It heartens hearing Barack and Michelle Obama chide black men into voting for Kamala Harris. Such eminences might be enough to prod them to do what’s necessary for America and right for themselves. How many years ago because of the figures involved neither of those sentences would’ve have been written nor even contemplated?
At one time, all should’ve been poised to leap forward on stairs erected by our elders. However, too many successors did the worst thing possible. They backslid. They took their eyes off the prize.
Clearly the Obamas are exceptional. Otherwise, swaths of black America have detoured into 21st century negritude. Navel gazing and intellectual thread splitting provide terrific fodder for soigne salons. Yet both are weak tea for all practical purposes.
Left aside and behind in the above pursuit were the nuts-and-bolts constructions which lifted blacks. Instead, granted easier lives made possible by people who knew hardships that wouldn’t have been exaggerated as horrific, finally allowed access to the sole power which truly matters at the end – education. The inheritors strayed off that path to roam into esoterica.
Just what black America needed. Our version of lotus-eaters.
Rather than continue and prosper with tried-and-true methods of incremental building blocks, younger figures aspiring to prominence and leadership pretty much dismissed what had worked. Less consensus building or cooperative efforts or compromising.
Impatience from people who only knew results but little of the struggle beforehand snatched the reins. They wandered off a climb which would’ve surely summited atop greater fairness, justice, and equality for more excluded Americans. From this they meandered into rhetorical wilds that unnerved good parts of mainstream America. Black and white.
Looking back, perhaps those unseasoned people who’ve attained leadership of movements seeking change, empowerment, and recognition regard the old process as delay. No. The old process was slow, yes. Often frustrating. Trying, too. But once established provided steady footing for the next advance.
There was no going back. Beachheads had been created. Bridgeheads were next.
That the Obamas, the first non-traditional couple to enter then thrive in the White House, must be dragooned into nearly browbeating men with the most to lose into rousing themselves to protect their interests would’ve saddened my father, his brothers, their circle of contemporaries. Eash a blue-collar man proud his industrial advocation provided plenty for himself and his family.
The idea black men having lost the will to look out for themselves would astound them. In the rural Jim Crow South, such was all they knew from boyhood into manhood. And this only relented slightly when migrating into the Northeast or Industrial Midwest.
Reflecting, it is a lack of foresight then-rural blacks who left Dixie for the North were never subjects of video histories in the same vein as Holocaust survivors. Those two groups share this: in short time none will remain to give their accounts.
While hearing the lives of others via second, third, however many persons later or learning them through literature, nothing leaves deeper impressions than oral recollections. The spoken word pierces farthest. Though the chroniclers aged and their sagas seemingly unreal, aren’t we still amazed upon recitals of events from decades past? The clarity. The vividness of participants in those times.
Our nation was fortunate during the Depression that the Works Progress Administration dispatched writers throughout the South to gather as many reminiscences as possible of surviving freedmen.
This task should’ve been performed 30-40 years sooner, but that too was a different America.
Knowing bureaucracy let’s not doubt plenty of WPA mucky-mucks saw these travels as “make work” errands. Because again in an America entirely different than our own, the belief next to no one would have any interest in ex-slaves’ life stories must’ve been wide and deep. Who could’ve thought the chattel existences of black folks might’ve borne any poignancy?
Or lessons.
Less harrowing but no less enlightening would’ve been collecting remembrances of the slaves’ descendent generations. The younger of whom for most part quit sharecropping lured by better wages offered by industrial America. Their internal migration into regions filled with people nearly inhospitable as those they’d left and manufacturing work almost as arduous as stoop labor should’ve urged some kind of journalistic engagement.
Certainly, the black press featured occasional articles focusing on up from dirt into prosperity articles. Seldom as these must’ve seen print, though, the pieces emphasized the glory at the end, not the struggle to reach it.
Fortunately in my family, as doubtlessly in countless other black families, conversation provided plenty of edification. If one just listened.
Of course my elders possessed gab. Most of them only made it as far as seventh or eighth grade before leaving school to find jobs which could contribute to the household. So none of them were going to write tomes about anything. Yet they spoke volumes.
