America’s Incrementation of Negro Equality

 

 

On the day that Michigan State Representative Cynthia Johnson, a Detroit Democrat, posted on Facebook the racist lynching voicemails she received from Republican Trump supporters following the oversight hearing where Rudy Giuliani and witnesses pushed Trump’s baseless election fraud claims, I texted them to my mother for her to hear.

“You fuckin’ whore,” the female caller said. “Fuckin’ Black cunt. Honey, how dare you bully witnesses on the stand. Your name and phone number’s out there now. You’re gettin’ doxed, bitch. You’re done. You’re so fuckin’ done. You should be swinging from a fuckin’ rope, you Democrat. You fuckin’ Democrats stealing the election, you deserve everything you fuckin’ get. Good-bye, man, you’re in so much trouble. Dems are going down, especially fuckin’ big-lip niggers like you.”

My mother called me and furiously said, “They hate us. They never wanted us to be free. You can’t trust white people. They’d rather you’re dead than free.”

All throughout 2020, my mother’s anger and frustration with America grew exponentially. There was a sense, a belief that our government would implement real policy changes after the world learned Breonna Taylor was killed by three white Kentucky police officers who fired thirty-two bullets into her apartment, hitting her with six, and after the world watched George Floyd lynched and Jacob Blake shot in the back seven times by a white Wisconsin police officer. That our legislators would finally pass laws addressing the brutal and systemic racism that has been simmering underneath the facade and polite discourse of many in white caste America. But nothing happened. And this terrorization and inhumane treatment feels to us Blacks that it’s become accepted behavior. The number of vile and racist voicemails that were left is a perfect example of that.

“Fuck you, nigger,” another caller said. “Your time is fucking coming. You’ll see. From the fucking gallows you’ll be hanging.”

A third caller said, “You are a piece of shit. You need to be run out of office and hung from a fuckin’ tree, you dumb nigger bitch.”

Not one of Rep. Johnson’s fellow Republican legislators condemned those callers for the death threats their Republican voters left. Instead, the Republican chairman removed her from her legislative committees because she spoke out against those racist death-threat voicemails. “This is just a warning to you Trumpers,” she said in one of the two videos she posted to her Facebook account after receiving those racist death threats. “Be careful, walk lightly, we ain’t playing with you. Enough of the shenanigans. Enough is enough. For those of you who are soldiers, you know how to do it. Do it right, be in order, make them pay.”

She was punished for standing up to racist lynching bullies, while Giuliani and Trump supporters were given the green light to spew their lies to the American people during a congressional hearing. I started to believe my mother’s assessment of white caste America was right. I mean, there’s still no anti-lynching law after one hundred twenty years of people trying to pass one.

Nearly two hundred such bills were introduced in the first half of the twentieth century alone, a time when this law would have been most effective. Thousands of Blacks across the country were lynched during this time under Jim Crow, but southern senators succeeded in blocking its passage every single time. I coupled this with the fact that every law that’s ever been enacted for us took a century or more.

For almost half a millennium Blacks have put up with white caste America incrementally passing civil rights legislation and eradicating the narrative of racial difference. Opposing racial equality is still deeply rooted in American life and constitutionalizing the laws that have been passed to protect Blacks. Brown v. Board of Education is still debated. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was gutted in 2013 by the Supreme Court. And the Emmett Till Antilynching Act—passed by the 116th Congress on February 26, 2020 by a vote of 410 to 4 with the backing of ninety-nine senators after one hundred twenty years of failure—was held up from being enacted by Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul, who wanted the bill’s definition of lynching to be narrower. “This bill would cheapen the meaning of lynching by defining it so broadly as to include a minor bruise or abrasion,” he bemoaned. “Our national history of racial terrorism demands more seriousness of us than that.” Republican senators were hoping to pass the bill by unanimous consent, giving just one senator the ability to grind it to a halt. The bill would have easily passed were it put up for a regular vote, but Republicans were unwilling to go that route because it would’ve taken several days. They wanted to use the unanimous vote symbolically and believed Rand would drop his objections, which he never did.

