monument and Ellis Island.
Harambee!
Janus
*?Harambee is a Ki-Swahili term popularized by the Kenyan Independence Movement meaning "let's all pull together!"
Emmy Award-winning journalist, author, historian, keynote speaker,?
Dr. Janus Adams?is publisher of BackPaxKids.com and host of public radio’s
“The Janus Adams Show” and podcast.