Afterword on the King Holiday
Commentary by Chitown Kev
“Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.” James Baldwin
At least twice a year, usually on the January holiday commemorating the work and accomplishments of The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King and on the anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination, I make it a point to read HamdenRice’s diary, Most of you have no idea what Martin Luther King actually did.
I enjoy reading the diary simply because it does a great job of adding color and texture to history; a history that seems, at least to me, to have become increasingly burdened to becoming simply a tool of whatever happens to be the ideology of the storyteller of the moment.
There’s also a personal reason that I read the diary and the comments; HR’s bone-chilling assessment of the enormity Dr. King’s achievement
At this point, I would like to remind everyone exactly what Martin Luther King did, and it wasn't that he "marched" or gave a great speech.
My father told me with a sort of cold fury, "Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south."
Please let this sink in and and take my word and the word of my late father on this. If you are a white person who has always lived in the U.S. and never under a brutal dictatorship, you probably don't know what my father was talking about.
But this is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished. Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches.
He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.
As a child growing up in Detroit, I knew that my people were from the South and that they migrated from Alabama to Detroit in the mid-1920’s; my grandmother was the only one of her surviving siblings that was born in Alabama (Granny had an older brother that died as a child; there remains in the family archives a picture of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather holding this child, my great-uncle, that I grew up believing was a baby picture of my grandmother; later as a teenager, I was told that it was actually a picture of Granny’s older brother). My great-grandmother and great-grandfather moved north to Detroit when my grandmother was about three years old and, as far as I know, Granny had no memory of living in Alabama.
I also knew, vaguely, that part of the reason that my family moved from Alabama to Detroit is that my great-great grandfather and great-great grandmother were directly threatened by the Ku Klux Klan in the mid-1920’s.
As I grew older and became more of the nosy self that I have been seemingly from birth, I was able to flesh out some of the details of the story from my elders and other sources; a car surrounded by hooded Klansmen, that one of the Klansmen pronounced that my great-great grandfather was ‘’a good nigger;’’ a judgment that could have well prevented him from being lynched.
I can’t imagine the terror and the trauma that arose from this event.
To me, it seems bad enough that any black family living in the South lived there with the not-so-low-level fear and terror that something like this could happen merely at the whim of whatever Klansman lived in the area.
Never mind the likelihood of being a family member or a friend of someone that was actually lynched.
Never mind actually surviving the encounter solely on the basis on being declared ‘’a good nigger’’ by someone who, perhaps, you didn’t know but who knew you. I imagine that you would feel some gratitude, yes, in surviving the encounter but I would also understand how it would heighten the sense of fear and terror that you would have to live with from day to day.
Offhand, I wonder if that terror was, somehow, conveyed to a two-year old girl, the granddaughter of ‘’the good nigger,’’ a girl who was to grow up to become my Granny, a woman who would, a little over 40 years later, shake her leg in order to rock her 10-day old first grandson to sleep amid the chaos and conflagration of the Detroit race riots outside. Did that 10-day old child have a sense of that chaos and conflagration outside? Did that 10-day old child actually see his father’s bloodied and swollen nose that became that way because a National Guardsman hit Dad with the police baton? Did that child see his Dad’s blood on his Mom’s clothes?
Or was that child simply as anxious for his next meal as he had been for the entirety of his 10 days on this earth?
I’ve never known anything like the terror of being a black person living in the south in the mid-1920’s.
And I hope to never find out.
For the most part, I try to remain out of various and certain arguments that take place on Twitter. Mostly, Twitter arguments and throw-downs seem to go round-and-round with little or no resolution and/or turn into simplistic exercises in one-upsmanship.
But I did come upon a certain Twitter comment yesterday that simply...unnerves me and relates to the primary theme of this post; the ‘’color and texture’’ of history.
It involves the strike by the Memphis sanitation workers in 1968; it was the reason that Dr. King was in Memphis in the first place.
Here’s the tweet that...well, ticked me off.
Aphra Behn, one of my favorite Kossacks and friend of Black Kos was responding to this tweet
“...Don’t let MLK’S radical history be whitewashed...”...really?
