Missing a “B”

 

 

Consider these choice words from a disgruntled citizen about the administering of a trust fund by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs, as reported in the Oklahoman in July, 2006: “peppered with scandals”, “deception”, “dirty tricks” obscenity” and “outright villainy”. Lest the reader assume these to be the rantings of some Native American radical, be assured they are not. The speaker was none other than U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, appointed to the bench by President Reagan. The honorable judge reached these conclusions after ten years of overseeing a case (begun in 1996 as Cobell v. Norton) that left him seemingly apoplectic, although he had stated three years earlier that he had “no confidence that Interior is willing to actually implement an adequate accounting.” Judge as prophet!

 

Ah, the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Did you know the bureau is older than the present-day government of which it is a part, older than the Constitution, older than the Declaration? It was begun in 1775 as the Office of Indian Affairs, with Benjamin Franklin as one of its first commissioners. That these many centuries later its efficacy may still be in question is a testament to two things: the vagaries of bureaucracy and the ongoing idea that the need for its services remain. So, despite whatever problems it might pose rather than solve, the agency endures. As we humans have long said, it’s the thought that counts – right?

 

All of this came to mind again recently while I attended a community forum, hosted by Washington, DC’s historic Metropolitan AME Church and moderated by Charles J. Ogletree, a professor of law at Harvard University who counts our current President and First Lady as former students. The forum had nothing to do with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Titled “Stop the Pipeline to Prison,” its focus was the incarceration rate of black Americans. In any such discussion, I always am reminded of a missing bureau and a missing plan. That bureau would be the Freedmen’s Bureau, and that plan would be a Plan B.

 

I am a firm believer in the idea, held solely by myself it seems, that the rate of incarceration of black Americans is but one consequence of the fact that the only real plan for black people in America was slavery. There was never a Plan B or any other back-up plan. When Plan A went awry, the haphazard approach to solving the ensuing problems is what we are left with today: every Congressional act, every constitutional amendment and every Supreme Court decision that has sought to affirm the freedom and the rights of citizenship afforded former slaves and their descendants. Which of these can called a plan in the true sense of that word?

 

The best case that can be made for any attempt at a real, alternative plan was the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Begun in 1865 under president Lincoln, who intended it to last for only a year following the end of the Civil War, its efforts miraculously lasted until 1869, a few years shy of its official demise in 1872. Some historians, true to the idea that history is written by victors and not their victims, have sought to portray the Bureau as an inept and corrupt entity that deserved an early death, choosing to either ignore or play down the good deeds attempted and accomplished by the many Americans who went to work for the agency. They do the same regarding one the greatest impediments to the agency’s success: the terrorism perpetrated by the southern jihadists in service to the god of white supremacy.

 

Yes, for all of its proven dysfunction, the Bureau of Indian Affairs is still here two hundred, thirty-seven years later. The Freedmen’s Bureau is not. The nation in general, and too many of its black citizens in particular, continue to pay too steep a price as a result. The story of the end of the Bureau is worth recounting, for the irony involved if nothing else. General Oliver O. Howard, the Bureau’s commissioner, was asked by President Grant to take a leave of absence from his duties to handle Indian affairs out west. Upon his return, he learned that – in his absence – Congress had officially terminated the Freedmen’s Bureau and all of its functions.

 

And what of the Honorable Judge Lamberth? An excess of common sense and common decency was deemed to be ire clouding his judgment. He was removed from the case, only the second time in US history such a thing has been done.