Hidden Black Heroes – With Jimmy Lee Tillman II – What is missing from our children’s education? Was the American founding a “white-only” movement? Were there any black American heroes before the 20th Century? Many small lies have have kept our country divided. What happens to both blacks and whites when they learn the truth about our American history? Tune in to hear this eye-opening interview with Jimmy Lee Tillman II discussing great black American patriots!

Air Date: 11/02/2021

Guest: Jimmy Lee Tillman II

On-air Personalities: David Barton, Rick Green, and Tim Barton

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Transcription note:  As a courtesy for our listeners’ enjoyment, we are providing a transcription of this podcast. Transcription will be released shortly. However, as this is transcribed from a live talk show, words and sentence structure were not altered to fit grammatical, written norms in order to preserve the integrity of the actual dialogue between the speakers. Additionally, names may be misspelled or we might use an asterisk to indicate a missing word because of the difficulty in understanding the speaker at times. We apologize in advance.

Faith and the Culture

Rick:

This is the intersection of faith and the culture. It’s WallBuilders Live. Thanks for joining us for the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective. We’re here with David Barton, America’s premier historian and our founder at WallBuilders, Tim Barton’s national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders, and I’m Rick Green, America’s Constitution coach and a former Texas legislator.

And I’d love to invite you to join us on Monday nights as well. We’re going to be doing a new class on Monday nights. We’ve been doing Biblical Citizenship in Modern America all year. We’re going to dive a little further go a little broader. We’re going to hit the topics of Foundations of Freedom with Michelle Bachman, Carol Swain, David and Tim Barton, Glenn Beck, myself, and many others. 

So we would love to have you join us there. You can sign up at biblicalcitizens.com. It’s free. Biblicalcitizens.com. Join us on Monday nights for the live class with the videos, and then Q&A with the special guests.

Alright, David and Tim, later in the program, we got Jimmy Lee Tillman, we’re going to be talking about his book, it’s called Tillman’s Handbook of Great Black American Patriots. And, of course, guys, you guys have a fantastic program on our website at wallbuilders.com, where you can get the “American History in Black & White” and really the true story of the political parties, of a lot of the history of race in our country. So folks can get that at our website, wallbuilders.com. We need to know that true history if we’re going to be able to have good policy going forward.

David:

You know, it’s interesting a lot of what’s shaping America right now is the debate over race, it’s the debate over critical race theory, the debate over the 1619 project, so many things are shaping the classrooms right now. And it’s interesting that what they’re advocating in the classrooms regarding race, there’s nothing new with that. These are all arguments that have been proposed for 100 years.

We Know So Little History

But it’s interesting they’re catching on in America today. And the reason they are is because we now know so little of our history that we buy into the systemic racism that were fundamentally flawed, we’ve always been racist. We would never have bought that 20 to 30 years ago because we need too much of our history. But today, if you ask most Americans to name Black history heroes, you’re going to get Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and those are all great, but those are modern folks. You’re not going to get somebody like a Wentworth Cheswell or Matthias D’Souza. 

You’re not going to get a Prince Estabrook. You’re not going to get someone like a James Armistead or a Jack Sisson or Billy Floor or all these other black heroes from the American Revolution because we couldn’t have Black Heroes back then because all the founding fathers were white racist. No, that’s the problem. And you don’t know what happened back then. And this a great quote from George Orwell I really liked this. His quote says, “Who controls the past controls the future, and who controls the future controls the past.” 

Take that a step at a time. Whoever controls the present controls the past, that means what we’re teaching in schools right now controls what we know of the past, the way it’s been presented. And if they choose to omit and delete so much of what happened, that’s significant because the next part says, “Who controls the past controls the future.”

So the people right now teaching what our past is like, that will define what America is going to be in the future. And since we’ve done such a lousy job of teaching our heroes in the past, and that the American founding was not just a white-only movement, I mean, the role of blacks and whites and Hispanics and the early founding of America, the founding era, the fact that Washington had 76 generals, and 28 of them came from foreign nations, I mean, America was a melting pot, for sure, in the early founding era.

