No More Lies

The Myth and Reality of American History

Dick Gregory

• Publisher: Amistad
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780062981288
• eBook ISBN:
  9780063042599
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

Republished as part of Amistad’s Literary Revival Program, the groundbreaking, bestselling look at history from the perspective of African Americans: an essential classic that continues to speak to us today, written by the voice of black consciousness, Dick Gregory—the incomparable satirist, human rights and environmental activist, health advocate, social justice champion, and NAACP Image Award–winning author.

In 1972, during the Black Power Movement, iconoclast Dick Gregory challenged one of the foundations of America itself—its history, which had been written almost exclusively from the white male perspective. In No More Lies, this true trailblazer gave voice to African Americans, speaking their truth about the past and race relations in the United States.

No More Lies offers this incomparable satirist’s intellectual, conspiratorial, and humorous spin on the facts. No subject is off limits from his critical eye—Gregory examines numerous aspects of culture and history, from the slave trade, police brutality, the wretchedness of working-class life and labor unions to the 1968 Civil Rights Act, the Founding Fathers, “happy slaves,” and entrepreneurs. 

Although this absorbing book is more than forty years old, its provocative truths continue to reverberate in our lives today. With No More Lies, Gregory inspire a new generation to connect what is happening today with what has happened in the past.  

In this trailblazing work of Black history, Gregory dismantles the foundational lies of America one by one:

• The Puritan Pilgrim Myth: Uncover the true story of colonization, where stolen corn, an accidental plague, and commercial interests replaced the myth of religious freedom.
• The Founding Fathers: Examine the hypocrisy of men who penned the Declaration of Independence while owning slaves and designing a system that privileged property over humanity.
• The Myth of Emancipation: Analyze why Abraham Lincoln's proclamation was a calculated war measure, not a moral act, and how 'freedom' became another form of control.
• Institutional Racism: Follow Gregory's searing analysis of how white supremacy is baked into America's laws, language, and culture—from the Boston Tea Party to the 'white tornado' on TV.

Chapter 1

The Myth of the Puritan Pilgrim

OR “SIT DOWN YOU’RE ROCKIN’ THE ROCK”

“. . . where blood is once begun to be shed, it is seldom staunched of a long time after.”

JOHN ROBINSON, 1623

“So they committed themselves to the will of God & resolved to proseede,” explains William Bradford, second Governor of the Plymouth Plantation (yes, folks, that’s what he called it!) and one of the leaders of the Mayflower group of “church resisters.” His words stand as the classic articulation of the myth of the Puritan Pilgrim as it survives today.

Though the settlers who arrived in Plymouth were not the first American colonists from England, or even the most important and influential in New England, Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower are the symbols of the Pilgrim myth. And that myth goes something like this.

THE MYTH

The Puritans were a party in the Church of England who wanted to go all the way in carrying out the Protestant Reformation. They wanted to establish both a religion and a way of life based upon a strict interpretation of the Bible; that is, living and worshiping as the Bible would suggest—without all the frills the Church had added. The Church of England, a high-church and formal structure just a shade left of the Vatican, did not make it with the Puritans. However, King James I and his law-and-order men did not take well to an “underground church,” just as Department of Justice staffers are not likely to go to Fathers Dan and Phil Berrigan, George Clements, James Groppi, or the Reverend James Bevel for confession today. So after repeated busts and harassments the God-seeking Puritans split to Holland, where freedom of worship was respected, and formed the English Congregational Church in Leyden. But all the while they longed for an unmolested home under the English flag. They felt like “pilgrims and strangers” in a foreign land, and they were worried that their kids were losing contact with English culture. William Bradford felt the Dutch language was “uncouth.”

America seemed to be the answer. The Puritans got permission from the Virginia Company’s London branch, found some financial backing from a group of English merchants known as the “Adventurers,” and set sail in the Mayflower. Even the voyage across seemed to prove that God was on the side of the Puritan Pilgrims. They had originally planned to make the voyage to American in two ships. But the second ship, the Speedwell, didn’t live up to its name, proving to be neither “well” nor “speedy” as it kept springing leaks, so the entire Pilgrim group had to crowd on the Mayflower, which wasn’t in any too good a shape itself. That the leaky ship made it from England to America with a 180-ton burden proved divine sympathy was with the undertaking.