Here is a man, a white man, a powerful, wealthy, privileged white man from a state that seceded from the union and became the thirteenth and final one to join the Confederacy, telling the only three Black Senators, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Tim Scott, who all helped write the bill, telling the family of George Floyd who watched him lynched on television, telling us Blacks across the country, who too watched Floyd’s lynching, how to define our worth and our human status. This is a man whose close aide, Jack Hunter, and co-writer of his 2011 book, The Tea Party Goes to Washington, spent years as a pro-secessionist radio pundit and neo-Confederate activist, called himself the “Southern Avenger,” and expressed support for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. In 2004, Hunter said, “Although Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth’s heart was in the right place, the Southern Avenger does regret that Lincoln’s murder automatically turned him into a martyr.” Hunter then wrote that he “raise[s] a personal toast every May 10 to celebrate John Wilkes Booth’s birthday.”

In December 2009, Rand’s senate campaign communication director, Chris Hightower, resigned after a Kentucky blog discovered a post on Hightower’s Myspace page on Martin Luther King Jr. Day that read: happy nigger day!!! Below the post appeared a photo of a lynched Black man. Hightower said the photo and comment had been posted by a friend. But the comment had been up for nearly two years before the press reported it.

In April 2010, Rand was asked by the Louisville Courier-Journal his thoughts on the Civil Rights Act. “I think it’s a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant,” he said, “but, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership.” He went on to say that publicly funded businesses should not be allowed to discriminate, but the Civil Rights Act shouldn’t apply to private businesses. “And that’s most of what I think the Civil Rights Act was about in my mind.”

How does one white man who has a long, wretched history of hiring white supremacists, who questions the validity of the Civil Rights Act, whose home state and whose race has for more than four hundred years put its knees on the necks of Blacks get to tell Blacks that the Emmett Till Antilynching Act doesn’t take lynching seriously? Is this another absurd audacious incrementation tactic? Rand Paul is making this decision not just for his state, but for every state and for the millions of Blacks who know someone, will know someone, who will be threatened with lynching or lynched themselves. He’s prevented the law from being enacted that could have been used in the case against George Floyd’s murderers.

Rand Paul’s actions, his history of racist hires, the rhetoric he spewed on the senate floor to justify his reasoning sickened me—my stomach was in knots for weeks. My mind still reels in disbelief. My gut tells me we have yet to move past the days of slavery and Jim Crow. But more horrifying, my soul tells me there are states that would not only enjoy bringing them back, but given the right temperature in the country, will one day try to. This thought sends a bone-cold shiver through me every time.

I’ve spent my whole life feeling unwanted in my American country. My mother raised me in the predominantly white city of Warwick, Rhode Island so I could get a good education and upbringing, but there were unintended consequences. I did everything I could to be less Black to fit in to white caste America, while at the same time worrying, wondering if I will be stared at if I go to certain places or if someone will call me a racist name. I yearned, hoped, and waited for white caste America’s acceptance, for it to pass laws that recognize me as human, laws that white men have, that white men make. From freely walking down the street to using public restrooms to dining in fancy restaurants, I’ve struggled with belonging, feeling as if I’m not a whole man because of the absurd incremental steps white men have taken to give Blacks basic, natural rights that are natural in the sense that their source is human nature and inherent, inalienable God-given rights by virtue of being a human being.

After I listened to the voicemails, an insufferable foreboding pervaded my spirit. A sinking, sickening sense of gloom unnerved me and knotted my throat in my contemplation. The butterflies got all tied up in my stomach. Heavy sadness loomed oppressively over my thirst for action and freedom, and it deeply stirred my soul. My tears disabled me, and I found them inscrutable. The troubles of my mind hurt everywhere in my body. A depression in my soul drew on me like shades of the evening. I’m fearful about what will happen to us Blacks if America continues on its current political trajectory.

