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Tag: Black History Month

  • Black History Month: ‘Africa must tap potentials of Africans in the diaspora’

    In order to develop the continent, Africans have been reminded of the need to bridge the gap between it and Africans in the diaspora.

    Participants gave this advice on Thursday at a panel discussion organised by the United States Embassy, Abuja in commemoration of the Black History Month.

    The theme of the event was “Building bridges between Africa and the Diaspora.”

    The Black History Month began in 1926 in the United States when historian Carter Wooden and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History announced the second week of February as “Negro History Week.”

    Aside from the lecture, there will be a performance by the Theatre Arts Department of Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Zaria to showcase African-American contributions to the arts.

    The performance titled “The Meeting” is a play about the meeting between two prominent black- American civil right activists, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr in 1965 during the height of the civil right movement in the US.

    According to the African Union, the African Diaspora is composed of “people of African origin living outside of the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality, and who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union.”

    Speaking at the event, Tanya Hill, an officer with the American embassy said the Black History Month is very important because it helps the “lost” diaspora find a connection to their roots.

    Ms Hill, who is an African American, said though she has not traced her descent in Africa, she is proud about everything that makes her African.

    She said as a child of the slave trade, she can only trace her genealogical roots to the 19th century.

    She, however, said it is very important to African countries to start building bridges with Africans in the diaspora.

    This, she said, has become important as it can assist with the socioeconomic development of the continent.

    Ms Hills said revaluing the relationship with Africans in the diaspora is a great way to bridge the gap between people of African descent across the globe. She said many black Africans have been doing so through DNA genealogical tracing of their roots,

    According to the African Union, the African Diaspora is composed of “people of African origin living outside of the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality, and who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union.”

     

     

     

     

  • Black history month: Why Selma” and not Memphis

    Black history month: Why Selma” and not Memphis

    Measure with care whose history you accept for neither the past nor the dead can loudly contend how they are dressed.

    Before being granted mainstream entry, selected chapters of minority history are given a thorough wash. After being pasteurised, they are given broader exposure. By then, they are no longer Black history. They have been transformed into White history in blackface. Every commercial retelling of Black history dons this mask of a mask. Subtle distortions in presentation produce grave distortions in the lessons derived there from much like an initial deviation in the course of a vessel will take the ship to a vastly different destination unless the course is swiftly corrected.

    Those who control the medium do more than control the message and the messenger. They pick them. As the years transpire, popularised Black history has been steadily turned into a false light. It no longer serves to enlighten; it now often obscures the deeper questions raised by the actual march of history. Events are recast so that history becomes a stranger to itself. Black history has been bent and domesticated. It now indoctrinates both Blacks and Whites to believe the society we now have is the product of a great awakening that broke old chains by the force of new law.

    The Civil Rights Movement (CRM) is portrayed as the second American Revolution, made this time without weapons and battle but with moral suasion and compassion. Although important, the CRM has been overstated. The fruits of the CRM are the fruits of political compromise; political compromise is always preceded by a moral one. The CRM changed America for the better but that change was more incomplete than comprehensive, more fragile than it was full.

    Most Blacks remain estranged from what they seek. For everyone one part of this failure for which they bear responsibility, society bears two parts. Yet, they are being told, by the commercialised salesmen of Black history, that reform has run its course. Your condition is your fault. Go get some bootstraps then pull yourself up by the odd contraptions. Once a progressive, educative too, Black History is now an instrumentality of those who would rather maintain the extant power relationships underlying the political economy. That which was instituted to help us from the hole is now being used to deceive us that we have already escaped. All the while, the hole gets deeper and we sink deeper in it.

    Despite being the work product of a brilliant, highly talented Black filmmake,r the movie Selma falls into this genre of misconception. It is the telling of Black history purposefully made palatable to Whites because its message is the needed reform has been had. This means that the story of the current Black condition is not that reform has been insufficient but that the people have been to insufficient to live up to the reforms.  Most Whites now insist that this blanched interpretation is the only credible one. If Black history is to retain any meaning except as an appendage of mainstream history we must not become gulled by seeing a finely crafted production featuring heroic black figures. While devoid of the flash and glitter of a Hollywood production, our analysis must strive to be more apt and enlightening that the people may better see the limited dimensions of what has been accomplished in their true behalf and the vast expanse yet to be travelled.

    Selma is the latest attempt to homogenise Martin Luther King into an establishment icon. King has been reduced to a slice of himself. He has become a civil rights amulet. In the popular image, King’s work is almost wholly defined by the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March on Washington and the Selma demonstrations which helped galvanise political support for the 1965 Voting Rights Act, seen by many as the legal culmination of the CRM.

