Jumping the broom!

Jumping the broom is an old tradition surrounding marriage and very committed relationships and dates back in several cultures for a very long period of time. In its literal sense, a couple forming a lasting relationship simply jumped over a broom to show their fidelity to one another.

Possibly no where was jumping the broom any more important than in the ante bellum and civil war south where legal marriages were not allowed among slaves. This was in direct conflict with the Christian beliefs surrounding marriage that intoned that a ceremony was to be performed and that the couple was to be faithful and bear fruit from one another “until death do yea part.� Still yet, the southern slave owning class wanted their slaves to bear that fruit because it increased the net worth of the slave owner as his number of slaves grew larger and larger. Slaves were human beings and they had a life expectancy so if they did not breed, slavery would have died out. To counteract this apparent moral discrepancy, the southerners created a whole universe of ideas as to why negroes were subhuman, sometimes comparing them to monkeys!

Slave owners came in many varieties. Some were very kind and benevolent to their slaves while others merely wringed as much labor out of them as they could. Some would never think of whipping their slaves while others made it an almost daily practice. Some slave owners were religious people and there is at least one collection of letters compiled in a volume called “The Children of Pride� in which a South Carolina slave owning minister encouraged his slaves to learn to read so that they could understand the Bible. In at least one piece of correspondence it talks of blacks and whites together in church services. This type of progressivism was probably the exception, rather than the rule in the south.

If one looks at the black experience in slavery and even thereafter, a belief in God and in the practice of religion was very important to a people who had little to no control over their fates and their daily lives. Attending church services among their own gave slaves an outlet and a belief that even though there might not be any hope for them on this planet there was a time approaching when they would be forever free of their bondage. And this feeling, particularly in the south, persisted long after the thirteenth amendment was passed and slavery came to a lawful end. In point of fact, by the use of organizations such as the Klu Klux Klan, blacks were held in a defacto slavery surrounding economics that persisted well into the twentieth century in many places. In the south, the former slave owners and their descendents had many ways of controlling the black population through the enactment of odious laws surrounding their rights to vote and many other parts of their everyday life. Some of these laws had existed even before slavery ended in the form of laws passed to control the substantial free black populations both in the south as well as some places in the north.

We speak today of the last great civil rights experience that is the allowing of gay and lesbian people to marry one another with a legal basis that is going on in this nation today. However, we forget what was probably a mass influx of marriages that occurred after slavery ended when blacks in committed relationships were finally able to hold a ceremony recognized by God and law and to quit having to jump the broom as their only way of telling the world that they were together for life. And, it is also best remembered that the practice of blacks marrying whites was forbidden by law in many places in the United States until the last fifty years or so. Jumping the broom quickly fell into disfavor among blacks when they could have a legal wedding and did not reemerge until after Alex Haley’s miniseries “Roots� repopularized it in the mid nineteen seventies.

We bring all of this up because today is the beginning of the second term of the first black president of these United States and we need to remember what a complete miracle it is that it has even occurred at all. Any viable Democrat candidate could have probably been elected president back in 2008 because of the shape that the country had gotten into under the previous eight years of horrible Republican rule. And, only in the Democrat party could a Barack Obama presidency have occurred. One pundit has noted that at the Republicans latest planning get together in Williamsburg, Virginia, they held their session on outreach to minorities in the Plantation Room! Republicans tried everything within their power to be sure that Barack Obama was a one term president. That would have made his initial election an aberration of sorts and his 2012 defeat would have always cast doubts upon his ability to win an election in a more or less normal election cycle. The fact that Obama won against the backdrop of things like the Supreme Courts Citizens United decision which was supposed to rig the lection for those who controlled American corporations through the unlimited raising of almost untraceable money was a feat of political wizardry all unto its own. In point of fact, those who worked for Obama were better organized, smarter, and more committed to their candidate that the Republicans were. We need to remember that this was and is a black candidate who, in the Republicans eyes, was really illegitimate right from the start. Many Republican shied away from the very radical birther movement but they would have surely taken any positive result electoral wise that it sent their way. President Obama has been so characterized in so many racist ways that they are almost beyond counting!

In point of fact, as Barack Obama takes the private oath of office a noon today and then the more public oath and inaugural address tomorrow, there will be many in this nation who will tell anyone who will listen that this very intelligent and articulate and deeply caring black man is not their president at all. So, in so many ways, for so many Americans, he will still be jumping a proverbial broom in their eyes. Barack Obama got the majority of the votes cast in the November elections but the dissenting minority is large and their intent not to be governed by this man is intense indeed! It was just under one hundred and fifty years ago that another man who had once been ridiculed by large portions of the population--Abraham Lincoln--for being a rube from the western edges of American civilization gave an inaugural address that will be remembered for as long as such addresses are given and recorded. We believe that Barack Obama will have an opportunity tomorrow to state the purposes of his presidency that, as Abraham Lincoln stated, may not be popular today, but, might live on in the history and enunciation of this country’s vibrant and living ideals! And, that the broom of history will eventually sweep away all that has been wrongly deemed illegitimate before!

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.