My county-issued “Certificate of Live Birth” prominently features faded imprints of tiny newborn feet. The document fits neatly within the borders of a thin, nondescript frame. A barely legible scrawl fills the lined space just beyond the word “RACE”. “COLORED,” it reads…or accuses. This was my first official I.D. and it was intended to be final.
Throughout prepubescence, I was too new to ascribe any particular “meaning” to this curious designation. But, as I was gradually socialized into what appeared more and more as a contrived “white” cultural milieu, the initial emptiness of that word began filling up quickly. Eventually, I had to not simply accept, but embrace and internalize its meaning. By degrees, I came to appreciate the hard work this word performed in determining who, or more precisely, what I was.
Dr. King, Malcolm X and the Negro vs. Black ‘Revolution’
As the most turbulent period in this nation-state’s bloody history since the blood-soaked 1860’s, the 1960’s featured at the forefront an impossibly young, determined southern preacher who had the temerity to tell the whole world that, no, I was not “COLORED” after all. I was, in fact, a “Negro.”
Without the slightest hesitation, I accepted this new sobriquet principally because I so admired Dr. King. I knew that what he was doing on the “Nightly News” somehow was being done specifically for me.
At the exact same time, though, there was yet another fire-breathing minister who held forth from “Up South,” as he put it, from within this nation-state’s deepest black enclave, its largest white-created black ghetto second only to Johannesburg’s Soweto — Harlem, New York City. Malcolm X was competing with Dr. King for my attention. Malcolm X insisted that I was neither “Colored,” and certainly not a “Negro.” Indeed, he declared, I was actually an “Afro-American.”
I enrolled in Indiana University’s hard-fought for and very first Black Studies Program just in time to join the fledgling nationwide Black Power Movement. It was in the middle of the “Long, Hot Summer” of ’66 when another young Howard University student, Stokely Carmichael (nee’ Kwame Toure), led a ragtag group of protesters down a dusty Mississippi back road demanding voter registration for “Negroes.” At some point, he raised high his black fist, and in a voice that eclipsed both Martin and Malcolm’s, Stokely declared that I was none of the things that those other brothers had talked about; that I was not “Colored;” that I was not a “Negro.” And neither was I an “Afro-American.” Rather, I was and always had been, nothing more and certainly nothing less than a BLACK MAN!
When asked by a reporter what do Negroes really want, Stokely at once re-defined and re-directed a stalled Civil Rights Movement.
“We want Black Power!,’” Stokely shouted. “We Want Black Power! WE WANT BLACK POWER!!”
Stokely Carmichael scared a lot of people, especially white people. But Stokely’s new identifier did not immediately supplant either the old “Colored” or “Negro” monikers. Indeed, he frightened my own father as well. My father fought against the switch, arguing that “Colored” and “Negro” had served us well and had gotten us this far, and would eventually carry us through to that “great gettin’ up in the morning.”
In defense of my old man, however, all now “black” Americans carried the heavy historical and current weight of the torment and torture of two and a half centuries of enslavement, of slave breeding plantations, of ensuing tenant farming, of sharecropping, of convict leasing, of redlining, of mass imprisonment, of Jim and Jane Crow racist segregation of every single aspect of human life….and, of course, of outright mass murder.
My father’s resistance to blackness was therefore a matter of survival. Ironically, he understood this new push toward “blackness,” its accompanying nomenclature, and revived cultural affects in the same way that most so-called whites did: as a direct threat to white supremacy. And he had good reason for his hesitancy, for his fear. He had had direct experience with fearful white people. Back in the early ’40s, after hiding out in woods, swamps and among friends and relatives for three weeks, he and his two brothers hopped a freight train and barely escaped Louisiana ahead of a lynch mob. Their “crime”? Refusal to continue to sharecrop.
At IU, I recall countless heated bull sessions with fellow Negro-soon-to-be-Black students in class, in the dorms, in the Student Union, during protest marches and poetry slams, in off-campus smoke-and-crash pads — all on the necessity or the unnecessary-ness of yet another name change.
And then like a bolt of lightning, in ’68 came James Brown, who set Stokely’s demand to music — a funky, low-down mix of urban urgency with a down-home, churchified, field slave’s call-and-response cadence. With props to James Weldon Johnson, Black America had a “Brand New Bag,” an updated “Negro (nee’ Black) National Anthem”: “Say It Loud! I’m Black and I’m Proud!” The deal was sealed. We were now Black People.
‘Keep Hope Alive’ — Jesse Jackson and “African Americans”
I finally went to Africa… and for a myriad of reasons, one of which was to answer the question as to whether “African American” aptly described, defined and, yes, identified “modern” black people in this nation-state. The term had been injected into the black socio-political bloodstream by Jesse Jackson some ten years earlier.
Long before Barack Obama appeared, Jackson was, by far, the most famous black man in America. His long history, beginning with his work with Dr. King in the ’60s, straight through two “credible” back-to-back runs for the presidency, rendered him this nation-state’s top black political leader and the white establishment’s go-to guy for all things “black,” in much the same way and in the tradition of past such leaders (Douglass, Washington, Garvey, Dubois, X, King).
In Ghana, I came to realize that my African heritage and my “American-ness” were of a piece, indeed a single entity, a single “identity.”
I walked through the 537-year-old slave dungeon, Elmina Castle, the first such structure built in sub-Saharan Africa by Europeans for the specific purpose of holding captured Africans for transport across the Atlantic. I stood silent on the threshold of the “Door of No Return,” the portal through which millions of African captives passed on their way to the slave ships. I walked across those cold stone floors, through the damp, dark passageways and holding cells. I tried, but failed, to imagine the abject terror those unfortunate souls experienced.
Interestingly, before entering these spaces, our tour guide separated the few white people among us from the black people. He did this, he said, because in past tours some “African Americans” had become so distraught and angry at the graphic, in-your-face realization and demonstration of precisely how brutally our forebearers had been treated that they physically attacked the nearest white person.
Once we finally emerged from those hell holes, there was not a dry eye in our group, including yours truly.
Ghana has instituted what is called The Year of Return, Ghana, 2019. It is a commemoration of and invitation to all diasporan Africans and people of African descent to “return” to Ghana and commemorate the 400 year anniversary of the first African slaves to arrive in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619.
Thus, Jesse Jackson’s renunciation of “Colored,” “Negro,” “Afro-American,” and “Black” in favor of “African American” now made sense.
All people need a physical connection to a land base as well as an emotional or spiritual connection thereto in order to fully embrace and express their humanity. As Jackson has argued, there is no land called “Colored” or “Negro” or “Afro” or “Black.”
But there is Africa, the second-largest landmass on the planet, and the ancestral home to not only all Africans wherever they are, but of humanity itself.
Written by: Herbert Dyer, Jr. For more of Herb’s articles/essays, go to: medium.com/...