    Mainstream history treats the Selma episode as King’s best hour. This error tosses aside the last three years of King’s life as if they were lost years. Those years contain his most humane efforts. The works performed during this challenging period are more instructive to our present condition than are the civil rights achievements so publicly heralded. The Bus Boycott, the March, and Selma brought King fame. The hard work he did after 1965 confirmed his greatness.

    This more progressive aspect of his contributions is willfully ignored by the mainstream. They do not want many people to know this part of his life, fearing the people too may walk this line. This could change the structure of America in ways the civil rights legal measures could never contemplate and in ways that would discomfit the establishment.

    1965 was a watershed year, but the water did not all shed into the same channel. The CRM had joined different streams of Black political thought in an often tendentious coalition. Traditional Black elites and radical activists agreed to work toward the agreed goal: the end of legal racial discrimination. (The only recorded meeting between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X was at the Capitol when both attended congressional hearings on the Voting Rights Act.)

    The decision to focus on civil and political rights was apt as it represented the largest yet most attainable goal to which all Blacks could agree. It was the common denominator to which all major strands of Black political thought could agree. With Voting Rights Act’s passage, the ad-hoc political coalition began to crumble.

    Upon winning this battle, the conformist Black elite had its full. They attained their key objective.  Destruction of the most obvious racial barriers would allow them entry into the mainstream. The door of Integration well served them because they were positioned close to it. They just needed the legal key to open it. The majority of Blacks remained miles from the door without means to close the distance. Having a key would do them little good except to serve as a cruel joke of which they were the butt, a stinging keepsake of the oceanic expanse between the high promise of civil equality and the lowly reality of their economic weakness.

    The elite would expand and grow in absolute numbers yet remain a small fraction of the overall Black community. Having achieved most of what they wanted, they would exit the politics of protest to enter mainstream electoral politics. They would no longer posture to change the system. Their modest aim was to gain greater security for their class not be fighting the establishment from within, but by becoming loyal to it, come what may.

    With each year, the Black political class would become more glued to the power establishment. Their role changed without outcry from or due notice to the people.  They would no longer represent the Black community to the White establishment. They would serve as establishment envoy to the people, explaining to the broken and poor why more could not be done and to be patient and grateful because their decrepit condition was the best attainable at the given moment.  The phrases, “We are doing all that we can” or “All that can be done is being done,” are almost always dismissive lies used on those whom the speaker does not feel are entitled to any intelligent explanation.

    Today’s unimaginative Black political leaders are the direct heirs of the moderate, CRM elite.  They both enjoy the same easy conformity to Money Power and an establishment devoid of goodwill toward the majority of the people.

    On the other side of the spectrum were the young activists.  Many of them performed the heroic, dangerous grassroots civil rights work mobilising people to protest and vote.  The foci of their grassroots activity moved from the rural communities of the south to major cities across the nation. These activists recognised civil rights legislation by itself would not answer the question of the worsening ghettoes and super-ghettoes into which too many Black communities had turned.

    Many young activists openly shunned CRM nonviolent tactics. This was not as radical a departure as portrayed. The CRM always contained re was always an important armed element in the CRM. During a meeting at the height of the movement, a senior national leader wanted to poll how many of the grassroots organisers attending the meeting carried weapons while doing their work. They all raised their hands; they all were armed.

    The Black Panthers symbolised this aspect of Black political thought. They saw the Civil Rights Movement as a first step toward radical revolution that would likely prove violent. More because of their revolutionary message than because of their access to weapons, the Panthers were hunted down like dogs. Reactionary groups like the Black Muslims carried weapons. Since they did not challenge the status quo, they were not targeted as severely as the Panthers.

    Between the moderate establishment and the radicals, stood Dr. King. By appearance and vocation, he seemed to belong with the elite. To his eternal credit, he did not limit himself to their cause. His vision was much broader. The Voting Act did not end the campaign. It signaled the beginning of the more fundamental battle.

    King charted unexplored territory for someone considered a member of the Black elite. He remained loyal to nonviolence but would pursue goals that beckoned a drastic, near violent restructuring of the American political economy.  In his ways and means, he remained true to the established norm. Yet, his ends borne more affinity to the radicals than to the Black establishment.

    Thus the Black establishment put him at arm’s length. When he publicly denigrated the Vietnam War and when he espoused the rights of the poor by supporting workers and their unions, moderate Blacks joined the White chorus, labeling him a “troublemaker.”

    Meanwhile, radical blacks said he was too much an establishment figure due to his reliance on dialogue and nonviolence.