And it’s interesting, even back at the Constitution convention, I mean, a number of those guys who helped write that Constitution were foreign immigrants. They were not US citizens, which is an amazing thing for most people to know today. So it was not a white-only movement back then. It’s always been very mixed racially. And that’s just not known today.

Tim:

Well, and yeah, saying they were immigrants is like the guys like Alexander Hamilton, who was clearly not born here in the United States. But freedom loving people who came to America and recognize the greatness of America, the influence of America, Alexander Hamilton was a guy involved. 

The Significance of America

But as they’re writing the Constitution they recognize, hey, you really need someone who has been a part of this culture, who’s live in this culture, which is why even there were limitations on a congressman or senators being elected, we’ll make sure they’ve need to have lived here for a certain amount of time before they can be elected to positions of leadership because you need to know what it means to be an American, what the American way of life is really about. They understood the significance of America.

And dad, to your point with it being all kinds of diverse people there, the musical Hamilton came out. And I don’t know if it’s a year or two ago, whenever, a year probably ago when it came out, I don’t remember now. It’s been a little while. But Hamilton wasn’t a white guy. And I mean, there’s some paintings where he maybe looks a little lighter. 

But you look back, there were many significant leaders involved in some of the thought process that led the American Revolution or that led to some of America’s major positions that were being largely espoused not just by the white people, but by people who were freedom-loving people looking for that freedom and liberty in America. And America has been a very diverse nation from really the beginning.

And there’s been many people who actually in the last couple years who have helped to try to reestablish some of that. Of course, we did a book called The American Story where we go through some of the actual story of America, from Columbus really to the end of slavery in America. 

And we tell a lot of the diversity of America with some of the men and the women who were the heroes and the heroines, and some of your black heroes and your Hispanic heroes and your German or Polish heroes. And we go through all of these individuals who are heroes for their contributions to America.

And there are now some people trying to help reclaim those stories. And actually, I recently was exposed to somebody telling some of the stories that actually we’ve told some of the same stories, but it was somebody different voice, different position, saying and I said, you know what, we might ought to get this guy on radio and interview him because it’s people who are fighting the same fight that we are trying to help just reestablish truth of the American story. And so you have now people joining in this call is trying to tell the truth of America again.

A Moment from AMERICAN HISTORY

Rick:

Jimmy Lee Tillman is our special guest when we come back from the break, again, the book, Tillman’s Handbook of Great Black American Patriots. Stay with us, you’re listening to WallBuilders Live.

 

This is Tim Barton from WallBuilders with another moment from American history. Many today assert that religion is something private, that it has no place in the public square, and that it is incompatible with government. But the Founding Fathers believed exactly the opposite. They held that religion was absolutely necessary in order to maintain our free system of government.

For example, John Adams declared “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion.” And signer of the Declaration, Benjamin Rush, similarly affirmed “Without religion, there can be no virtue, and without virtue, there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all Republican governments.” The Founding Fathers understood that limited government required public morality from the people and that public morality was produced by the Christian religion.

For more information about the Founding Fathers views on religion and public life, go to wallbuilders.com

Rick:

Welcome back to WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us today. Jimmy Lee Tillman is with us and founder of multiple organizations. I love this one, Martin Luther King Republicans. Jimmy, you probably don’t even know we did a special on MLK in our Chasing American Legends series. But you can also catch him on Jimmy Lee Underground Radio Network. Thank you, sir, for joining us today.

Jimmy:

Yes, thank you for having me. Thank you for having me.

Rick:

I am excited about your new book, you know, here on WallBuilders we’ve done a lot on black history and the black patriots in the American Revolution, and so much of that history that’s just completely been lost. And I was blown away by the preface in your book about what got you excited about this: it was conversation with your daughter, would you just relive that one with us?

