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a qualification independent of his personal merits or his actual class. He is part of the group of colonizers whose values are sovereign..." Many will recognize this description as their own experience, especially if they lived in the South in the period before the Montgomery bus protest. Even today this is an accurate enough description of race relations in the small towns and rural areas of the South as well as (in modified form) in many of the new suburban areas of the North. Mobs attacking civil rights marchers with axe handles, lead pipes and chains in Grenada, Canton and Philadelphia, Mississippi, or throwing rocks and bottles at civil rights marchers in Southwest Chicago and Cicero, Illinois, are a testimony to this. One other major factor was introduced into the colonial relationship within the United States and that is the whole super-structure of racist culture.* Parks, boulevards and highways are named after slaveholders and segregationist politicians while black men who pioneered in organizing the first public school system in the South, during Reconstruction, are slandered and vilified in textbooks and films. The colonized are taught to dislike themselves, taught to believe that they have no history in which to take pride and, above all, are taught that they have never played any decisive part in the struggle for their own emancipation but have merely been childlike, passive beneficiaries of the quarrels which, from time to time, arose among the Great White Fathers. In dealing very briefly with these descriptions of the psychocultural aspects of colonialism it is to the point to mention another example in our experience. It was mentioned earlier that the European colonialists renamed parts of the African continent to their liking. A century earlier the pattern had been set by the pirates and merchant capitalists who named coastal areas of the African continent after the particular commodity from which they got the most profits (i.e., "Slave Coast," "Ivory Coast," "Gold Coast," etc.). Africans brought to the Americas from various developed tribal societies (i.e., Fanti, Dahomey, Mandingo, etc.) were renamed "Negroes," a designation which separated them from any land-based cultural identification. Herein we see the depth of cultural arrogance which colonialism represents. The Africans in the New World made efforts to hold on to their African identification. They called their first churches in America, The African Methodist Episcopal Church and The First [[footnote]] *For an elaboration of this, see the article, "Foundations of Racism in American Life," FREEDOMWAYS (Fall, 1964).
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Reopened for Editing 2024-02-09 13:56:59