After a long, hard sixty-five-day journey, the Puritan Pilgrims finally landed on the New England shores, considerably north of Virginia, and decided to settle along what is now Plymouth harbor. Thus it turned out to be a real “mass” movement. They arrived en masse, in Mass, running away from Mass.

Only courage and devotion kept the little band of Pilgrims alive. Though ill-equipped to make it on their own in an unfamiliar land, lacking both talent and resources, they somehow survived. Pilgrim rhetoric says God provided the survival kit. Governor Bradford said, “They knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country.” And William Brewster boasted, “It is not with us as with other men, who small things can discourage, or small discontentments cause to wish themselves at home again.”

Surviving the first winter in the settlement of New Plymouth stands as one of the first “profiles in American courage.” Think of the odds, the myth perpetrators tell us. Mishaps and delays caused the Puritan Pilgrims to land in the midst of one of those terrible New England winters. Not only did nature prove to be hostile, but all the time, as one historian put it, there were “dusky savages skulking among the trees.” More than half of the band of settlers died that first winter, and “at one time the living were scarcely able to bury the dead.” (Of course, if the Puritans really took the Bible seriously, that shouldn’t have caused any concern. After all, Jesus said, “Let the dead bury the dead.”

No ship arrived with additional supplies for a whole year. Yet when the good ship Fortune did arrive, with thirty-five new mouths to feed, not one of the original survivors wanted to make the trip back to England when the Fortune set sail again. Such is the stuff the Pilgrim fathers were made of.

And, the myth continues, the Pilgrims were also the fathers of the democratic form of government America holds so dear. Upon arriving in the New World, the Pilgrims drew up the Mayflower Compact, which stated that they would be ruled by the will of the majority until England made permanent provision for the new colony.

Pulitzer-prize winning historians Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Eliot Morison sum it up this way in The Growth of the American Republic:

But they [the Puritan Pilgrims] never lost heart or considered giving up and going home. These simple folks were exalted to the stature of statesmen and prophets in their narrow sphere, because they ardently believed, and so greatly dared, and firmly endured. They set forth in acts as in words the stout-hearted idealism in action that Americans admire; that is why Plymouth Rock has become a symbol.

And Governor Bradford concluded in his annals:

Thus out of small beginnings greater things have been produced by his hand that made all things of nothing, and gives being to all things that are; and as one small candle may light a thousand; so the light here kindled hath shone unto many, yea, in some sort, to our whole nation.

So the Puritan Pilgrims, though later to be replaced by the founding fathers of the American Revolution, still remain most dear to American mythology. America the God-fearing and God-loving nation was founded by those who shared that fear and love. America is specially blessed because of her religious origins. “Land where our fathers died; land of the pilgrims’ pride; from every mountainside; let freedom ring.”

And every Thanksgiving little kids in public school assemblies re-enact that first New England feast, complete with funny hats and costumes, and always, of course, carrying muskets.

THE ROCK IS ROCKY

Of course there were too many slaves in the English colonies for the Plymouth Rock myth to sit well in the black community. To black folks the myth says, “Here was a man searching for religious freedom and the right to worship as he pleased, and on his way over to find God, he stole us.” It is a strange man who wants to establish a way of life as the Bible suggests and begins that new way of life by keeping some slaves.

But even white folks should realize the shaky foundation upon which Plymouth Rock rests. The Puritan Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth quite by accident. Call it divine intervention if you want to, but God had to pull some pretty shady deals with the Indians to make it happen.

When the Puritan Pilgrims were looking to the New World for a place to settle, their first choice was Guiana, which Sir Walter Raleigh had described so alluringly. But they soon decided that a tropical climate would not be the best for industrious Puritans. Besides, the new colony would be dangerously exposed to the Spaniards, who had proved themselves not very friendly to another group of God-seekers, the Huguenots, whom they had wiped out in Florida.