Right there is a major reason my parents were sticklers for education. Lack of book learning hindered them. Until her dying day mother often lamented who she could’ve been, what may’ve been denied her.
That’s an American tragedy.
Let me repeat: education is the only power that matters.
On Saturday nights when their lives had entered comfortable suburban phases, father and his brothers, sometimes also close friends from work or neighbors might assemble at one or another’s home. Here, over good whiskey truly deserved after bone-tiring workweeks, they’d let their hair down among some of the most trusted they knew.
Complaints as we know them today — incessant, whiny — weren’t aired. Instead, observations were the preferred methods through which to give voice to grievances. Let’s suppose this a holdover from “Down Home” years when circumspection kept the suppressed from further societal repression. Being direct could’ve unleashed that against them.
For undereducated men, they were smart. Having been underestimated, underappreciated, undervalued, and overlooked throughout life, they knew how to evaluate their respective situations. And at this period, say, between post-King assassination, pre-Nixon resignation when who the then mainstream perceived as “radicals” vaulted ahead to divert and subvert the various currents roiling late-60s/early 70s America, these men gathered the light being produced yielded little heat. Unlike their heydays among a phalanx that achieved solid, no, tangible, results, they saw “radicals” like Indians who exchanged trinkets for land.
Father and the rest preferred their era of advocacy. Then, job actions and negotiations delivered better wages, improved benefits. These edged blacks into the mainstream. Eventually those bargaining sessions led to people like them rising into clean-collar/tie-wearing slots. Natural progression being what it is, some even started infiltrating mid-level management. In these, their voices were heard.
That’s quite a hike from once having been universally ignored.
Father, et al, might’ve found today’s successors dismaying. Rejoice in the Obamas’ accomplishments as good portions of America rightly have, momentum for more of the excluded to sit at the big table and turn the big wheel is meeting resistance. Whether it’s last gasp Anglo defiance or black inertia, who knows?
Decades on, decades dead, those same men were they among us still would be equally, if not more, disappointed that black men could fail seeing how voting will improve their lives. For the longest period of our nation’s existence black men and women long into adulthood were legally prohibited to exercise this otherwise guaranteed right.
Today, while simple to register and easy to cast ballots, black men who erroneously believe they know better will state exercising the franchise is futile. They see no tangible results. I actually heard someone exclaim, “No vote ever changed my life!”
Too many examples. And our lives are too short for repeatedly yelling the opening line to Sam Cooke’s Wonderful World.
Too many doubters remain mired through themselves or by forces they can’t or won’t dispel. In any case, benefits to them aren’t instantaneous. So skepticism quickly becomes cynicism. A modern curse if there ever was one.
We should be thankful those who blazed our paths had patience as well as understood long-game strategizing. Few in today’s bunch do or can.
The generation after mine, generations after theirs, lack this awareness. They are too easily distracted. They are too easily discouraged or derailed. It is improbable no more than a handful can conceive of persevering.
One hopes some innate self-preservation kicks in for stubborn black men to understand voting’s importance. Then vote. Especially in 2024. All kinds of women see the stakes. Black men should share their same urgency. Because it’s just that vital to both respective groups’ futures. Or if the results skew into the abysmal on November 5th, dashed futures.
But where there is effort hope exists. When I approach a black male resistant to vote, I don’t bother with apportionments and legislation or dry governance like that. I make it personal.
Since there’s often a trial proceeding or has just concluded that interests “the community,” from which loud suspicions of injustice invariably arise, I ask whoever needs persuading whether he knows how juries are put together.
The fellow always knows what juries do. Or he may’ve even been a defendant who heard a verdict rendered by one. This is after all Las Vegas. But how are juries formed?
Voting rolls. Juries are selected off voting rolls.
If the verdict in a controversial case is thought to have been a miscarriage, the only possible way to possibly prevent another displeasing outcome is by appearing on voting rolls. Luck of the voir dire and voila! Sitting on a jury box bench in a stale courtroom listening to testimony and a judge’s instructions.
Before being seated, though, one must first enter the booth.