Posted on 11/14/2005 7:09:19 AM PST by Watershed
BERKLEY, Mich. (AP) — A black parent and the NAACP are criticizing a middle school's choice to perform a song that they say glorifies slavery.
The song, "Pick a Bale of Cotton," is on the folk music choir program Wednesday at predominantly white Anderson Middle School in the Berkley School District.
The song's lyrics include, "Jump down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton. Gotta jump down, turn around, Oh Lordie, pick a bale a day."
Greg Montgomery said he complained to school officials, and when he was dissatisfied with their response, decided to pull his 11-year-old daughter China from singing.
"It's mind-boggling that people don't understand sensitive issues," he told The Detroit News.
China said: "They were bringing back the memories of how African-Americans picked cotton, and it wasn't a good memory. It was disrespectful to African-Americans."
Berkley schools spokeswoman Gwen Ahern said district officials would consider the song's origin and decide whether to leave it in the concert program. She also defended the choice.
"We used to sing that song when I was in school during the '50s," she said. "It's like a Southern type of folk song. I remember it being perky. It was more of a song that people just sang for fun."
I really expected the title of the song to be "Ol' Black Joe".
Picking cotton is not all about slavery. As a matter of fact it hasn't been about slavery for a long, long time.
I was stationed at Blytheville AFB, in north east Arkansas, for much of the 50s and 60s, and cotton was and is the money crop in Mississippi county.
Kids of all colors earned their spending money picking cotton and many Airmen and their families from the base earned extra income by picking cotton.
I said all that to say this: This is just one more bullsh*t, race dividing, lawyer and race baiter enriching, frivilous law suit.
The welfare state breeds dependency.
Dependency breeds victimhood.
Sooner or later...all the fault falls on one person....
the man.
Idiocy and a waste of food, time and space.
The years have taken off the harshness of the time. I hated it at the time, but have since realized that hard work didn't kill me, and there is no such thing as menial labor.........
Music, art and sports are not "nonsense" and people with no appreciation for them are missing a lot.
I appreciate them all, but I don't see an educational value that can't be picked up elsewhere. Especially one our tax dollars support. Public schools should teach the basics, as it's apparent children can't pass most tests. What happened to the three R's? Sorry, we've got to make sure the little kiddies can sing on key?
He later got a football scholarship to Rice (Institute) University were he got his degree after three years in the Navy between his 2nd and 3rd year. He related to me more than once how many summers he had picked cotton as a child.
My yard man (ethnic German) who is a machinist and does a dozen yards in his spare time, has told me that his dad, a local farmer, made them start picking at four years old. He is no more than 30, so that wasn't too long ago.
I go to visit a very old lady who tells me of her childhood and youth. She grew up in Oklahoma and picked a lot of cotton as a young girl. Her family were poor farmers.
She's white.
When violent, garbage hip-hop is pulled off radio stations nationwide, THEN we can start this discussion back up.
People are absolutely insane, fighting over issues like this and ignoring the self-perpetuating cancers in their own society.
Sheesh! There's a cotton field across the street from my kids' school.
That in itself has to be racist, right?
It provided me with plenty of incentive to get the hell off the ranch
and head straight to the nearest big city as quick as I could.
My husband's grandmother, born a sharecropper in Texas, could tell you all about it. Even though she was white.
These stories of contrived outrage at imaginary slurs are really, really annoying.
Maybe NAACP would like wigger Eminem and his Kill Mommy song instead?
The death of Rosa Parks was a reminder of how great an organization the NAACP was 50 years ago, when they led the battle against Jim Crow. Now, they merely carp about songs. Pathetic...
I edu-ma-cated myself right out of Mississippi..........
With so many other good folk songs out there, it amazed me that this teacher would pick a song that makes slavery seem "fun." I don't blame the girl for feeling bad about this.
At my daugter's public school last year they sang "Go Down Moses," "Swing Low Sweet Chariot," as well as many secular songs.
Entire families worked the fields in the backbreaking task of picking cotton before mechanized equipment simplified the task. In this early photo at the Pavliska farm near Granger, children pick and fill bags along with adults. Photo courtesy Nancie Pavliska Roddy and the Institute of Texan Cultures, University of Texas at San Antonio.
More to the point, though, "Pick a Bale" is among many children's albums and songbooks which show American culture through the ages. This song has been sung by many artists.
What I don't understand is this: The NAACP and others wish us to never forget slavery and its issues, yet the culture of the time(i.e. music and lyrics) must never been spoken.
People used to sing those songs in order that, like the holocaust, we would Never Forget (slavery). Now they wish to eradicate them from history. Doesn't anybody but me realize how racist THAT is? Course they never let us forget when the professional race baiters are demanding more blackmail.
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