Charles Drew 

Jimmy:

Well, I was sitting down talk to my daughter just accidentally basic things that she know about. Well, you know, she went to a Catholic school. So all four of your school so I’m not tripping on her education, you know, she got to find education. But a lot of things were missing out. You know, a lot of our history was missing out. She didn’t know a lot about Phyllis Wheatley. Especially what really hurt my feelings were the story about Dr. Charles Drew, and a lot of people in America, we understand Charles Drew the father Plasma, made the father [inaudible 08:33], great machines, but he was reason why we won the war. By his plasma machine kept more bodies out there for us to win the war.

So the big lie out there was that he was in a car accident, and because of color of his, he was denied service. And her opinion was how can this country do a great man like this? Our country is got to be a mean country. That’s a big lie. They worked around the clock 72 hours to make sure this man was alive, right. Doctor stayed under this man, and they wanted to be the great doctor who saved Charles Drew. He had three other companions in the car with, there was also black, they saved their lives also.

You see it’s stuff like that to keep our country divided. You know, it’s little small lies like that which you can easily go back and check the records to just dispute, or I would have to say nowadays, or fact check them to clear those record. And so it’s stuff like that I say to keep us divided. 

Eventually, like we talked earlier offline about the black [inaudible 09:39] revolution, the blacks at Bunker Hill, with a CRT this Critical Race Theory that we got out here now is trying to really bring us to get Jim Crow. We’re going back to the plantation. We’re going back where blacks feel that they’re subservient, white feel they’re superior, white feel guilty that they’re white, black feels bad that they’re blacks.

Now, here in America, it was divided between the North and the South. You know, the North should always get their story told that seems like the story of the South, the losing South always gets the glory. And now here we have people not understanding that Harriet Tubman came from the north to free slaves in the south. 

But [inaudible 10:26] all America was enslaved. What did the slaves went away to freedom? You see, half of this country, blacks couldn’t marry, read, write, vote at property, just the other half of this country it was like that. And it seems that they’re losing half of the country who lost the war is their story told over and over again, which put the greatest thing on America.

Crispus Attucks

Like if you want to look at America’s George Floyd, let’s go to Crispus Attucks. Here’s the black man who got shot in the middle of the streets and all of America went to war, and went to [inaudible 11:08] country of a black man. You asked Phyllis Wheatley, when George Washington in this moment of doubt thought it was a losing cause he got this black woman writing letters of encouragement to form this great country.

See his stories like that that are missing here. If you want to have the critical race theory and teach the truth about American history, there’s you go from the beginning of American history and how we were once all together. The idea of all men created equal was true in one part of America, maybe not all parts of America. 

As a matter of fact, that’s why Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass argued to Abraham Lincoln to make Abraham Lincoln live up to the principles of the Constitution to make everybody equal. You see and these stories are not being told, don’t sit here and just keep living off of blacks couldn’t read, if you got caught reading or writing, he was hung.

That was just one part of a plantation lifestyle of a corporation, big corporations want to make all the profits that they had so they had strict rules. You know, you want to look at the cotton plantation, the tobacco plantation, the peanut plantations, all those big corporations, you know what the free labor they just have a strict rules. Up an industrial city of North it was all hands on deck; can you work, you come out here, and whatever you need, what’s your trade? It was just a different process of society. And here in America…

Rick:

No, I think what you’re saying is exactly around here, we say it this way, you teach the good, the bad, the ugly: you teach it all. You don’t just choose the ugly or the bad, you got to include the good as well. And by the way, folks; the book is called Tillman’s Handbook of Great Black American Patriots. And you bring to life some of the stories that have really been lost in history. If you mentioned Crispus Attucks, I mean, the American Revolution begins there. 

Seeing Ourselves Differently

You also cover James Armstead, the American Revolution ends because of his spy work that he was able to do with Lafayette. You go through pastors and others and all these great patriots that had been lost. And I guess it’s like you mentioned that the whole CRT thing. Is there an effort, you think, to leave out these black heroes in history because if you teach these black heroes you realize black Americans have ownership in the American dream from day one?

