On November 22, 1963 I was sent home early from St. Benedict’s Parochial School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York. I attended St. Benedict’s with my two older brothers but I don’t remember if I was with them during the short walk back to our house that day. I do remember walking into our kitchen-dining room and seeing my mother at the stove. My mother usually greeted me and asked how my day was. My mother did not turn toward me that day. I approached her and discovered she was crying. I had just turned five years old on November 5th and up to that point I had never seen my mother cry. My mother continued tending to cooking and crying. Finally she quietly and soberly declared, “ whenever somebody tries to do something for colored people they kill them.”
The television coverage of the Kennedy assassination and funeral seemed to play on endlessly for months. The people who lived in my neighborhood and who surrounded my parents; friends, family, were deeply saddened and angry.
The 1964 election can be summed up in a joke I heard regularly: “ What comes out when you pee? Goldwater.” Senator Barry Goldwater, Arizona senator and author of “The Conscience of A Conservative” was the enemy of the people who framed my world. Lyndon Johnson offered a possibly brighter choice even though he presided over the clearly segregationist “ Dixiecrats” that were an important part of his constituency. I was immersed in this information by osmosis. I was five years old, but the conversations I overheard informed me. Also, Vernel’s barber shop was a daily forum for the heated discussions about Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam and Rev. Martin Luther King. Many of the barber shop pundits believed Malcolm X was more relevant to the survival of “Negroes, Colored people, or “the Black man”;depending on who was talking, than Rev. King.
On February 3, 1964 Rev. Milton Galamison led the largest student boycott in the history of the New York City public school system. A reported 464,365 students stayed home to fight for the end of school segregation. Rev. Galamison followed up with a second boycott on March 16, 1964 which reported 267,459 students staying away from schools. In response to the school segregation issue, Mayor John V. Lindsay implemented the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment. In 1964, Mayor Robert Wagner, Jr. (1954-1965)signed a contract to pledge 223,000.00 toward programs like Youth in Action for Bedford-Stuyvesant residents to solve the issues of poverty, housing,health, employment,social welfare,and recreation. By 1966, Mayor Lindsay(1966-1973) created a school district in a black neighborhood that was decentralized and permitted Black Brooklynites to pursue a black nationalist curriculum. Freedom Schools pre-dated the current charter school movement. Schools named after Marcus Garvey, slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers (murdered in 1963), slain Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X(murdered in 1965), and some with African names like Uhuru Sasa(Freedom Now) sprang up in Brooklyn.
New York, and Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn in particular, was a hotbed of union activity, the school desegregation movement, and the equal pay and employment movement. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. of Harlem became the first person of African American descent to be elected from New York to Congress (1945-1971). Powell was a vocal champion for his constituents and the poor and disenfranchised. His personal life was splattered over NY tabloids due to his excessive spending, womanizing, and flamboyance. Many African Americans applauded his ability to put it to “the man” down in Washington. In 1968, Shirley Chisholm became the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Congress. Mrs. Chisholm represented the 12th Congressional district from 1969-1983. Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Adam Clayton Powell and Shirley Chisholm were names that reverberated throughout my world.
This is how I grew up. I was raised in an America where there was outrage, cynicism, skepticism, activism, and hope. The phone calls to leaders downtown, in Albany, and in Washington came from my house and from houses all around Bedford-Stuyvesant across, Black America, across Disenfranchised America.
In 2017, America is in distress. Americans are reacting with outrage,cynicism,skepticism,activism,and hope to the rhetoric of the recent presidential election cycle and the ascendancy of Donald Trump to 45th President of the United States. Members of all races, genders, ages, and sexual orientations are signing petitions, marching, and making phone calls. However, I am reluctant to willingly join the call for social action. I quietly wonder where were you or your parents when we were fighting for social justice and being told to wait, to be patient? When heroin was flooding the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant, destroying my cousins and half brother and their friends? When men were going to Vietnam and returning irreparably broken;if at all? When COINTELPRO ravaged social justice organizations and their leaders?
James Baldwin made a bold declaration and asked a profound question:
Baldwin put the onus of change squarely on people in positions of power and privilege. “What white people have to do,” Baldwin said once, “is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary for them to have a nigger in the first place. Because I am not a nigger. I’m a man. If I’m not the nigger here, and if you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you have to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that. Whether or not it is able to ask that question.”
As the wealth supremacists control more of the world and pilfer more of it for their own pleasure, white Americans are becoming the new niggers. Your children are dying from opioid abuse like my relatives did, you are losing jobs or being underemployed like my parents, my neighbors were and me and my peers are currently, You find it increasingly difficult to pay for education like my parents and relatives did, You are suffering from health problems and can not always afford quality medical care. Joining the military is the most appealing option for education and financial security. Living like a nigger in America is so distressing Donald Trump became president under the coded promise to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. Make America the land where the Caucasian man was on top again; like the old days; like before Obama set foot in the White House. I must inform you America, you have been fooled. You have been given a bad check. You are the new nigger. Your disenfranchisement enhances someone else.
America is at a crossroad. We the people all have a stake in this country and require an honest evaluation of how American society has lost it’s moral will to attain the lofty goals it was founded on. And even in that, the Founding Fathers were visionaries who deemed land, women, and slaves their property.
I am a reluctant activist because my neighbors are impatiently demanding an end to hypocrisy, injustice,corruption, and inequality and I remember asking for the same things my entire life and being told to be patient or simply told to wait.