[Membroj] Esperanto research at the Library of Congress--progress report

[Ralph Dumain]

I'm still keeping up with all the technological changes that enable us to accomplish more faster, better, and cheaper. I haven't been to the current periodicals room of the Library of Congress yet, but I just put in an appearance in the microforms room. In the old days you had to feed coins into a machine to make inferior copies of old microfilmed newspapers and such. Now, while the old microforms are there, you can do so much more. The microform readers are now hooked up to PCs and laser printers. You put your microfilm or microfiche under the lens, and when you've got what you want, properly focused, you can scan it and save it on your flash drive and/or print out the result with a laser printer (up to 50 copies total, for free). What a world, what a world . . . 

You can save scanned pages in three or four formats. I recall the JPEG and PDF formats. You can also perform at least some elementary image editing operations--rotate, crop, etc. It took some time for me to figure all this stuff out, so I didn't do as perfect a job as I should have. I finally figured out how to save all the scanned pages of a document in a single PDF file, but I mixed up the order of the pages in the process.

So what was I up to? You may recall that in a previous adventure I discovered possibly the first African-American Esperantist, William Pickens, who was to become a major civil rights leader of the early 20th century:

William Pickens: Who’s Who in Colored America 
http://autodidactproject.org/esperanto2010/pickens-whoswho.html

Pickens wrote two articles on Esperanto in the periodical VOICE OF THE NEGRO in 1906. In addition to those two articles, I scanned one of the issue covers as a JPG I can add later. maybe next time around I can improve on what I did this time. But here are the two articles:

Esperanto, the New International Language, April 1906
http://autodidactproject.org/esperanto2010/pickens-espo1.pdf

"La Vojo"--Zamenhof's Poem in Esperanto, Dec 1906
http://autodidactproject.org/esperanto2010/pickens-vojo.pdf

This second article is especially interesting in that he translated Zamenhof's poem into English, in addition to discussing the problem of translation and showing his sympathy for Zamenhof's ideals. I don't know offhand whether anyone else has translated this poem into English or who it was. For all I know, Pickens could have been the first.

The context of the time is also worthy of note. I don't recall when the American esperanto movement really took off, but these were the early years, four years before the World Congress of 1910 in Washington. Pickens also wrote this three years before the founding of the NAACP, in which he was to play a leadership role.

While scrolling through the fiche, I chanced on another article,comparing the plight of Black Americans to that of Russian Jews. The author concluded that for both groups the prospects in their respective nations were probably hopeless, and things were bound to get even worse. ou may recall that the failed Russian Revolution of 1905 unleashed yet another round of horrible pogroms which had quite an impact on Zamenhof, instigating him to push the "interna ideo" and hilelismo/homaranismo even harder.  And in the USA, this was the period of the "nadir", in which black Americans found themselves in the worst situation since slavery, with all the rights they had gained from emancipation stripped away, with the system of Jim Crow consolidated and the rule of lynch law a terrifying reality. For both groups in both countries, the combination of mob violence and government repression rendered life and well being notoriously precarious. I will likely upload this little article as well.

I don't know how long Pickens stuck with Esperanto. His family today is aware of the Esperanto connection, perhaps in the same way I am. Perhaps I should make an effort to enquire. I don't know whether Pickens attended the 1910 Esperanto Congress or whether he even could have, given the rigid segregation enforced in all places of business. Imagine if Zamenhhof had met Pickens and the kind of conversation they might have had.