Second choice was Virginia, but the Puritans soon remembered that Episcopal (Church of England) ideas had already taken root there. New England was considered too cold, but the land around the Delaware River seemed ideal. Through the help of Sir Edwin Sandys, who was sympathetic to the Puritans, negotiations were completed with the London Company for a grant of land in the Delaware River area.

Quite the opposite from nature being hostile, if it hadn’t been for certain acts of nature, Plymouth Rock would never have happened. Storms and foul weather so confused accurate measurings of latitude and longitude that the Puritans ended up in Cape Cod. Since they were not in an area under the jurisdiction of the London Company, they tried to head south but were again turned back by natural hazards. So Plymouth became the best possible site for settling considering the circumstances. Even though their land grant was no good, the Puritans thought they could easily obtain a new grant from the Plymouth Company.

Nature’s unforeseen change of the Puritans’ travel plans probably saved their lives. It so happens that some three years before the Puritan Pilgrims landed, a terrible pestilence had swept over the New England area and killed, according to some estimates, half of the Indian population between the Penobscot river and Narragansett bay. Many of the Wampanoag Indians in the area attributed this calamity to their having killed two or three white fishermen the year before. So when the Pilgrims landed, the Indians were reluctant to deal with the invaders, thinking that all white folks might have the power of the plague at their disposal. Those “dusky savages skulking among the trees” were merely looking out for the plague demon. Just keeping an eye on white folks.

When the Pilgrims landed, the Indians held a pow-wow and went through elaborate rituals, conjuring up every kind of curse imaginable, but they were superstitious enough not to resort to physical methods of attack. Thus began a phenomenon which was later to become a byword in America—religiously inspired strategic nonviolence. So the Indians left the Puritan Pilgrims alone that crucial first winter.

But that was all the time the white folks needed. At the first sight of Indians scurrying in the bushes, a platform was built on the nearest hill and a few cannon were placed there to cover the neighboring valleys and plains. By the end of summer the platform had become a fort, overlooking and protecting the harbor and the rapidly growing village.

Imagine what would have happened to the Plymouth Rock myth if nature had not intervened. The Puritan Pilgrims would have landed on course in the lands between the Hudson and the Delaware. They probably would have had problems with the Dutch. If not, they would have found themselves in the territory of the Susquehannock Indians, at the time one of the most powerful tribes on the continent. And the Susquehannocks did not have hangups about the plague demon.

PURIFYING THE PURE

What kind of stock were these Pilgrim ancestors white folks have been trying to trace their ancestry back to for over three hundred years? First of all, there is some argument among historians that the Plymouth Rock folks were Puritans at all. Some say they were Separatists, not Puritans, the latter group being the settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Those Massachusetts folks proclaimed a more “pure” rhetoric, seeing themselves and their colonial enterprise as a “beacon of light for all mankind.” I suppose that really means making the Indian’s territory “safe for democracy.”

But it is clear that the Mayflower group had no other motives for settling down in the New World than looking out for number one. They didn’t see themselves on a missionary crusade to convert the Indians as other pilgrims did. They just wanted a bit of land in which they could do their own thing. What that thing was to be we shall soon see. But whether or not Puritans or Separatists is the proper designation for the Plymouth Rock group matters little, because fewer than half of the Mayflower arrivals were pilgrims anyway. Captain Miles Standish was a non-Pilgrim hired to serve as military adviser, along with two hired seamen and fourteen indentured servants and hired artisans, thus forming the first military-industrial complex.

Brother Standish was responsible for originating an American problem which many people feel is still paramount today—the use of outside agitators who encourage looting and stealing. When the Mayflower first docked in Provincetown, Standish led a few expeditions inland to explore. When Standish and his men came across some corn buried by the Indians in underground barns, they couldn’t resist the urge to “cop” their new find, thus giving a very early answer to the Indian’s question of whether or not he could trust the white man. Governor Bradford later said that planting the stolen kernels of corn the following spring is what saved the Pilgrim fathers from starvation. Of course, a few bushels of corn were minor compared to what the white man would later steal from the Indian.

