To this day, many of us have difficulty accepting, without shame, that we are descendants of Africans and America’s Slave class, but also are true Americans, even after 400 years of contributions to making America the world’s most dominant nation.
The resources the first post-slavery generations had for the advancement of newly freed slaves were less than miniscule given the forces arrayed against them — governments, white clerics, and the white citizenry, including the KKK. In 1875, newly freed slaves were poverty stricken, illiterate, ignorant in the use of freedom and faced massive intimidation and violence – 99.4% of Black lynchings were committed by 1952, just as the third-generation, post-slavery, my generation, was coming into young adulthood. The first generations’ power was even more microscopic in comparison with the economic and political power of African American leaders today.
DuBois said that Black Americans’ problems must be solved by our exceptional people, our Talented Tenth; but most of us came to success through the efforts of common folk.
Nearly all of those early iconoclastic warriors have gone to their rest. They left us mostly unsung; but their deeds, their victories, and their honor live in the cultural heritage of each of us alive today. Culture is an active noun; in repose, it is worthless – people use it or lose it.
Our cultural power was distorted drastically after the mid-sixties when large numbers of the Talented Tenth left the local southern Black communities to assume better opportunities for successful lives, just they were equipped and urged to do. However, as an unintended outcome, those remaining in the communities came to rely too much on the federal government to lead us in finding permanent solutions for our plight.
It was the government that provided the legal power for evil-doers to destroy any Black community they labeled “Blighted.” Those communities had protected Black people within the larger American system through shared activities, shared fate, common goals and a powerful spiritual connection. They reared and educated healthy children, including our lowliest, and launched many of us into first class American citizenship.
The “unsung heroes” achieved such significant improvements for us, I must ask:
Were those Black stalwarts who led us through the first generations after the Civil War made of sterner stuff than we are? Were they more courageous? Did they define and use self-reliance in a more effective way? Did they accept that trouble be visited on them and not be passed on to future generations? Were they less likely to fall for charlatans’ deception, hypocrisy, and tricks than are today’s leaders?
To be true to their legacy, our heritage, our history, our culture, you must become part of the solution and seek to get involved with building the good community right where you live, just as they did. From them, I learned about good communities.
In the good community, the people:
• do not simply live side by side with others, they join with individuals, families and institutions and live through one another and for one another;
• do not belong to any organization that spends more money on alcohol, historic rituals, and entertainment of members than they spend on scholarships, books, computers, mentoring, tutoring, and rites of passage into adulthood for the children;
• support legitimate, verifiable programs that are truly helping eliminate the conditions that lead to inequality and drive children into the cradle-to-prison pipeline;
• rely principally on themselves even when exacting and applying the resources from the national, state and local governments to save the children;
• hold ALL leaders, both inside and outside the community, to the same high standards of accountability and responsibility. And if any leader is found to be corrupt or found to be neglecting the children with immoral policy decisions and toleration thereof, they sweep them out with the trash;
• help parents learn how to fulfill their responsibility to model and teach children our most redeeming cultural values: respect for others, self-respect, decency, good manners, a strong work ethic, good study habits, discipline, self- control, and commitments to healthy habits;
• teach the children that power is not determined by who they can knock down, step on, step over or kill, but rather by who they will hold up, pick up and help;
• have the courage to tell Black boys and girls not to produce children they are not capable of parenting, educating and financially supporting;
• do not live lives of cheap grace, professing to be persons of faith on Sunday but not helping to save God’s children Monday through Saturday;
• have no concern about their neighbors’ religious or political party affiliations but are resolutely concerned about their commitments, their performance, and the moral values they portray by their actions;
• know that freedom for oneself is incomplete if it is not used for the betterment of counterparts who still suffer because they are descendants of slaves.