Even the most cursory glance at history as handed down by Wikipedia reveals who is engineering the “whitewashing” in this case:
From the beginning, strikers refused to erase the racial dimension of the issues at hand. Various speakers from the NAACP addressed the strikers in the union hall.[10] Many of these leaders, including Reverend Samuel Kyles, opposed the alliance with white union leaders who seemed to be riding the strikers' coattails.[11]
One of the sheer joys in reading Wikipedia is delving into the footnotes and other links that Wikipedia that provide "color and texture” to a Wikipedia entry such as this.
Under the headline of that lead story, one learns from the reporting of that time that it was then-Memphis mayor Henry Loeb that attempted to downplay the racial dimensions of the Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968; those sanitation workers that actually did go on strike did not deny the racial dimensions of their actions.
In keeping with the desires of those sanitation workers, let’s not “whitewash” what happened in Memphis in March and April of 1968.
It would be accurate to say that the Memphis Sanitation Workers strike of 1968 happened because of reasons having to do with the intersection of class and race; to say or claim anything else and/or to remove one or the other element from the recorded history of that pivotal event in American history is to remove all ‘’color and texture” and context from that event in favor of turning the event into a simple and rather insipid vehicle of whatever an ideology requires at a moment in time.
Personally, I prefer a history that is true and with the usual amount “color and texture” that history almost always possesses.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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President Donald Trump has come under intense criticism for comments he made about black and Latino countries, particularly those made about Haiti and its immigrants during a meeting with a group of senators on Thursday discussing bipartisan solutions for immigration reform.
According to a report from the Washington Post, Trump became frustrated when lawmakers brought up immigration protections for people from Haiti, El Salvador, and certain African countries during the meeting. Specifically, however, he reportedly asked, “Why do we need more Haitians?” in the immigration program. “Get them out.”
He is reported to have also said, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump also suggested that the US should instead aim to bring in more immigrants from countries like Norway.
The comments kicked off a wave of criticism, with many observers pointing out this was another entry for the president’s history of racist and xenophobic remarks. But most glaringly, it seemed Trump was overlooking the role American policy has played in creating the very conditions he was deriding.
Many of the countries Trump criticized have been affected by US foreign policy
As writer Nicole Chavez detailed Friday for CNN, the US government has long been active in Haiti’s politics. When the slaves in the country fought for independence in the late 18th century, the US provided aid to the French colonists in an effort to stop the rebellion, fearful that the revolt would spread to the US. Even when Haiti gained independence in 1804, it took the US until 1862 to recognize it as an independent nation, subjecting the country to an economic embargo in the intervening years.
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President Donald Trump reportedly couldn’t avoid stereotyping black people during a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus.
He had asked members of the Congressional Black Caucus in a March meeting, Vivian Salama reported for NBC News on Friday, if they personally knew Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, who is black. He was surprised when none of the attendees did, two meeting attendees told Salama.
That wasn’t the end of it. In the same meeting, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus told Trump that welfare cuts would hurt her constituents, “not all of whom are black.” Trump then reportedly responded, “Really? Then what are they?”
Trump has pulled this kind of stunt in public before. Last year, when April Ryan, a black reporter, asked Trump if he planned to meet and work with the Congressional Black Caucus, he repeatedly asked her to set up the meeting — even as she insisted that she’s “just a reporter” and therefore not at all affiliated with the congressional group.
The NBC News report comes a day after reports of Trump’s racist remarks about Haiti and African countries. According to the Washington Post, Trump asked during a bipartisan immigration meeting, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Then he suggested that the US should let in people from countries like Norway instead. The implication: People from predominantly black countries are bad, while people from predominantly white countries are good.
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Scott planned to sacrifice as much as she could to raise a healthy child. She prepared to leave school and move into the house of her then-boyfriend’s mother, although her partner was slowly growing distant and unsupportive. With a job that didn’t offer health care or workplace flexibility, and unaware of any campus services that might have been available to support her, Scott’s emotional, physical, and mental stress began to grow.