But at least Brother Standish didn’t steal Indians themselves, as an earlier white invader in the same area, George Weymouth, had done. Weymouth and his traveling buddy, James Rosier, worked for English promoters who were trying to drum up enthusiasm for settling in the New World. Colonization was seen as good business primarily, and religious considerations only came in second. To the English capitalists, if religion could get folks over there, fine. The main thing was to get white folks settled over in the land of the Indians with a tie to England, so that money-making goods would flow into the mother country.

Weymouth and Rosier did some trading with the Indians to get them used to the idea. Or, as Weymouth said, the English “wished to bring [the Indians] to an understanding of exchange” so that “they might conceive the intent of our comming to them to be for no other end.” Since the English planned eventually to get as much of the Indians’ land as possible, they wanted to make that later job easier—or again, as Weymouth said, to treat the Indians “with as great kindness as we could devise” without regard to profit.

But one day Weymouth and Rosier got the feeling that the Indians were setting them up for an ambush. Probably because of their own guilt, their [white folks’] fears came out in them, and on the suspicion of ambush alone they decided that the natives belonged “in the ranke of other Salvages, who have beene by travellers in most discoveries found very treacherous.” So the two Englishmen cut out, kidnaping a few Indians to take with them, and headed back for home shores.

Back in England, Ferdinando Georges, head man in Plymouth, was very pleased with the Indian catch. He saw them as very good for promotion. The Indians were taught the English language and then were used to make speeches about the riches of the New World and the good life to be found there. Such Madison Avenue hustling paid off. The New World was described as a veritable paradise; rivers filled with fish, jumping out in Charlie Tuna fashion just begging to be caught; turkeys falling out of the trees before you could shoot them; animals eager to give up their furs; and all manner of utopian delights.

People remembered Thomas More’s description of a utopia located somewhere in the New World, and America seemed to be it. All kinds of folks were attracted to going there, not just the God-seekers. Convicts from the jails of Middlesex and other counties in England for example. As early as 1617 convicted criminals were saved from the gallows in England to “yeilde a profitable service to the Commonwealth in parts abroad.” By 1670 the good folks in Virginia were quite upset at the great number of “fellons and other desperate villianes sent hither from the prisons of England.” They petitioned their council for law and order to prevent the “barbarous designs and felonious practices of these wicked men,” and to see to it that English promoters stopped sending “jailbirds” into the New World.

America also proved to be a convenient “fresh air fund” for England—get the kids off the streets and into the colonies. Poor folks in general and kids in particular, with whom England was “pestered,” were sent to the colonies. King James himself sent off a group of “Duty boys” on the ship Duty: “divers young people” of whom the king wrote to Sir Thomas Smith, a leading English promoter, January 13, 1619, “who wanting imployment doe live idle and followe the Court.” Some towns saw America as a convenient answer to the poverty problem, recognizing that a one-way ticket was a cheap form of relief and a good way of getting rid of indigents.

Thus in the colonization of America the English government and the capitalists worked hand in hand. Colonization was good for business and a way of getting rid of undesirables. King James was glad to get rid of the Pilgrim fathers because he had vowed either to whip them into line or to run them out of the country. After all, they were dissenters, opponents of the Church establishment. Anything the promoters could do to make the trip enticing had governmental approval.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: For White Only
• Chapter 1: The Myth of the Puritan Pilgrim
• Chapter 2: The Myth of the Savage
• Chapter 3: The Myth of the Founding Fathers
• Chapter 4: The Myth of Black Content
• Chapter 5: The Myth of the Courageous White Settler and the Free Frontier
• Chapter 6: The Myth of the Mason-Dixon Line
• Chapter 7: The Myth of Free Enterprise
• Chapter 8: The Myth of Emancipation
• Chapter 9: The Myth of the Bootstrap
• Chapter 10: The Myth of the Good Neighbor
• Chapter 11: The Myth of American Rhetoric
• Chapter 12: The Myth of Free Elections
• Epilogue: From Myth to Reality
• Postscript: Dr. Martin Luther King’s Last Message to America
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Also by Dick Gregory
• Copyright
• About the Publisher