Police shootings of people like Walter Scott and Mike Brown or the recent police beating of a man in San Bernadino, CA on an allegedly stolen horse after he had fallen off are hardly new. Next Sunday's New York Times does a feature of popular author Toni Morrison, who has become an institution in this country. In it, she recounts the shooting of poet Henry Dumas, who was shot down in the streets for Walking in the Subways While Black in 1968.
And when the poet Henry Dumas went to his death, the way so many black boys and men do, it was Morrison, who never had a chance to meet him and published his work posthumously, who sent around a book-party announcement that was part invitation, part consolation, which read: “In 1968, a young black man, Henry Dumas, went through a turnstile at a New York City subway station. A transit cop shot him in the chest and killed him. Circumstances surrounding his death remain unclear. Before that happened, however, he had written some of the most beautiful, moving and profound poetry and fiction that I have ever in my life read.”
But based on what we know about police brutality and based on what we know about the ability of the Official Story (TM) to cover things up, I would believe the family over any He Said/She Said narrative. It used to be that the media would accept anything that the Police said as gospel truth. But in light of the latest round of police shootings (The Walter Scott shooting was called
murder by the NYT Editorial Board), journalists can no longer accept the police narrative as gospel truth if they are to remain as credible sources of information.
Henry Dumas was not merely a poet, he was prophetic in his love song to Mother Earth:
I have to adore
the mirror of the earth.
You have taught her well
how to be beautiful.
Now, over 40 years after his death, the preservation of the earth has become one of the defining issues of our time.
Here is a poem about
Shango, ancestor of the Yoruba people of Nigeria:
Vodu green clinching his waist,
obi purple ringing his neck,
Shango, God of the spirits,
whispering in his ear,
thunderlight stabbing the island
of blood rising from his skull.
In another prophetic piece,
Dumas writes about the raw anger of a man who is having trouble paying his rent:
My black father sits crooked
in the kitchen
drunk on Jesus’ blood turned
to cheap wine.
In his tremor he curses
the landlord who grins
from inside the rent book.
The problems of inequality and the shortage of affordable housing in this country are brought up over 40 years before the Occupy Movement made them mainstream. From this poem, we see that these problems had been building up ever since the colonization of our country. Occupy was simply the accumulation of years of oppression and people taking a stand and deciding that they have had enough.
In 1968, a prophet of God was shot down in cold blood for Walking the Streets While Black. One version of his shooting holds that the officer believed Dumas was reaching for a gun. The other version says he was shot as a result of mistaken identity. Either way you look at it, the people that acted in this manner acted in the same manner as the mobs in the old days who crucified Jesus and who killed the prophets and apostles.
On the evening of May 23, 1968, Dumas was shot and killed by a New York Transit policeman. Details surrounding his death remain sketchy and controversial; some evidence suggests that this shooting was a case of mistaken identity, while other evidence suggests that Dumas’s behavior led the officer to believe that Dumas was reaching for a weapon. Regardless of the exact circumstances, Dumas’s tragic, early death serves as a reminder of the capricious state of black men in American society during the 1960's and beyond.
Although Dumas’s work was published in several small magazines and journals in the 1960s, such as Hiram’s Poetry Review, Negro Digest, Trace, and Umbra, and in the anthology Black Fire, he did not publish a book-length collection during his lifetime. A vast majority of his work remained unpublished upon his death. It is primarily through the efforts of Redmond that Dumas’s work has been placed before the public. Some of the collections that Redmond helped guide to publication are “Ark of Bones” and Other Stories (1974), Play Ebony: Play Ivory (1974), Goodbye, Sweetwater (1988), Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected Poetry of Henry Dumas (1989), and Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas (2003). These works demonstrate that Dumas was a prolific, innovative, and eclectic creator who delved into numerous social and political issues through a variety of modes of expression, such as gospel, jazz, blues, parable, nature imagery, folklore, religion, and superstition.
Much of his poetry and short stories depicted the lives of Blacks trying to get by in the South during segregation. But the police shootings of Dumas and Scott are no mere isolated incidents. They are part of a systematic effort by the Corporate Industrial Police State to stamp out minority cultures. Let's use pot as an example.
Laws against pot use were racist in origin and championed by a white supremacist who did not want Blacks to have any kind of fun, joy, or happiness in their lives:
In a column for The Fix, Maia Szalavitz reminds us that Harry Anslinger, the father of the war on weed, fully embraced racism as a tool to demonize marijuana. As the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a predecessor to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Anslinger institutionalized his belief that pot's "effect on the degenerate races" made its prohibition a top priority. Here are just a few of his most famous (and most racist) quotes:
"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others."
“Reefer makes dar---s think they're as good as white men."
Between Anslinger's ruminations on the need to keep marijuana away from minorities -- especially the entertainers! -- were countless other fabrications about the health effects of pot. It was "more dangerous than heroin or cocaine" and "leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing,'' he claimed.
"If the hideous monster Frankenstein came face to face with marijuana, he would drop dead of fright," Anslinger declared in a line that underscored the type of extreme anti-marijuana hysteria that served as a catalyst for the 1936 propaganda film "Reefer Madness."
This effort continues today, whether it be Dan Quayle mocking Murphy Brown or the disproportionate imprisonment of Blacks in this country or hysterical police state apologists attacking
Black Girls Rock, an organization devoted to empowering Black women and which recognizes some of them in an
annual awards show.
And these efforts to stamp out "inferior" cultures are hardly limited to the African American community; witness our attempts under the Dawes Act, passed by the same people who invented the "Yellow Scare" and who gave us Plessy vs. Ferguson, to "civilize" the Native American population:
Between 1887 and 1933, US government policy aimed to assimilate Indians into mainstream American society. Although to modern observers this policy looks both patronising and racist, the white elite that dominated US society saw it as a civilising mission, comparable to the work of European missionaries in Africa. As one US philanthropist put it in 1886, the Indians were to be ‘safely guided from the night of barbarism into the fair dawn of Christian civilisation’. In practice, this meant requiring them to become as much like white Americans as possible: converting to Christianity, speaking English, wearing western clothes and hair styles, and living as self-sufficient, independent Americans.
Federal policy was enshrined in the General Allotment (Dawes) Act of 1887 which decreed that Indian Reservation land was to be divided into plots and allocated to individual Native Americans. These plots could not be sold for 25 years, but reservation land left over after the distribution of allotments could be sold to outsiders. This meant that the Act became, in practice, an opportunity for land-hungry white Americans to acquire Indian land, a process accelerated by the 1903 Supreme Court decision in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock that Congress could dispose of Indian land without gaining the consent of the Indians involved. Not surprisingly, the amount of Indian land shrank from 154 million acres in 1887 to a mere 48 million half a century later.
The Dawes Act also promised US citizenship to Native Americans who took advantage of the allotment policy and ‘adopted the habits of civilized life’. This meant that the education of Native American children – many in boarding schools away from the influence of their parents – was considered an essential part of the civilising process. The principal of the best-known school for Indian children at Carlisle in Pennsylvania boasted that his aim for each child was to ‘kill the Indian in him and save the man’.
While our economy has improved since the height of the Great Recession, it is only a matter of time before another catastrophe will happen. We are not going to achieve either world peace or universal employment until we, as a society, come to grips as a nation over how we treated our Black and Native American populations. If we do not, then
it is only a matter of time before the rest of us are affected.
“First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.” -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer