Mr. Hannon - My Mentor, My Socrates

Donald Hannon, Mr. Hannon to his students, was my only favorite high school teacher. I was attending the American Community School in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1965 when I took his course in Ideologies. This was a college level course, using the Socratic method. There were no textbooks. Student class notes, his lectures, and mimeographed essays he handed out were our textbooks.

The Socratic teaching method was used by Socrates of ancient Greece. He taught his students while walking along, lecturing and asking them questions. This form of teaching is also known as the dialogical method. Out of the exchange knowledge, and debates, critical thinking emerged. 

Rather than a student reading from a textbook and accepting only what was on the page, then regurgitating what was there, the Socratic method encourages students to grasp ideas using their own thinking, while not accepting what they are receiving at faith value. Rather "truth" is arrived by taking several sources, analysing them, and then discerning what is “truth” and knowledge as can best be interpreted at the time. If new information and ideas come up later then the “truth” is adapted to the new situation.  

An ideology is a “system of ideas and ideals, which form the basis of economic and political theory and policy” which together, guide how  groups of people think and act the way they choose to live. 

Capitalism, Democracy, Totalitarianism, Fascism, Nihilism, and Communism are among the most influential ideologies in the modern world. Depending which ideology one is guided by, as a group of citizens they can live under a democratic government, or communist regime or under rule of divine right kings. Some ideologies as decided by the people who choose to live under them. Others, like communism or fascism are imposed on them. 

I remember we had about 12-14 students and we met every day of the school week. We set our desks in a semicircle facing Mr. Hannon’s desk and the blackboard. During each session Mr. Hannon introduced us to an ideology and the influential leaders that used them. He introduced us to them while giving brief lectures, while scribbling on 

He passed out mimeographed papers (when the xerox machine was in its primitive stages), defining ideologies and the influential persons that used them for leading people or for subjugating them. 

Capitalism was about acquiring wealth. Socialism was about citizens distributing wealth willingly for the better good. Communism was about taking wealth away by force from the people in order to create a utopian society. I really understood the communist system Mr. Hannon was talking about, as I had lived during through its early stages in revolutionary Cuba six years before.

Then, Mr. Hannon formed us into debating teams and without prior preparation would pose questions for debate, pro or con. It didn't matter which team "won" or "lost." There was no "right" nor "wrong." What mattered was that we mastered the material and knew how to argue the ideology's strengths and weaknesses, as well as to compare and contrast with the others. 

There were no letter grades. We were graded on how involved we were in the discussions, and on our written assignments, without concern of giving the "right" answers.

​

Mr. Hannon's ideologies class is the most important learning experience that has carried me through academia including my graduate work. In fact, I used Mr. Hannon's teaching/learning methods to defend my Ph.D.

I graduated from A.C.S. in 1966. I never saw Mr. Hannon again. But I had a brief telephone conversation with them while visiting Buenos Aires in 2018, 52 years later. He was near 90, as he remembered me, speaking in a frail voice. I thanked him again, and how much he had influenced my life, my learning, and teaching. 

He is my Mentor, my Socrates

Thank you Mr. Hannon 

Frederick Douglass: Former Slave, Orator, Suffragette, Advisor to President Lincoln on Emancipation

 Frederick Douglass 1817-1818 to 1895 - “What to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?”

A few facts about Frederick Douglass: 

He chose his last name from a poem - He taught himself to read and write - He disguised himself as a sailor to escape slavery - He picked his birthday - He married the woman who helped him escape - Douglass was an abolitionist

He was the most photographed American of the 19th century, consciously using photography to advance his political views.

In 1848, Douglass was the only black person to attend the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights  convention, in upstate New York to pass a resolution asking for women's suffrage. This gathering planted the seeds of the future NAACP and the LWV. 

He was a member of and lay preacher in the AME Zion Church. One of the reasons he joined the AMEZ church was because he experienced discrimination in the white Methodist church. 

On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass was invited to address the citizens of his hometown, Rochester, New York. Douglass used the occasion not to celebrate the nation’s triumphs but to remind all of its continuing enslavement of millions of people. 

“What to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?” (edited)

The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable—and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former, are by no means slight. That I am here today is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. 

This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. 

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? 

I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. 

To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. 

My subject, then fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! 

It is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race, we are called upon to prove that we are men! Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. 

I was born amid such sights and scenes. To me the American slave-trade is a terrible reality. When a child, my soul was often pierced with a sense of its horrors. I lived on Philpot Street, Fell’s Point, Baltimore, and have watched from the wharves, the slave ships in the Basin, anchored from the shore, with their cargoes of human flesh, waiting for favorable winds to waft them down the Chesapeake. 

The church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of die slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; 

The American church is guilty, when viewed in connection with what it is doing to uphold slavery; but it is superlatively guilty when viewed in connection with its ability to abolish slavery.

Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen.

I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain.

Rev. Dr. Lawrence Rankin, Chair Religious Affairs Committee

 

WEB DuBois: Sociologist, Early 20th Century Philosopher of the Black Experience, Civil Rights Leader

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois 1868 - 1963) was socialist historian, civil right activist, :Pan Africanist, author, writer and editor. Born in Massachusetts. After completing graduate work at the University of Berlin, he was accepted in Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate. He became a professor at Atlanta University, a historic black school of higher education.  

 

Du Bois, along with Ida B. Wells, was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of People (NAACP) in 1909. He founded NAACP's official journal, The Crisis, in 1910. The NAACP primary mission was to seek laws that protected blacks from being lynched. A 1915 article in the journal gave a year-by-year list of more than 2,700 lynchings over the previous three decades. According to the Tuskegee Institute, 4,743 people were lynched between 1882 and 1968 in the United States, including 3,446 African Americans and 1,297 whites.

Du Bois published his seminal work The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. In this collection of essays, he described the predicament of Black Americans as one of "double consciousness.” He writes: 

"One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, who dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

Dubois he attended the founding convention for the United Nations, channeling his energies toward lobbying the global body to acknowledge the suffering of Black Americans. Du Bois also turned a spotlight onto the injustices of colonialism, urging the United Nations to use its influence to take a stand against such exploitative regimes.

At the end of his life, Du Bois embarked on an ambitious project to create a new encyclopedia on the African diaspora, funded by the government of Ghana. A citizen of the world until the end, the 93-year-old Du Bois moved to Ghana to manage the project. Du Bois died in Ghana in1963, the day before the historic March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech.”

Nora Zeale Hurston: Novelist, Anthropologist, Controversial Race Reformer

Zora Neal Hurston – Claiming Space, PBS American Experience

Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 - January 28, 1960) was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays.

Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, and moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, 62 miles from here in 1894. She later used Eatonville as the setting for many of her stories. In her early career, Hurston conducted anthropological and ethnographic research while a student at Barnard College and Columbia University. She had an interest in African-American and Caribbean folklore, and how these contributed to the community's identity.

She also wrote fiction about contemporary issues in the Black community and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance.

 Hurston's works concerned both the African-American experience and her struggles as an African-American woman. Her novels went relatively unrecognized by the literary world for decades. In 1975, fifteen years after Hurston's death, interest in her work was revived after author Alice Walker 

Her nonfiction book Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo", about the life of Cudjoe Lewis (Kossola), was published in 2018.

Hurston was the fifth of eight children of John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston (née Potts). All of her four grandparents had been born into slavery. Her father was a Baptist preacher and sharecropper,

When she was three, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida. In 1887, it was one of the first all-Black towns incorporated in the United States.  Hurston said that Eatonville was "home" to her, as she was so young when she moved there. 

Her mother died in 1904, and her father remarried the following year. She and her siblings were sent to a Baptist boarding school. After a year, her father stopped paying her tuition. She left school at 14 years old to fend for herself. She had three short marriages and no children.

In 1918, Hurston began her studies at Howard University. She was one of the earliest initiates of Zeta Phi Beta sorority. She anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University in New York City.

In 1934, Hurston established a school of dramatic arts "based on pure Negro expression" at Bethune-Cookman University. The English Department at Bethune-Cookman College remains dedicated to preserving her cultural legacy.

Hurston traveled extensively in the Caribbean and the American South and immersed herself in local cultural practices to conduct her anthropological research

In 1936 and 1937, Hurston traveled to Jamaica and Haiti for research that mixes anthropology, folklore, and personal narrative. 

From October 1947 to February 1948, Hurston lived in Honduras.  Hurston expressed interest in the Miskito Zambu and Garifuna, people who were of partial African ancestry and had developed creole cultures).

During her last decade, she was contacted by Sam Nunn, editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, to go to Live Oak, Florida to cover the murder trial of Ruby McCollum. McCollum was charged with murdering the white Dr. C. Leroy Adams, who was also a politician. McCollum said he had forced her to have sex and bear his children. McCollum was convicted to death, and later committed to the state mental hospital at Chattahoochee. 

Hurston's work slid into obscurity for decades, for both cultural and political reasons. The use of African-American dialect, as featured in Hurston's novels, became less popular. Younger writers felt that it was demeaning to use such dialect, given the racially charged history of dialect fiction in American literature. 

Since the late 20th century, there has been a revival of interest in Hurston.[32] Critics have since praised her skillful use of idiomatic speech.[59]

Hurston, who was a Republican, argued that New Deal economic support had created a harmful dependency by African Americans on the government and that this dependency ceded too much power to politicians. She was also a supporter of Booker T. Washington, while criticizing WEB DuBois as an elitist.

Hurston opposed the Supreme Court ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954. She felt that if separate schools were truly equal (and she believed that they were rapidly becoming so), educating black students in physical proximity to white students would not result in better education. Also, she worried about the demise of black schools and black teachers as a way to pass on the cultural tradition to future generations of African Americans. 

She moved to Fort Pierce, Florida. Penniless, she was moved into a Welfare Home, where she suffered a stroke. She died on January 28, 1960, and was buried in an unmarked grave until 1973. Novelist Alice Walker found her unmarked grave. Walker commissioned a gray marker inscribed with "ZORA NEALE HURSTON / A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH / NOVELIST FOLKLORIST / ANTHROPOLOGIST / 1901–1960."

After Hurston died, her papers were ordered to be burned. A law officer Patrick DuVal, passing by the house where she had lived, stopped and put out the fire, thus saving an invaluable collection of literary documents for posterity. 

In a 1957 letter, which could have been her epitaph she wrote:

But ... I have made phenomenal growth as a creative artist. ... I am not materialistic ... If I do happen to die without money, somebody will bury me, though I do not wish it to be that way.