    King saw himself not solely as civil rights leader. The CRM was part of a larger struggle, the fight for depressed minorities and the poor in the land of plenty. That fight was itself part of a greater struggle: that of human dignity in all lands for all people.

    King was not killed for his CRM role. The Voting Act was penned three years before his death. America had already absorbed the initial shock of the legislation and had co-opted much of the CRM by then. Rarely is a man assassinated for events several years removed. Famous men are more often assassinated in fear of what they may yet do. He was brought down in Memphis because the work he was doing there was consonant with a larger vision to radically reform America’s political economy. Thus, the mainstream will forever downplay King’s journey to Memphis. Instead, it will act as if his march ended with Selma.

    The Voting Act did not challenge the power structure; it confirmed. For Black people, the Act is rightfully viewed as a major achievement. On another level, the legislation was merely a tool in a fight about which Blacks were dimly aware. The measure was a bit of leverage in the tussle between the moderate and conservative wings of the White establishment. In a way, this echoed the end of slavery a century before. When North and South fought over slavery, the quality of life of the bondsmen was not the main consideration. The true issue was which segment of the national elite would stamp its name on the shape of the nation for the remainder of the 19th century. The status of the Negro was essentially a device by which the two sides kept score in this intramural power scrum.

    In a subtle way, Selma exposes the limited nature of the Voting Act. The film inaccurately portrays President Johnson as opposing the Act. While Johnson had no personal love for blacks and amply directed expletives at us in his private discourse, his record of supporting Black voting rights is incontrovertible. As Senate majority leader, he shepherded the first voting rights legislation outmaneuvering vehement filibuster by fellow Southerners in 1957. As president, he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Johnson supposed the 1965 Voting Act as a logical progression of the 1957 measure.

    However, the film portrays him as a negative force. Portraying him as a hero would lessen the dramatic impact. By sending the message that the Act had to overcome presidential opposition, the film depicts it as more radical a reform than it really was. If the film showed Johnson as a cooperative agent, discerning people would begin to notice the skunk among the minks, the maggot in the honey jar.

    The aims of the CRM and the Voting Act, in particular, were modest ones more favorable to the elite than the Black majority. Most of White establishment was assuaged that the Act would not damage their position. Some knew they would benefit by gaining the elite as pliant junior partners in a national political coalition.

    Black people gain the right to vote without molestation. Due to their lack of economic muscle, they remain restricted to choosing between the two parties created by the establishment. Thus, they remained on the leash owned by Money Power. Occasionally, an individual race may present a progressive alternative. In the main, the parties and their candidates guard the status quo. The differences between the parties are those of nuance and style, rarely of substance. They offer no workable solutions to the conditions of those living in maw of poverty.

    Yes, if you ask a slave, he would select the less serfdom over pure servitude if his choices were thusly limited. My wager is that he would rather a third option: actual freedom. Yet, that option was not on the menu then and is not on the table.  Neither major party offers an economic agenda to relieve the American working class from three decades of stagnant wages, increasing household debt and growing poverty.

    Well-acted and crafted, Selma seems to be an attractive bundle of political sophistry. A joint venture between members the White and Black establishment, it leads you close yet astray. Its implicit message is that the CRM is the zenith of the struggle for racial equality and dignity. Everything that follows is epilogue. King realised the CRM was but a chapter in a larger, more important book.

    To proclaim victory at that point would have been like the America’s Founding Fathers celebrating victory because they signed the Declaration of Independence. The signing of that document did not end the Revolutionary War; it was the true beginning of it in all of its ramifications. Selma and other messages like it caricature King as his one-dimensional, civil rights miniature. They tame him, turning this ever-evolving progressive and humane figure into a symbol of a status quo that would make him bristle. The things he abhorred 50 years ago still hold sway.

    King has become an object of political taxidermy. They have brought him inside the hall of political legitimacy only after having killed him and stuffed his political legacy with their own notions. They mount him on their walls and tell us to be glad because King has won.  They have made him a hero, they say.  In reality, they have turned him into their trophy and have tried to obscure his true legacy in the process. This expropriation will not stand forever. Truth comes if slowly. One day, we shall take him back and display his fuller legacy because that is where the greater good and justice lie.

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  • Artistes chart new path at Black History Month

    Artistes chart new path at Black History Month

    IT was quite an exciting moment last week when a group of artistes converged on the popular Bogobori Hotels to celebrate this year’s Black History Month.

    In the last 25 years, Black History Month has become a cultural and financial phenomenon worthy of celebration.

    The event was intended to give vent to the creative juices of both the aspiring and established artistes.