When the bleeding started, it was terrifying and painful. After losing her pregnancy, Scott left the emergency room with no tangible medical reason for the loss of her child and an incredibly large medical bill that she would spend the next seven years paying off.
Later, fueled by her personal experience, Scott founded Sister Reach, a member of the Black Mamas Matter Alliance, one of the dozens of local organizations taking on the infant mortality and maternal health crisis in American cities. Black women are 2–3 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women. The infant mortality rate for non-Hispanic black mothers is roughly twice that of non-Hispanic white mothers, 11.11 to 5.06 respectively. Infant mortality rates in the U.S. are higher than comparable high-income countries, and black infant mortality rates in particular rival the infant mortality rates of some war-torn countries, such as Libya and Bahrain. The stressful steady battle to defend their right to motherhood and family, and make enough to survive, yields poor outcomes for black mothers and the children they might have had.
Although politicians often tie these poor outcomes to drug use or poverty in black communities, a study done by the American Public Health Association showed that those traditional risk factors do not predict the racial differences in low birth weight, a health factor often linked to infant mortality. In other words, black mothers are not to blame for the loss of their own children, as politicians and local media outlets might claim. So what is?
An article published last year in the Nation posits racial discrimination as a possible explanation, because studies of infant mortality across socio-economic status and education have found that black infant mortality rates were still higher than white infant mortality rates when other factors were held equal. How does racial discrimination produce these effects? One underexamined factor is how the deteriorating conditions of work, and the benefits workplaces should be offering but aren’t, create excess stress for black mothers.
In her book How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics, author Laura Briggs points to the rigorous demands of the American workplace as a cause of this racial inequality, saying, “The more the workplace demands of everyone, the more it specifically demands of African Americans to prove that they are not imposters, not slackers, not thugs, or entitled incompetents.” Toxic work culture demands black women survive and succeed through stressful conditions and high expectations with little to no support in the workplace.
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It was a photographer who first suggested that King, a political science major, consider entertainment law. While studying at Howard University in the mid-1990s, King looked to CNN founder and hometown hero Ted Turner and BET creator Robert Johnson for inspiration and developed a 10-year plan to become a mogul in his own right—and, more important, to make the industry less white in the process.
It took him 20 years, not 10, but King got there in 2015 when he started Macro Ventures, which finances and produces film and TV projects from nonwhite creators. Armed with cash from Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective and investors from Silicon Valley and Wall Street, Macro premiered its first movie, The Land, at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016. Later that year, Macro’s Fences, an adaptation of August Wilson’s Tony Award-winning play directed by and starring Denzel Washington, was released. It earned four Oscar nominations and won the best supporting actress award for Viola Davis. Macro’s third film, Mudbound, released by Netflix Inc. last November, has earned Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe nominations for Mary J. Blige.
For all the success black-led films have had lately—last year’s best picture Oscar winner, Moonlight, had an almost entirely black cast and creative team, and the racial horror-farce Get Out is seen as a top contender for the 2018 award—Hollywood as a whole is still a largely white patriarchy. While King rose swiftly through the ranks at William Morris Endeavor Entertainment LLC after law school, starting in the mailroom and becoming the company’s first black partner, he also learned firsthand how hard it was to get work for people of color. “There’s a lot of talk” about diversity in Hollywood, King says, but “people don’t want to create real change. Many decision-makers think they have to cast people of color to appease people rather than thinking it’s smart business.”
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“Black Panther” is setting sales records well ahead of its February 16 theatrical debut. Per The Hollywood Reporter, movie ticket sales company Fandango announced today (January 10) that the first 24 hours of advance ticket sales for the superhero film—which only started Monday (January 8)—surpassed those of all the other Marvel Comic Universe movies purchased via the platform. “Captain America: Civil War,” which grossed $179 million in its opening weekend, previously held the record.
Fandango did not disclose the number of tickets sold or revenue generated, but did note that a survey of 8,000 moviegoers ranked “Black Panther” as the second-most anticipated movie of 2018. The most-anticipated one, “Avengers: Infinity War,” will feature many “Black Panther” characters.
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