I had real hope when Mayor Muriel Bowser renamed a section of Sixteenth Street Black Lives Matter Plaza on June 5, 2020. Seeing the words black lives matter emblazoned in thirty-five-foot-tall yellow capital letters in front of the White House near Lafayette Square where a statue of the slaver, ethnic cleanser, and former president Andrew Jackson is mounted was more powerful and beauteous than seeing Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel. It made me reach a still point, that mythical point between the quick and the dead. When I saw John Lewis, a giant of the civil rights movement, standing among the giant letters, the image of the two together was, in the words of John Lewis, “Very moving, very moving, very impressive. I think what the people in DC and around the nation are sending a mighty, powerful, and strong message to the rest of world that WE WILL GET THERE.” A well of feeling spilled out of my misty eyes. My optimism and enthusiasm grew hearing this from a man who had his skull cracked with a billy club by a state trooper near the Edmund Pettus Bridge for marching with six hundred people from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama on March 7, 1965, forever known as “Bloody Sunday,” to bring attention to the injustices used to stop Black southerners from voting. I thought a new Black revolution would usher in a second civil rights movement. A second Reconstruction. Black freedom would finally be a reality, and in the words of Gil Scott-Heron, ladies and gentlemen, “The revolution will not be televised.”

There’d be a distinct separation between the progressive social movement and the manipulation mediated by the media. It would be streamed online. There’d be no acceptance of the effort to “cool out” Blacks with national televised concerts, sitcoms, or interviews of Blacks. No manipulated police brutality on instant replay like a sporting event in the form of a national pastime. No inspection of the mainstream sensibilities between Blacks and the police force would be warranted. The decades, centuries of marching in the streets forever gone. A sense of identity and self-worth existing beyond the purchasing power, materialism, and marketing schemes of corporate America would reign supreme.

To my disappointment, that never came to fruition. Nothing, not nothing, but nothing legally happened to constitutionally better Black lives. On the contrary, Blacks came to be quite opposed by the powers that be upon the vital matter of our civil rights. The occupant of the White House after the first Black president had hundreds of peaceful BLM protestors tear-gassed in Lafayette Park so he could walk across the street and have his picture taken standing in front of St. John’s Church, the Church of the Presidents, while holding the Bible. The only piece of legislation brought to the floor in Congress, the Emmett Till Antilynching Bill, was blocked. The three police officers who killed Breonna Taylor weren’t and would never be charged with causing her death. And a generation of civil-rights memories were forever lost. Airickca Gordon-Taylor, surrogate daughter of Emmett Till’s mother, who spent her life bringing attention to his lynching, died March 21. Reverend Dr. Joseph Echols Lowery, the dean of civil rights and a top lieutenant for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., died March 27. Al Edwards, a Texas State Representative who wrote a bill to mark Juneteenth, the first Black emancipation celebration to receive official state recognition, died April 29. Fred L. Davis, civil rights activist who marched down Beale Street with MLK for the Memphis sanitation workers, died May 12. Lucille Bridges, mother of anti-segregationist Ruby Bridges, often referred to as a Mother of the Civil Rights Movement, “who in 1960 braved a gauntlet of threats and racist slurs to escort her daughter to a formerly all-white school in New Orleans in what became a symbol of opposition to segregation,” died November 10. Bruce Boynton, an often-forgotten figure of the civil rights movement, died November 23. While a student at Howard University, he was arrested after refusing to exit a “whites-only” section of a bus station restaurant after attempting to buy a sandwich. Boynton hired Thurgood Marshall as his attorney, who would later go on to be the first Black Supreme Court Justice. In Boynton v. Virginia, the Supreme Court ruled in their favor but didn’t end racial segregation in public transportation, sparking a series of events that overturned Jim Crow and inspired the Freedom Riders. James L. Netters, one of the civil rights activists who helped lead the sanitation workers strike with MLK, as well as sit-ins, marches, and protests, died December 13. John Lewis and C. T. Vivian, the two towering civil rights figures, both died one day before the birthday of the late Nelson Mandela.

“The government has failed us,” Malcolm X once said. “Any time you’re living in the twentieth century, 1964, and you walking around here singing “We Shall Overcome,” the government has failed you…Oh, I say you been misled. You been had. You been took. I was in Washington a couple of weeks ago while the senators were filibustering and I noticed in the back of the Senate a huge map, and on this map it showed the distribution of Negroes in America. And surprisingly, the same senators that were involved in the filibuster were from the states where there were the most Negroes. Why were they filibustering the civil rights legislation? Because the civil rights legislation is supposed to guarantee voting rights to Negroes from those states. And those senators from those states know that if the Negroes in those states can vote, those senators are down the drain…We must know what part politics play in our lives. And until we become politically mature, we will always be misled, led astray, or deceived or maneuvered into supporting someone politically who doesn’t have the good of our community at heart.”

Since the day Abraham Lincoln emancipated the slaves, the unhurried incrementation of Black rights has reflected back to us what it means to be on the other side of America’s approved history. Biden reflected that a month after he won the presidency when he was still ignoring Black Lives Matter’s request for a meeting. I cannot say I was surprised, but disappointed? Very much so. There’s no doubt that we, Blacks are the reason he won, and couple that with the vile, barbaric murders of Blacks in 2020, I mean, at the very least, he should’ve been more than willing to meet with BLM leaders to discuss how we might improve relations and pass long-needed legislation. Biden’s symbolic appointments of Blacks in cabinet positions are just that, symbolism. It’s not new or exciting and was completed by Barack Obama being president for eight years. A true symbol of Black Power isn’t putting a few individual Blacks in power, but by giving all Blacks the power to live our lives in the same manner in which white caste Americans live their lives.

Biden again reflected the unhurried incrementation of Black rights back to us when he wanted his predecessor to go to his inauguration. His predecessor who called African countries “shitholes,” had a white supremacist as his senior adviser, and incited, organized, and engineered the insurrection that occurred on January 6, 2021 in the United States of America. Dressed in military, racist, and anti-Semitic attire while waving the confederate and Kekistan flags, the insurgents stormed the Capitol building. They hung nooses, flashed white power hand signals, carried pipe bombs, Molotov cocktail explosives, semi-automatic rifles, and when they were finished, took pictures with the Capitol police officers. One of the officers even helped one of the women rioters down the Capitol’s stairs. Holocaust-denying, neo-Nazi, white supremacists were treated with royalty while Black Lives Matter protesters were beaten with billy clubs, batons, shot with rubber bullets, chemical dispersants, and jailed by the thousands. It was a disturbing reminder of the difference between white privilege to feigned oppression and Black resistance to actual oppression that Biden conceded after his granddaughter pointed it out to him.

Pearl Bailey once said, “We look into mirrors but we only see the effects of our times on us—not our effects on others.” My questions are: Why does white caste America look into the mirror and only see the effects of its times on itself and not its effects on Blacks? Why’s there still so much disdain for Blacks almost sixty years after the Civil Rights Act passed? What will it take for white caste America to see us the way nature sees us? It seems America has forgotten that the White House is where Lincoln signed the immortal document. I was stumped. Had no answers. None. Not one inclination. My diminished hope and daunted spirit created a cold chill throughout my body that not even a steaming cup of coffee or hot bowl of oatmeal could ameliorate. A polar vortex had gripped America like a vise and I settled in for a long winter’s nap.

January 4, 2021 marked the 195th anniversary that eighty-year-old Occramer Marycoo, known by his slave name Newport Gardner of Newport Rhode Island, and his retinue sailed on the brig Vine from Boston to Liberia. Before his voyage to the continent of his birth, he said, “I go to set an example to the youth of my race. I go to encourage the young. They can never be elevated here. I have tried it sixty years,—it is in vain. Could I by my example lead them to set sail, and I die the next day, I should be satisfied.”

