[Membroj] Washington research progress report

[Ralph Dumain]

As next years's ELNA congress will be on a holiday weekend, being too ambitious in terms of getting the public to come to some event would probably be a mistake.  That leaves us with entertaining ourselves, and the question remains, how serious does one want to get on a holiday weekend? It's a shame that we can't plan something more ambitious, becuase there is something far more interesting that could be done than simply shnorr for the American dream -- lando de libereco.. .. Here are a few thoughts.

The 1910 was an international as well as a national event. Presumably others from the Americas outside of the USA were here too, along with Europeans and maybe some Asians. Hence we might think of the Latin American connection.

This year is Colombia's centenary in the Esperanto movement, and they are having a commemorative congress there.

I'm reading Zamenhof's big ms on Hilelismo, the predecessor of Homaranismo, and I'm finding it fascinating and instructive about his mindset. Recently I read Van Kleef's monograph on Homaranismo.

1910 was also smack in the middle of the great Jewish (and other) migration from Eastern Europe, which means that Zamenhof could have gotten a chance to see how his people were doing here, not to mention that there may be been immigrants participating in the American Esperanto movement.

In 1910 Washington was a centerpiece of Jim Crow. How did Zamenhof and others react to that, and how did Black Washingtonians perceive the 1910 Esperanto Congress?

What other viewpoints were extant other than the 'lando de libereco' fantasy? Esperantists did or could have known better, or at least did in subsequent decades, when an Esperanto translation of Leib Malach's play "Mississippi" was published in Esperanto in 1939. (See my recently uploaded foreword and biography from that publication). Furthermore, Malach traveled all through the Americas (Latin American connection again), inter alia causing an uproar in Argentina with a play about sex slavery. 

Now most interesting of all: I've been discovering references to Esperanto and other constructed languages in the black press. So far the most prominent black Esperantist of the time was William Pickens, who published in or was reported on in The Voice of the Negro, The Amsterdam News, and the Chicago Defender. I don't know yet whether he was here in 1910 but he well could have been. He was a major civil rights figure of that time. There are other articles in the black press on Esperanto and at least one on Volapuk. The Pittsburgh Courier reported (in 1953!): "Ido movement names Negro to top post"--a peculiar achievement, given that the Ido movement was dead by then!

In short, with some detective work, an interesting portrait of the various viewpoints from which the Esperanto movement could be viewed, all radiating out from the question: what was the world like in 1910, and what influences converged upon Washington in that era?