Jimmy:

Well, once that story be told, white America and black Americans will look at themselves differently. White should look upon black Americans like hold on, this is your country, you have to offer my rights, and black Americans will feel that hold on, this is my country, my people die for your rights and all right. And then once will become just like when Grant tried to incorporate all America back in society.

You see when Trump said let’s make America Great Again, everyone wants a hopper back slavery or Jim Crow, but they never want to go back to President Greg General Grant went after the slave revolt, you had people like Stomp Smalls and I was a slave once upon a time, now I’m a Congressman, now I’m making laws for this great city, I was a slave now I’m Governor, I was slave now I’m a State Rep.

You see, once blacks start getting incorporated into America, that’s when America is great. You see the keep America on great is when you separate America greatness, which is black, white, and red. You see, what most people don’t understand that we just celebrate Columbus Day but and I don’t want to call the indigenous people what you want to have it, but in the black community, people don’t realize that and this held blacks in servitude. 

I mean, they fought for the Confederacy. And after the war was over, they refused to even free slaves. So if you went through the whole story about the tribute of the black man here in America, also includes the Indians because they did more damage to the black man than the white man, especially after slavery. But that story is not being told also.

Rick:

Yeah. And I am so glad what you said earlier that knowing about these great black patriots is important, not just for black Americans, but white Americans, for all Americans. Because when you do know the whole story, and you see all of these stories come to life through the Revolutionary period, as you bring up the Texas Revolution, you get a totally different perspective on what it takes to get freedom and who fought and died to get us that freedom, and then you treat each other in a different way. 

You Need This Book

And you start seeing each other as fellow Americans who went through a lot to get this nation where it is today. So, I recommend the book, not just for black Americans to know about these black patriots, I don’t care what color your skin as you need to be reading this book. And tell me now is Amazon the place you want people to go for the book, or to your website, what’s the best place to go?

Jimmy:

You can go to Amazon, but I really like to go to tillmanfamilypress.com, you go there and pick up the book, or lulu.com, that’s my publisher. But those places you can probably get it cheaper there. But Amazon and other places charging a high little price, but you can mostly get it there. 

But really, I wrote the book for white America, to be honest with you, because I was at a lot of Trump rallies well, last year, basically about this time last year going back and forth with them to Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan and stuff like that. And a lot of white Patriots are asking me how come blacks are not patriotic? Even though we came, just we’re like pooped out, you know, we’re just packed in there and that’s why I’m saying America is not that race that you’ve seen.

A lot of black people attending mega rallies, just a lot of white people attended Black Lives Matter rally. You see, it’s just we all have different tribes. We just might be a prejudiced country, we’re not as racist as people want us to be perceived. But anyway, a lot of white patriots are asking me and I was telling them about the stories then they did not really know. 

So I said you know something? If I can just teach you that you’re my brother not because Trump’s the president that we always have been brothers from day one, maybe American could be a great country.

You see every country in the world, you can look at them and say okay, you Chinese, okay, you German, okay, you Russia, but America, we just have the Constitution and our blood and bread is shared for this land, that sort of thing we have in common. So once you put everybody in that pot of soup, everybody that fought for this land, everybody that fought each other rights, then you have one brotherhood, you see. And that’s why I really wrote the book. And that’s why I hope…

Greenberry Logan

It’s trickling down to black Americans because once the Trump derangement syndrome has got over everybody, and they really realize how patriotic they are now seeing how things has changed, you know, seeing how money’s main takeaway from black colleges, seeing how black unemployment is so high, seeing how immigrants gets rendered loose to the country and they can’t get no better jobs. You see, a lot of things has turned black America around, now so the book is now just trickling down event down to them.

But it was mainly for white America so they can look at their black brother, even the ones that are coming back from the Iraq War, from the Afghanistan War, from the war they’ve been fighting these wars to as patriots that are serving this country because they sometimes the kids that even the Alamo, we was at the Alamo fighting for the Alamo, you know what with Davy Crockett everybody, not just serving food at Arms once those stories be told, we remember the Alamo too.

