Jefferson’s White Heaven, A Black Man’s Hell

Robert Zimmerman’s (aka Bob Dylan) poetry earned him the Nobel Prize for such abstract “protest” language as

“How many roads must a man walk down

Before you call him a man?

The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind.”

Dylan’s elusive and non-threatening folksong found its way to the front lines of the civil rights movement, but the Black Freedom movement had a far more potent anthem—the unabashed, uncompromising, crystal clear concerto in sweet soulful tones, “A White Man’s Heaven Is a Black Man’s Hell.”

The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan’s opus of 1960 asks:

Why are we called Negroes?

Why are we deaf, dumb, and blind?

Why is everybody making progress

Yet we seem to be lagging so far behind?

Why are we mistreated?

Why are we in this condition?

Most assuredly, the answers to these questions for the Black man are not “blowing in the wind,” as Zimmerman maintains. Moreover, it is interesting to note that “Blowing in the Wind,” which was Dylan’s most popular song, was a severely watered down and mealy-mouthed adaptation of a defiant Black spiritual, “No More Auction Block.”

Nobel Prize-deserving Farrakhan continues:

So let’s check back into history, which rewards our research…

Great advice, because there is no more rewarding proof of the theorem “a white man’s heaven is Black man hell” than researching the history of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson when he was a member of Virginia’s House of Delegates from 1776 to 1779. Jefferson fought hard and successfully to overturn the legal doctrines of property rights known as Primogeniture and Entail. For the most part Blacks are totally unfamiliar with these legal concepts even though they are at the very foundation of American white supremacy.

Europe had become inhospitable to its lower classes because its custom of land transfer assured that wealth would be concentrated in the hands of an elite few. Upon the death of the patriarch of the family, his entire estate would be inherited by his first-born son and none of it would go to any of the later-born children. Under this feudal law, land and property could not be divided or sold, so the later-born children would have to stay in service to the eldest son if they wanted to maintain their standard of living. This practice kept a tiny few in immense wealth and kept their families tightly knit, albeit by threat of poverty, but it left the masses with no way of obtaining land or wealth. Predictably, this often led to dissatisfaction among the masses and ultimately to popular rebellion and revolution. This practice of bequeathing all wealth to the first-born son is called primogeniture, and the prohibition against dividing land and property is called entail.

When the European explorers opened the new hemisphere for settlement, the lower classes saw emigration to America as the only way to escape the desperate cycle of landlessness and poverty.

Thomas Jefferson didn’t want the same fate to befall the fledgling United States. He believed that everyone, even the very poor, should own land. Of course, “everyone” in Jefferson’s white supremacist mind meant Caucasian only, and the boundless, Indian-cleared territory invited European settlement. In effect, the government became the big white daddy and every white man that showed up was its first-born son.

Well, this is what created the White Man’s Heaven in America, and all of it sounds as good as Martha Washington’s cherry pie (most likely made by one or more of her 317 enslaved Africans). But with the demise of primogeniture and entail—and the consequent division of property and the spreading of the wealth amongst the white populace—came the Black Man’s Hell.

Under the new laws, when the white patriarch died all of his property—including his African slaves—could be cruelly divided among all of his children and to anyone else and sold off without reservation. Black slave families were destroyed, splintered into oblivion whenever a “master” died off. The more children the slavemaster had, the more fractured the Black families were likely to become. This may be why the house slave appeared so distraught at the loss of the white master, for his demise also meant the death of their Black families.

Let us understand that this new law applied only to Massa’s white children. Jefferson’s own Black children, by way of his multiply raped slave Sally Hemings, could not hope to gain from this New World wealth-building method. Another provision was thrown into the law such that any child of a slave woman “followed the condition of the mother”; thus, even Massa’s children via the rape of the Black woman were legally entrapped in slavery and unable to inherit any wealth through their own father.

So Jefferson’s mighty work to spread the wealth of America through the elimination of primogeniture and entail brought a tangible hope and unprecedented riches to millions of European immigrants. To them America was a veritable heaven, its streets paved with gold. To the Black man, that very same work spread the cancerous condition of slavery and undercut a slave’s ability to maintain a semblance of a family structure.

So my friend, it’s easy to tell

That a white man’s heaven is Black man hell.

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