That evening, I decided to go back to God’s Little Acre where Occramer’s wife, Lima, and three children are buried. God’s Little Acre is a small corner of the Common Burying Ground in Newport comprised of nearly three hundred markers of enslaved and free Africans—the largest and most intact African slave burial ground in the country. As I drove from my house in Cranston to Newport, the spiritual signification I had when I was there last summer whipped through the tunnels of my mind. The pictures swiftly fled into the shadows and evaded my grip, like a riderless raven horse with ironshod hooves kicking up clods of brain turf in muted thuds leaving hoof prints filled with black holes. I had the radio playing in my car, and a live version of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Winter in America” came on, which I had never heard. Before singing the song he said, “There used to be an agreement between the seasons. They came to the agreement that they would stay for about three months each and go wherever seasons go when they’re not where you are. And then one year in America, one of the seasons got mad and decided it was going to stay. Decided that the way things were done there made it feel at home. People weren’t doing what they were supposed to. It was the people running the shit. It was some kind of vibe that made it feel it wasn’t leaving. But it wasn’t a change of temperature, it was a change of philosophy, politics, psychology, the way things were going in that direction. And so for a long time now where we come from there’s been no spring, no summer, no fall. We’ve been taken over by the season of ice. Very few people recognize it for what it is although they feel uncomfortable. Very few people recognize the fact that somehow the seasons don’t change. I mean you get acclimated, you get politically acclimated, philosophically acclimated, you start to relate everything to the season of ice, and so your dreams become frozen, your ideas become frozen, your policies become frozen. It’s just frozen days and frozen nights. Frozen aspirations and frozen inspirations. There’s something wrong, I mean there’s something wrong, I mean there’s something wrong, I mean. We’d like to talk to you about a season that has taken over America. The season is winter. The song is called ‘Winter in America’.”

His words hit me hard down in my hopelessness, in my fearfulness, and then he sang the song. The music faded upon my entrance into the burial ground, the words bouncing off the walls of my mind. I turned off the radio as I drove my car down the thin gravel road bordering the gray and heavily weathered tombstones. Green and yellow tie-dye grass around the tombstones harkened toward the native skies. The maples’ bare branches shook and creaked at one another very sadly. A zephyr exhaled mightily and a few lonely little leaves danced with mirth as if they knew nothing could ever shake them. An orange full moon on the horizon ascending to the zenith through the raven curtains of the evening forsook the main. From star to star my eyes roved. Twinkling, sparkling with luster, they glowed more than during all the other seasons before. Absorbedly I watched a star sweep through the unclouded sky, shaking its torched flame. The ocean air was filled with the memories of the simpler time in my youth when happiness was easier to come by.

Looking out at the tombstones, I got out of my car, and walked over to Lima’s and the three children’s graves. My brown eyes discerned the majesty of the cemetery. The boundless blue where the rivers empty ebbed and flowed with the liquid syllables of my ancestors’ poetry. There was a vista that traversed the ethereal space, mantled the gloom of the night, and brought me into tranquility. As I knelt beside the gravestones asking my ancestors to answer the questions of my belonging, I felt an ennobling power, a new being rising in my soul—longer than the soil is brown and friable—longer than sailing the unbounded imperious waves. Hope restrained my tears and soothed my pain.

I sat down on the grass, zipped up my fleece pullover, and watched the night’s shade play on the soil from which the tree trunks rose as their supple boughs billowed—some of their boles crooked and distorted. There was something about the icicled branches’ unimaginable shapes.

The way they responded to the moon’s light. They didn’t wheel or hurry back into the darkness. They sought out the light. And when a tree’s branches didn’t get enough of it, they swung and bent and did whatever they had to do to get it. A gentle zephyr wafted through the grove giving sway to the leaves and branches that danced to the tuneful evening courting the sky. Every undulating and rippling diminutive leaf was as harmonious as feathered wings. For winter could not freeze these leftover leaves.