    It was a Black History Month Special powered by the Pan African publication, African Profiles Magazine and US-based URIM media in conjunction with Gbagychild Entertainment, hosts of the Taruwa brand.

    The theme of the event was “Arts and the Cultivation and Refinement of the Human Capital”. According to the organizers, the theme was in recognition of the central role played by arts in the entire black liberation movement.

    In his speech, international PR consultant and Pan Africanist, James Eze, who represented the guest speaker, Prof. Chudi Uwazuruike, highlighted the great writings of influential Black historical figures like Frederick Douglas, among others.

    Other contributors on the occasion stressed the huge benefits of collaborative ventures between Nigerian and American artistes in the entertainment industry in the last decade alone.

    They further highlighted the importance such international exposure had brought to individual Nigerian artistes and the industry as a whole.

    Eze called for a deliberate educational policy that would stress the teaching of history as a compulsory course at all tiers of education.

     

  • Black history month: Can the spirit triumph?

    Black history month: Can the spirit triumph?

    A biased eye incites a mean heart but a compassionate hand repairs the broken

    This will be my last article on the Black History Month. We exit the month as we entered – a people with small answers to large questions. This bewildered inadequacy is not confined to Black America. It applies to the entirety of our race. A small number of black people have reached their individual promise lands. They bask in fortune, fame and even power. Yet, for the vast number of us, being black means being in retreat. For most, yesterday looks better than tomorrow. It is a sad thing when the future appears leaner than the past. Sadness is compounded by the knowledge that the past has been a wholly inferior one. Yet, the danger lurks that we shall go further adrift. This need not happen. To prevent our continuing decrease, we need better understand forces arrayed against our betterment, especially diathesis of a collective psychology that directs us to think less of ourselves than while placing others on a pedestal that needn’t exist.

    Let’s return to the Jordan Davis trial for it offers striking lessons applicable on a wider scale. Since my last column, the verdict has been rendered. It is a case study in logic contorted by the ill advices of racism. The jury convicted the middle-aged white shooter, Michael Dunn, of attempted murder of the three black youths his ten bullets missed. Three of those ten shots entered Jordan Davis that life might leave him. The jury did not convict Dunn of murdering the lone person he shot.

    For shooting the unarmed Davis, the jury could not make its mind that Dunn committed illegal homicide. What a grotesque message this conveys for it carries an implicit invitation to kill. Better for a white man to quickly kill a perceived black assailant than miss the dark target. The black man might flee and later present conclusive evidence of never posing a threat to his erstwhile shooter. Such a threat would exist only in the mind of the gunman because hatred had conditioned him to see a black man as a violent felony in progress. Centuries ago, slave-holding whites slept in fear of an insurrection among the bondsmen. That a dark-skinned human being might fight for his freedom after being involuntarily thrust into servitude was something more than a curious notion. It was unalloyed evil. Slavery is gone but the racial fear, that was both born of it and that gave birth to it, remains. The old hatred permeates the modern air. It walks the streets, nigh ubiquitous for it enters almost every chance encounter between white and black men. It stokes fearful anger in whites and suspicious apprehension in those blacks aware of the crimson history between the two races. Blacks ignorant of that history fall bewildered, unable to comprehend while they always are on the wrong side of the unemployment line, a judge’s gavel, or a vigilante’s gun.

    Dunn said his life was threatened by Davis. He claimed the boy held an object that resembled a firearm or a stick. Nothing corroborates this assertion. The lone confirmed evidence was that the two engaged in a shouting match. Yet the jury gave Dunn a pass on the murder charge because they wanted to believe Davis, by virtue of his blackness, got what he deserved and Dunn, by virtue of his race, had ample reason to shoot as he did.

    We are left with the travesty of a man being convicted for missing the other youths but not for killing the one he shot. The jury did not want to believe this middle class, middle-aged white man could be guilty of murdering a black youth out of sheer annoyance simply because this lesser human being had the effrontery to argue with him. Racial stereotypes do not permit this conclusion. Social and political myths abound regarding the violent nature of black men. By social convention, Davis was guilty of assaulting Dunn. Forgetting or being ignorant of this social myth, Davis would pay with his life. This was too high a price simply for not recognizing the evil barriers society had imposed against his humanity.

    Had Davis and his companions been white youths, Dunn never would have reached for let alone discharged his weapon. Had Dunn been a black man who killed a white youth in the same circumstance, the jury deliberation would have been swift and sure. The shooter would have been convicted of the worst type of murder. This jury simply could not grasp the fundamental truth that a white man might lethally and illegally aggress a black youth. They dared not admit a white man could harbor illegal ill will to a black man. That would upset the cart. According to common perception, illegality and violence always flows the opposite way. For a black man to be attacked by a white man, the former must have provoked the latter. Consequently, the shooter could take the witness stand, bemoaning he was “the victim” and acting in hurt amazement that he would be compelled to stand trial to defend his lethal deed.