Rick:

Amen. I love it. I love it. Man, so much good stuff and I love the fact that you got Texas in there and the like you said that these are stories every American needs to get them, every one of us need to know this full story and the real history. What was the guy’s name that was at, so he was at the siege at Bear, I think he was also at the Battle of San Jacinto, is Greenberry something, what was his last name?

Jimmy:

Logan.

Rick:

Logan, that’s it, Greenberry Logan.

Jimmy:

Greenberry Logan.

Rick:

Yeah, Greenberry Logan, you do a chapter on him in the book as well. So anyway, I love it. Great stuff, recommend it to everybody to get. You can get it at Amazon. The best page to go to is going to be tillmanfamilypress.com, and we’ll have a link at wallbuilderslive.com today. The name of the book is Tillman’s Handbook of Great Black American Patriots. And how can people follow you for interviews, get you in to speak, that sort of thing?

JimmyLee2DC.com

Jimmy:

Okay. Well, you can always go to the [inaudible 19:23]Republican.com, jimmylee2dc.com, and you can always find me and book me there. And don’t forget Hendrick Arnold, he was a leader and spied doing the Texas Revolution, just for the record, that guy…

Rick:

Oh, there’s another good one. Oh, that’s good stuff.

Jimmy:

And if you pick up the book, you also see that in Texas also, there’s a lot of historical sites that are dedicated these individual also. In the book, there’s also landmarks historical places that list these great Americans that show you that American also found these individuals worthy of being honored also. There’s a lot of places in Texas you can go see and find out that we was here too even at the Alamo.

Rick:

I love it. I love it. Jimmy Lee Tillman, God bless you, brother. Let’s get you back on again soon.

Jimmy:

Alright, thank you. And God bless America.

Rick:

Stay with us, folks, we’ll be right back with David and Tim Barton.

THE AMERICAN STORY

Hey, guys, we want to let you know about a new resource we have here at WallBuilders called The American Story. For years, people have been asking us to do a history book, and we finally done it. We start with Christopher Columbus and go roughly through Abraham Lincoln. And one of the things that so often we hear today are about the imperfections of America, or how so many people in America that used to be celebrated or honored really aren’t good or honorable people.

One of the things we acknowledge quickly in the book is that the entire world is full of people who are sinful and need a savior, because the Bible even tells us that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And yet what we see through history, and certainly is evident in America is how a perfect God uses imperfect people and does great things through them. The story of America is not the story of perfect people. But you see time and time again how God got involved in the process and use these imperfect people to do great things that impacted the entire world from America. To find out more, go to wallbuilders.com and check out The American Story.

Rick:

Welcome back to WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us. Thanks to Jimmy Lee Tillman for joining us today as well. We’ll have links to his book so you can get there at wallbuilderslive.com back with David and Tim. And guys, man, I knew some of those stories as I flipped through his book, obviously, from all the information that you guys put it. I didn’t know about some of the black patriots in the Texas Revolution. Knew there were a lot of them in the American Revolution, that’s pretty cool.

David:

That clearly got your attention, bro. That was fun to listen to you pop off of that. So yeah, there’s some great black heroes and that’s the thing with this. There’s not a shortage of black heroes, not black folk, there’s not a shortage of black heroes. We’re not talking about just folks who were soldiers and participants, we’re talking about the guys who rose to the top who were notable for their accomplishments

Tim:

Yeah, whose stories were known. This isn’t something that people are discovering for the very first time like, oh, my gosh, did you know there was a black person who did a great thing at some point in American history? These stories were known. If you go to the Alamo, there’s actually paintings of the individuals from the Alamo, some of the heroes that were down there. And if you look at the painting, you realize you know what, there’s a lot of people in these paintings who are not white.