I peered over at the trees—some oak, some maple, some evergreen. A pair of birch and beech stood out among them. The sniff of pine and dry leaves modulated the salty coat of the briny and spread throughout my body what Walt Whitman said is “the knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth.” I inhaled deeply and stared at the grove blankly, inquisitively, at its diversity. Night’s dispelled light began to enfold the sleepy foliage with its soft voluptuous veil. Softly, deafly, night’s leaden scepter touched me, sealed my thoughts and my drowsy lids, but like tongues in trees out came a silent discourse of consciousness. I sat with my frigid hands in my coat pockets completely nonplussed by this—the moon now far beyond the horizon discoursed with the stars. Here and there the stars flickered palely as the black shape tried to eat its way into their shining light. Something in this soundless speech of souls opened my inner door, through which I could communicate with the trees—finding that they were just like me. In words as clear as our language can afford, I saw how tree diversity guarded against pests and disease, how it ensured a healthy canopy, mitigated damage that results from only a few species dominating a country, and enriched the soil, allowing it to produce a vast array of luscious, succulent vegetation no matter a season’s turning.

Soothing my care, this knowledge hushed my despair. Out of nowhere a black warbler appeared sitting in an evergreen. Its sweet warbling took flight over the music of the night. Floating, falling, unfurling its splendor. Heightened, sharpened my every sensation. Caressing, possessing my senses helpless to resist the notes it borne on the zephyr’s wings. The warbler preened its feathers, and when finished, spread its dusky pinions to the heavens, waving at the glimmering tides as it vanished. A cloud of stardust caught up in the branches spilled out onto me, and into the moonlight, shimmering like a thousand tiny meteorites. A dazzling, lingering vision nestled up against the dark winter curtain kneeling on the brink of spring, and with a sound like a chorus of joiks that ascend gradually in melodic formation. I could’ve fancied it to have been the murmur of my African ancestors who once lived, but now ghosted the land they had suffered in. I pondered long, weary with my ancestors’ ceaseless yearning, thinking—what was it in the contemplation of this moment that gave me such solace? I gazed with a kindling glance upon the liquid plain, listening to this silent discourse of consciousness. What I saw in that silence and space was a snapshot of the soul of the earth, of the universe. It was holding up a mirror of itself. Its reflection showing that light isn’t the source, the sustainer, or the renewer of life. Knowledge is. Those glorious giant orbs out there may be the cause of every motion and operation in the universe, but knowledge is the motor that powers the earth. The trees seek that knowledge through light. They aren’t some adjunct to the soil. They’re the life of the soil, the respiration of the earth, in the same way the ebbing and flowing of the sea is.

My belonging, Blacks’ belonging, our purpose became so apparent to me, a truth that’s not at all like the belligerent acceptance accorded by those privileged European settlers who defined Blacks’ inalterable flesh, bone, brain, which can only be ascribed by nature as subhuman, and deemed it acceptable, forgivable by God to inflict slavery and racist terrorism upon us. My Black roots reach down into the brown flesh of the ground where my ancestors are buried, and bend and twist and do whatever they have to do to find nourishment. They are the lifeblood of this part of the planet for without them America would not be America because it is us who were jailed down to build it. For centuries nature witnessed it. In its memory are Negro spirituals sung in its cotton fields, runaway slaves trekking through its streams, Negro blood spilling in its rivers, Black corpses lying on its shores, hanging in its trees, floating in its seas, and forever are the screams of Africans’ whippings. For there isn’t a corner of America’s atlas where the grass, trees, water lilies grow without a piece of my sable race growing inside of it. This soul-shaking moment taught me that we are all connected. A collective heartbeat we share. Impossible to be separated. And the next time I feel disconnected from white caste America, all I need to do is just look up because I am the universe expressing itself. With this certainty guiding me, I was able to attain an optimistic attitude toward America’s current civic degradation, which white Washington legislators exhibit in regard to passing and enacting laws that protect and give Blacks our equal rights. They know very well at heart, however little they may be disposed openly, publicly to profess, that no country will survive that depends for its functioning upon inequality, envenomed trickery, and deception. We all have an intellectual instinct of this fact, as well as a broader human consciousness. It’s time for us as a nation to work out our righteousness through our government and overturn the mass of unjust and decrepit laws that defile the laws of nature.

“They’ve always said I’m anti-white,” said Malcolm X. “I’m for anybody who’s for freedom. I’m for anybody who’s for justice. I’m for anybody who’s for equality. I’m not for anybody who tells me to sit around and wait for mine.”