    The facts of the case did not fit this tidy construct. Thus, the jury decided to keep faith with racist convention and ignore the truth.

    A deeper truth is that historic reality aligns with this case more so than with the stereotype. Historically, blacks have been targeted and killed by people like Dunn more so than people like Dunn had to worry about being killed by the likes of Davis. Whites have killed more blacks in racist outrage than blacks have killed whites. In the history of America, white men have been the most deadly of racist predators. Based on actual fact and history, that Dunn would murder the black Davis was always the more likely outcome, if only for the hue of the victim’s skin. Yet, this historical reality is not the image that first jumps into the collective consciousness. Imagine a street criminal in America. Imagine a murderer. Imagine a drug dealer. The likely first image to surface is that of a black man. The truth is different. Blacks are no more likely to murder or traffic drugs than whites.

    This inaccurate image is not by chance. It has been carefully engineered so that whites subconsciously abhor blacks and disassociate themselves from them. It has been created also that blacks find manifold ways to degrade themselves and to believe that things white are things superior.

    The power of images is devastating. CNN interviewed one of two black people on the Davis jury. The young female juror asserted that Dunn, the shooter, was a good guy and that race played no part in the case. The poor woman denied almost the entirety of American social history in the space of that brief interview. Ignorance can be more deadly than any bullet. Her statements reveal a fundamental flaw common in the race. A diminishing number of us want to be black in terms of political, cultural and social orientation. These people want to blend in to larger society; they want to homogenize into a great and bland nothingness. They seek not the pride of diversity. They grope for the comfort of submission. They want to be accepted as human beings whose skin happens to be black. They seek to turn sinister tragedy into a love story simply by calling it a different name. Thus, they seek to jettison our historical legacy and duty before the legacy has been completed and before our collective duties have been fulfilled. The quest for equality is not over for it has not been won. However, too many of us find it too uncomfortable and difficult to talk about. It is too stubborn a problem, thus better to ignore the thing and move along as best one can.

    As such, blackness is in retreat. We no longer press for greater justice. Our leaders seek not to inspire us to eradicate this obstacle or demand those on the other side of the barrier to seek greater humanity by dismantling the trap rather than making it more subtly powerful. We now are taught to manage racism. We are to live under its shadow. That is our plight. The best we can do is to position ourselves under the thinnest aspect of the menacing cloud. Since that space is keenly limited, we compete against each other in a winless war to minimize the racism we feel individually instead of gathering our collective strength to combat the injustice so that none will have to endure its sting. We have resigned ourselves to defeat because we have given up the fight. We have accepted the broken image of ourselves to the extent that we no longer believe anything can be fixed or that things need fixing.

    Thus, the pitiable black female juror mostly excused Dunn and saw nothing in him but respectability and good while Dunn despises the very essence of the woman. Dunn is a racist. Before the incident, he had penned letters to friends, asserting the more he came into contact with blacks, the more he hated them. From his lips streamed a flow of invectives against our race when he talked freely. Given his racist disposition, this case should have been prosecuted as a civil rights matter, a hate crime under Florida law because this case was about race. Instead those charged with prosecuting the matter, decided to whitewash race from the trial. They purposely avoided bringing it up. In doing so, they tried a case that did not exist. They turned the search for justice and some modicum of truth into a lie. To distill race from an instance where an obvious racist shot an unarmed black youth is like building a house of wind and air. Nothing of weight and substance can live in the air perpetually, even an eagle has a nest which it inhabits. Those in charge of the case discarded the very essence of the thing they purportedly sought. They feigned toward justice but their objective was to preserve the racist covenant. Maintaining the racist social constellation was more important to them than justice. Preserving the social constellation profited them. Justice would not have done so.

    The Davis case is a microcosm of race in America and much of the world. Most whites deny their racism. They are comfortable and do not want to make the adjustments justice and right require to correct the evil imbalance. When asked to alter their ways, too many now claim to be victimized. They are like the errant driver who, after striking a hapless pedestrian on the roadside, stridently complains how the inconvenient it was for the walker to have damaged their car by not moving out of their way.

    World over black people have lost courage. It is no longer fashionable to speak of race as an active determinant in the political economy. Those who do are labeled troublemakers or regressive. Those words are mere labels used to disguise the truth. The work for justice and equity is half-done. Left unattended for many years, even that work is becoming unraveled for many of us. Most black Americans have lost ground economically in the past decade. There are more black men in jail than in university in America. This augurs ill for the future; nothing in the offing that suggests the change needed.