We Must Promote Truth

And this is again, as he brought out that the hero, right, you asked about, what his last name and Logan, right, as the story unfolds, it’s very well-documented history that is just largely been ignored today. And when you ignore history, it allows people who have an alternate agenda apart from just promoting truth, they can come up with their agenda, and they can reshape the way people understand history or what they imagine about history, was what 1619 projects as we want to shape the way that we are; we’re reimagining our history. I don’t want to reimagine history. I want to learn history.

What was actually true there’s a lot of well documented information that is simply ignored today. And so I’ve not read his book yet. I’m very interested to see how he unfolds some of this. But I thought it was a really interesting point where he said, you know, if you look at Crispus Attucks, Crispus Attucks was like the original George Floyd, I thought that’s such an interesting point where he said George Floyd got killed in America, although everybody around America wants a rally to this guy, and this guy becomes the rallying cry for a movement, that really was.

When you look back at the Boston Massacre which is where a Crispus Attucks was believed to be the first life lost in the Boston Massacre where the British fire into the crowd, three people died instantly, two people died later, but Crispus Attucks who was this black American patriot fighting for the cause of liberty, John Adams, after the revolution was riding and talking about the revolution.

And so sometimes people look to Lexington green or the Battle of Concord Bridge, and they think that’s really where the revolution began. John Adams says, no, the revolution really began when the first blood was shed on King Street. So this is John Adams, an individual heavily involved in the revolution, obviously, heavily involved in early American government saying that King Street was where the revolution started and the King Street was the Boston Massacre. That was Crispus Attucks.

An Honest Story of History

And these were some of the things that if we just were telling an honest story of history, and recognizing the American Revolution began with the death of a black patriot, and this was part of the rally for other Americans going, hey, the British has fired into us, they killed some of our people, our patriots, Crispus Attucks was known as part of our people in our patriots in the American culture that time. 

We just have lost so much history along the way that today we don’t know that. So I am very grateful there’s guys like Jimmy Lee Tillman who’re out there writing, helping people relearn some of these stories that are very well documented pieces of history.

David:

And Jimmy really had a great statement. He said, what’s happening right now with the way we’re teaching history, he said, I’m just quoting, I wrote down because it was so good. He said, “We’re going back to the plantation.” He said, “Both whites and blacks feel bad for who they are.” He said, “But once the true story is told, both blacks and whites will feel differently about their country.” 

He’s exactly right. The way we portray history, the way we present it, the way we teach it, that George Orwell quote, I mean we’ll feel differently and we will be a different nation from what they’re trying to make us right now.

Rick:

That’s so powerful. It’s so true. And it’s so needed. I mean, instead of CRT and teaching us to hate each other, and hate ourselves and hate our country, this is a chance for us to come together and realize, hey, look, we’ve all got ownership in this American dream.

Hidden Black Heroes – With Jimmy Lee Tillman II

David:

And Rick, let me throw something in. I just got back from a tour through all sorts of cities in Michigan. And there was a high percentage of black population where I was doing these meetings. And so there were a lot of blacks in the meetings. And in all the meetings, I share some of the stories of black heroes out of the American Revolution. And the response was very enthusiastic. But it’s interesting. I think the response to the Black Heroes was more enthusiastic from the white crowd than it was the black crowd.

Black crowd is like we’ve never heard this before. And white crowd was, oh, my gosh, we really weren’t racist all the time. And so as Jimmy said, you know, it’s going to affect both blacks and whites. And I watched that over the last couple of weeks as we’ve been doing these meetings throughout Michigan, it really does have a liberating effect on both blacks and whites to know what truth is in the history.

Rick:

It’s incredibly powerful. And it actually brings us together instead of tearing us apart. Instead of only focusing on the bad and the ugly, brings the good together as well. We need so much more that. So we’re thankful that Jimmy Lee joined us today. We’ll have links to his book today. Also, links to American History in Black & White on our website at wallbuilders.com. Get into that information folks and share it with your friends and family. We need truth out there: the lies are being spread all over the place, you can be one of the ones that brings truth. Thanks so much for listening today. You’ve been listening to WallBuilders Live.