On the day of April 4th, this Day of Sacrifice, this day of the martyrdom and assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we gather together to raise up and pay rightful homage to him, his life and legacy.
What time is it? It’s time to re-engage the fierce urgency of now and continue pressing forward on the issues of the day. It is time to stay involved, focused, and intentional in preventing voter suppression. It is time for truth telling about the heinous and abominable side of American democracy. We have no time to relax.
Regardless of the obvious legal language, focus and maneuvering in that Minneapolis courtroom that is being watched by the world in horror, hope, trauma and righteous anger, there is in it all a larger moral meaning.
Once again, the edges of the years have met and merged, and another new year has come. And we find ourselves and the world in the midst of winter in the worst of ways. COVID-19, a pandemic of worldwide proportions and devastating impact, has swept across the world, wreaking havoc on the health, lives, and livelihood of millions, showing no mercy and no signs of an early exit.
Claim to be the birthplace of Memorial Day. Researchers have traced the earliest annual commemoration to women who laid flowers on soldiers’ graves in the Civil War hospital town of Columbus, Miss., in April 1866. But historians like the Pulitzer Prize winner David Blight have tried to raise awareness of freed slaves who decorated soldiers’ graves a year earlier, to make sure their story gets told too.
“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” So reads the 15th Amendment, ratified on February 3, 1870, the third of what came to be known as the Reconstruction amendments.
Again, so we might remember and raise up, pursue and do the good. We owe this month of meditation, celebration and recommitment to increased study of our history to Dr. Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950), the founder of Black History Month, who rose up from the evil and debilitating depths of post-Holocaust segregation and suppression to point to a new way to understand and assert ourselves in history and the world.
I will never forget the colorful characters of Beale Street: Men wearing coordinated suits, shoes and hats, with processed hair; curvaceous women walking with advertising gaits and long eye lashes; impromptu street concerts by bands and musicians; “barkers” pleading for customers to enter their stores and shops; shoe shine boys with their mobile shine parlors and the bustling crowds.
“The buying power of the African American community is $1.1 trillion, but it only circulates 6 hours in our community, and the Asians keep a dollar in their community 120 times longer than African Americans. The Jewish keep the dollar in their community for 20 days, and the dollar in the White community circulates 17 days.”
Race matters in the United States, and virtually throughout the world. Throughout U.S. history, race and racial conflict shaped and reshaped the categories into which all identities were classified. Since its beginning, the racial struggles at the heart of U.S. society created the nation’s politics and culture. Winnant argues that although race matters, it is as problematic a concept today as ever. He calls the current period one of “universal racial dualism.”
The leaders of the desegregation social protest movement of a generation ago mobilized millions with one simple demand, “freedom.” In the context of a racially segregated society of the South in post-World War II, freedom meant elimination of all social, political, legal and economic barriers that forced African Americans into a subordinate status.
An online search engine birthed by a small team of researchers at the University of Minnesota connects students, artists, scholars, educators, and the general public to the great history of Blacks in America.
The last time I saw James Baldwin was at a memorial colloquium on Hoyt Fuller at Cornell University in 1984 at which we were both presenting. He was talking, as always, about the problematic reality and responsibility of race and writing, about his continuing amazement at White folk’s cultivated self-delusions concerning what they do for and to other people, and the harried and hassled hope he still held for America in spite of its chronic and seemingly incurable race- induced sickness. This re-reading of Baldwin in this his month of birth, August 2 (1924- 1987), is done in respectful remembrance