    President Obama met establishment black leaders in February. The gathering was more symbolic than real and more cynical than symbolic. The policy measures announced to salvage black males from the rigors of prejudice were so pitifully small and piecemeal that one had to wonder if the gathering was to solve a problem or just to take credit that such a meeting was held at all on this subject. This was the first such meeting the president held after six years in office. Still, the session was tepid and modest. The real reason for the session was to energize established black leaders to stoke the black community to vote during the congressional elections later this year. The Democratic Party needs their votes to stave Republican gains, thus averting a repeat of the Republican onslaught that occurred during the last (nonpresidential) congressional elections in 2010. That we now have a black president dangling false carrots before our nose shows equality to be quite real. Black politicians can be as calculating and cold-hearted as their white counterparts. What they offer the black community is ersatz hope so the people exert themselves, not for the common benefit but, to safeguard the jobs and positions of this elite.

    This is a terrible bartering of the people’s welfare in exchange for the continued luxury of a cozy establishment.

    The people deserve much better. No race has suffered more in the past centuries yet received so little for its suffering. We now exist in that awful space where most of our people are so confused they can’t distinguish their self interests from what are not. Our people work hard the world over; but, they mostly labor to the greater benefit others than themselves. The harder we labor, the more we lose and fall behind. If we are to survive and, at some point, thrive, we must first return to the point we see the world and how it operates in terms of race, in terms that are often starkly black and white. Until then, we shall live in someone else’s world. We shall suffer the consequences of existing in a place not intended for us and incur the slings and bludgeons that happen to those who let others define their human worth. Until then, Black History Month is nothing to celebrate or even commemorate as if we have reached our destination. It is never prudent to stop to celebrate one’s homecoming before reaching home. We have too far to go. Until then, Black History Month and every month for that matter should be times when we open our eyes to clearly view the challenge at hand then begin to talk in bold, unashamed terms about how to complete the journey initiated by those figures and personalities of our prouder past.

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  • BLACK HISTORY MONTH Andrew Jackson Young, Jr.

    Andrew Jackson Young, Jr., was born on March 12, 1932 in New Orleans. He is an African-American leader, clergyman, and public official. He was a leading civil-rights activist in the 1960s and, as a Democrat from Georgia, served (1973–77) in the U.S. House of Representatives. Under President Carter, Young was permanent representative to the UN (1977–79) and was noted for his outspokenness. He served as mayor of Atlanta (1982–90) and ran for, but failed to win, the Democratic nomination for governor of Georgia in 1990. In 1999 he was elected to a two-year term as head of the National Council of Churches.

    Reference: Young, Andrew Jackson, Jr.http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/people/young-andrew-jackson-jr.html#ixzz2qI5i7M2v

  • Black History Month: But what colours the future?

    Black History Month: But what colours the future?

    February is Black History Month. Accordingly, it is timely to discuss the condition of our race. Before we embark on that journey, an excursion is in order into comments received for last week’s article criticising the Obama Administration’s belief that it possesses the legal authority to kill American citizens suspected of terrorism without charging the person with a crime or bringing them to court.

    My thesis opposes the Administration’s. I don’t believe the executive branch has the unfettered power to kill people by labeling them terrorists based on secret criteria and evidence of which only a handful in government are apprised. Democracy requires an informed public. The people must vigilantly guard their rights but also must be explicitly informed about what is wrong. Here, the Obama administration reserves the right to summarily execute an alleged terrorist while also reserving the right to keep secret the information and criteria upon which the mortal decision was based. Democratic due process is confounded when government refuses to publish the elements of a crime prior to taking any citizen to task for committing the crime. Individuals commit crimes in secret. However, government should not copy this behavior by defining crimes in the same nocturnal, clandestine manner. In broad daylight, government should openly publish what constitutes a crime, especially one attracting capital punishment by bringing down the full and terrible wrath of American military power on a person like a descending anvil.

    Many people thought enough of the subject to express views contrary to mine. This is welcome and helpful. However, a troubling strand wove through most opposing comments. We need to pluck this string not because it is a bit frayed. This column is not an abstract exercise. Its intent is to provide a heterodox, progressive viewpoint on the global political economy so that you are not automatically seduced by the mercenary opinions and hired facts that describe mainstream media. I write to spur you to think for yourselves and not as the establishment would have you do.

    The common denominator in most opposite comments revealed a tendency to think as the government would like. The train ran thusly: “Those killed by government are terrorists and thus are right for the killing. Why else would government kill them?” At bottom, this is circular reasoning somehow resulting in a dead end. It implies government infallibility. If, by nature, government is infallible, then the hunt for democracy is indefensible. Being imperfect, the people should not be sovereign. Being perfect, government should be sovereign. The flawed public should serve this perfect instrument as a serf would serve his lord. Unerringly segregating terrorist foe from innocent neutral and permanently restraining itself from wrongfully depicting as terrorists other types of political enemies is an extremely complex task. If it can manage this, then government should have free rein to enact secret policies covering all spheres of the political economy. Such reasoning is anathematic to democracy. It is also hogwash.

    Few quibble with the notion that active, known terrorists are due whatever comes their way. The thorny issue is how a person is proven to be a terrorist, who does the proving, and who judges the proof. Whenever all these critical aspects are assumed by one entity, due process is absent. A police/security state nears. Dictatorship readies itself in the shadows cast by avarice and ambition. Greece and Rome fell in like straits. Terrorists have never felled a great nation. Creeping despotism and the democratic dry rot are mortal dangers to great civilizations, reducing them to ash. Yet, we so fear the transient danger that we become susceptible to that which may author harm irreparable.

    Because terrorism is heinous, people too easily support what government claims to be the counterterrorism pursuit. Herein lurks the danger. The assault against civil liberties is gradual and usually begins with the most reviled elements. Thus, respectable peoples are unconcerned about the encroachment. Steadily, the encroachment spreads until all are touched and most have become afraid. Then it is too late. The state has become too intolerant. Even mild dissent is smashed by the clenched fist. People too willing to trust whatever government does on matters of internal security may be a people too insufficiently vigilant to hold inviolate the democracy they have. This is true in America. It is a lesson for Africa.

    Those who believe the American government infallible in circumscribing enemies forget history. Approximately 60 years ago, communism malingered as the evil specter. The national security apparatus suspected a communist onslaught the next day. A legion of next days came and went. The red avalanche never did. Still, the law enforcement machinery looked for communists under every bed, in every closet and kettle. They trafficked fear; the resultant hysteria ruined the lives of multitudes. The witch hunt was all legal because laws were written for the very purpose of targeting people for the flimsiest reasons. It was legal but immoral and smacking of evil gowned as patriotism.

    J. Edgar Hoover, the transvestite racist who headed the FBI for roughly fifty years, distained Martin Luther King, calling him a communist agent. That King personified American public morality gave Hoover no pause. He attacked King like a mad dog jumps a wounded hare. King was blackmailed by the FBI and jailed by southern police departments. He was castigated as the most dangerous man in America simply because he wanted legal equality. The establishment of his time thought King a domestic terrorist.

    The more radical Black Panthers received harsher treatment. While their symbolism was militant, their goals were fairly modest and local. Still, law enforcement ceaselessly pounced on them with billy clubs and bullets until this human species of panther became an endangered one. Malcolm X was killed in a vulgar hit bearing traits of something sponsored by a clandestine agency. X’s crime: Being a black man with a piercing wit and too honest a tongue.

    This brings us to Black History. Today, no Black American leader lies in danger of assassination for trying too avidly to advance his race. They are in greater danger of being fired from their assumed roles of ambassadors of the establishment to Black people instead of vice versa. We now suffer an erosion of Black Leadership so profound that most Blacks rightfully deem themselves leaderless. This was not always the case.

    One hundred years ago, Black American leaders were exceptional. W.E.B Du Bois and his ilk formed the core of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). They fought for legal rights/political justice. Conservative Booker T. Washington discounted political integration, instead focusing his gaze on economic progress. Jamaican immigrant, Marcus Garvey, preached a conservative but militant Black nationalism. He wanted to return to Africa en masse. Despite the outlandishness of his solution and pomposity of his person, his searing critique of America racism spoke to average Blacks. He was a heroic figure who you either loved or detested. As with so many Black heroes, his fate would be tragic. Attempting to finance his quixotic project, he was convicted on questionable fraud charges and unceremoniously deported. Conversely, Mr. Washington’s political moderation was supported by the White establishment. To his credit, he apparently gave clandestine aid Du Bois although they maintained a picture of public animosity. Both realized they complemented each other.

    The Du Bois quest for legal equality became the dominant thrust. The closer Blacks advanced toward equality, the more the elitist Du Bois began to see it as a hollow stick. Toward the end of his life, he recognized the transcendent importance of economic matters. Becoming a socialist, he spent his last years in Ghana under the hospitality of Kwame Nkrumah.

    Although selecting different paths, these Black Americans dedicated their lives to Black progress in an era where championing Black people directly undermined a person’s natural desire for a long life.

    The next generation produced Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Both surrendered their lives for their people. No need for judge or jury to decide if these men were principled envoys. There is but one conclusion to draw from their lives. Lesser, more militant figures like Black Panther leader Huey Newton occupied the radical flank of the Black movement. After decades of broken bones and dashed dreams, the door swung ajar. With legal discrimination ended, Black people looked to a new day. Change was not as dramatic as hoped. The new day would look more like a new dusk. Still, this period represents the height of Black American leadership thus far.

    Something strange happened on the road to comprehensive equality. The establishment began charging an exorbitant toll which only a few Blacks could tender. The result produced a sea change between Black leadership and White establishment. Previously, Black leaders presented the interests of the Black race to the White establishment. Since 1970, whose embassy the post-civil rights generation of Black leaders mainly carries has become indecipherable. Reverend Jesse Jackson is an exception to this because he is really one of the last remaining civil rights era stalwarts. He is a vanishing breed.

    Ironically, progress in integration endangered the very type of leaders who made possible progress toward integration. The modern Black leader has access to two worlds. He can waltz with the establishment or moonwalk with the home folks. The greater the access to money and power, the greater the likelihood of preferring the waltz. Consequently, this period shall be known as the time of the great taming of Black leadership. An obvious sign of this era is the lack of a radical Black leader of national stature. The lineage from Garvey to Malcolm X has been extinguished. No one wants to be John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness. The smart guys are more comfortable playing Herod.

    The radical strain has been supplanted by its diametric opposite represented by Justice Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain, the unsuccessful Republican Party presidential nomination candidate. Neither has seen anything white he does not like and nothing black he does not detest, including the face in the mirror. Both kowtow to Whites and both know the role of buffoon. In years past, this duo would have been derided as Uncle Toms. Today, they are the elder statements of what should only be called the Black Tea Party. Shame on them for making a career of self-hate and wide, ready grins.

    The new leadership model also produced Colon Powell. Powell is regarded as a luminous figure simply because he rose to the top of the American military hierarchy. That he climbed is undisputable. But for what purpose? Powell brought no significant change in military policy or strategy. The consummate insider, Powell reached the heights by going along with how things were. He was not a Black man in the Army. He was an army soldier in black skin. Whenever forced to decide between the interests of Blacks against the steady operation of his beloved military, he sided with the institution. This is a rebirth of the ante-bellum house slave mentality. When he became Secretary of State, the servile orientation failed Powell, permanently sullying his legacy as a statesman. Because his bosses so ordered, he sat before the entire world publishing falsehoods he had reason to suspect. He did as ordered and thus became complicit in a war that needn’t have been, a war that reduced hundreds of thousands to their graves. In prior generations, Black leaders opposed wars against weaker, non-European states. Today’s Black leaders question nothing.

    Enter President Barack Obama, the nonblack Black President. Obama spent a noticeable portion of his first term explaining to Black people why he could not do anything to help them because he was the president of all Americans not solely of Black people. Sounds fair and impartial, yet it was a deception. Obama is the manservant of another group, the financial establishment. He never told the financial establishment that he could do nothing special for them because he was president of all Americans and not just the handkerchief of Big Money. Had he told them such a thing, it would have been a lie.

    His first term presided over the largest transfer of government assistance to the financial community one nation has ever made in the history of humankind. During that same period, the net worth of Black America plummeted to levels not seen in three decades. A Black president is something good but only if he is interested in a purpose other than guiding the ship as it has always been steered. If he is not daring enough to act in proximate accord with the progressive political traditions of his community, I fail to see the collective value in his ascendance. It is a personal victory, nothing more. Welcome to the “Audacity of Nope.”

    Despite the fanfare surrounding Obama, Black America suffers like a wingless bird. Unemployment stagnates at levels associated with economic depression. Black incarceration is larger than the population of a small nation. So many young men rot in jail that the race itself can be deemed a penal colony. Should the negative trajectory of our leadership continue, Black Americans should brace for even hellish times ahead. It is sad for a people who have experienced so much to fall again because they have been deserted by those who should lead them. As things worsen, people will be forced to wake from numbed desolation to realize they walk toward molten danger. Only acute desperation will cause them to propel new leaders to the fore. Until then, the decline persists.

    Africa must be cognizant of this trend in Black American leadership not just because it affects a related group of people but because similar political and economic forces trouble Black Africa. If Black Africa repeats the decline in leadership quality, the Black race will face its most intricate challenge in generations. What does a race do when it seems to have only enough political and economic freedom to mortgage its future? Black History Month should be a celebration of overcoming injustice. If we are not careful, it may become our dirge.

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