Tag: black history month
Why Racists Fear Black History -- And Why We Should Thank Black America

Why Racists Fear Black History -- And Why We Should Thank Black America

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I want to tell you a story about Black History. I sublet Jack Whitten’s loft on Broome Street in Soho during the summer of 1969. I knew he was an artist, but when I first climbed the stairs and walked into his loft, I didn’t know what to expect. The door opened into his painting and sculpture studio at the front of the loft where four big windows poured light down on the paint-stained floor. The first thing I saw was a big piece of wood carved roughly from a tree trunk sitting in the middle of the floor. It was thick and dark-colored and must have been four or five feet long and three feet high, and into it, Jack had driven what looked like a thousand four-inch nails. Works of art are said by many artists to speak for themselves. Although I did not see it in this way at the time, that piece of art spoke in the unmistakable voice of Black History. It spoke of violence, but it was not about the violence of hammering nails into the wood. Jack Whitten’s sculpture told the story of having the nails hammered into him.

What happens to you when you confront a great work of art? Well, it changes you. Great art speaks to you. It teaches you. It tells you what it means.

Listen to Muddy Waters sing “I got my Mojo Working,” or Slim Harpo sing “I’m a King Bee,” or Howlin’ Wolf sing “Meet me in the Bottom.” You are listening to Black History. Listen to the right hand of Thelonious Monk picking out the discordant notes and off-chords of “Round Midnight,” or stand before Alison Saar’s life-size sculpture of a Black woman in a long dress on a plaza in Harlem and witness the power of Black History.

I was thinking last week that maybe I should write something for Black History Month, because during the last year Black History has constantly been in the news, and not in a good way. Black History has been turned into a political issue by racists who are afraid of it. Ron DeSantis in Florida and Republican legislatures around the country are attempting to censor the teaching of Black History. They want to erase the history of slavery and the oppression of Black people under Jim Crow and the struggles of the Civil Rights movement. They want to deny the contributions made by slaves, Black human beings who were not even recognized as citizens, and yet who toiled to build dams and roads and bridges and even the same U.S. Capitol building that racist insurrectionists assaulted two years ago. I thought maybe I would write about DeSantis and Republican fear of Black History and what he and the others are trying to do to erase it when this popped up in my news feed:

Stax Volt Tour 1967 feat. Otis Redding, Booker T. & The MGs, Sam & Daveyoutu.be


It’s from a film that was made of the Stax-Volt tour in 1967 that featured Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, and Booker T and the MG’s. You don’t have to watch the whole thing, although it’s worth taking the time, because it’s as good an example as there is of what DeSantis and his ilk afraid of. It’s 25 minutes of the power of Black culture – in this case soul music from the 60’s – but it could just as well be a Beyonce video, or concert footage of Kendrick Lamar, or Steve Lacy, or Lizzo, or Sister Rosetta Tharp, or Sly and the Family Stone, or Jimi Hendrix, or Muddy Waters, or Howlin’ Wolf, or Slim Harpo, or Marvin Gaye, or Ike and Tina Turner.

I could sit here all day long listing Black performers and never reach the end of what they have given us, how much they have added to the history of the United States of America. So much of what we know of the Black experience is from musicians like Thelonious Monk and Aretha Franklin and from writers like James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates and Langston Hughes, and from painters and sculptors like Jack Whitten and Vivian Browne and Kara Walker.

There is a song on the Stax-Volt video by Otis Redding called Try a Little Tenderness. It’s one of his greatest songs. It tells the story of two struggling people and how they cope with what life has dealt them.

Oh, she may be weary
Them young girls they do get weary
Wearing that same old shabby dress, yeah, yeah
But when she gets weary
Try a little tenderness, yeah, yeah

You know she's waiting
Just anticipating
The thing that you'll never, never, never, never possess, yeah, yeah
But while she's there waiting
Without them try a little tenderness
That's all you got to do

It's not just sentimental no, no, no
She has her grief and care, yeah, yeah, yeah
But the soft words they are spoke so gentle, yeah
It makes it easier, easier to bear, yeah
You won't regret it no, no
Young girls they don't forget it
Love is their whole happiness, yeah, yeah, yeah

The song itself is a piece of Black History because it’s Otis Redding and the story he is telling is coming from such a deep place within him. How much more can you tell someone about the common pain we all share as we live our lives? The power of Otis Redding’s song is right there in in front of us. He’s giving us the whole of his life and what he knows about living it. It’s everything he has.

And then look at the young people in the audience. They don’t have to listen to every lyric to know the truth of what he’s telling them. It’s right there in a single word, “tenderness,” and it’s in his voice. It washes them like babies in a sink. You can see its power in their faces.

That is what racists are so afraid of. They are afraid of the power that comes from having been Black in America and survived. Black History, as it is taught in schools and universities, tells the story of how Black Americans have survived oppression, and it is accessible by switching on your television or hitting a button on Spotify or watching the Grammy’s or walking down a street in New York City and looking at a sculpture, or going into a museum and standing before a painting. Black History and the truth of Black experience is right there in the culture, in fact it dominates the culture all of us live in. Racists can’t avoid it, nor can their children or wives or friends or brothers or sisters. They try to censor it and deny it and build walls around it because they are so frightened of its power.

Black culture is American culture. It is so politically powerful, we exported it to counter Soviet Cold War propaganda during the Cold War. In the mid 1950’s the State Department sent the Dizzy Gillespie band, with Quincy Jones as its musical director, on a 10-week tour around the world, through the Middle East, Asia, and South America. Crowds clamored to hear them everywhere. On YouTube, you can see film of tours over the years by jazz and blues and rhythm and blues greats through Europe, playing Paris and London and Brussels and Oslo and Stockholm and Madrid. With today’s Black music and culture, from contemporary jazz to hip hop, as they say, fuhgeddaboudit. It has taken over the world.

Rappers tell Black History in Atlanta and New Orleans and South L.A. and the Bronx and Brooklyn. It was on the Grammy’s last night when Beyonce received her 32nd Grammy award, when Steve Lacy sang Bad Habit, when Stevie Wonder paid tribute to Motown with Smokey Robinson singing his hit, The Way You Do the Things You Do, when Stevie joined country music singer and songwriter Chris Stapleton singing his hit, Higher Ground.

I grew up listening to these giants of Black music. One night at the midnight show at the Apollo Theater on 125th Street, I saw, on a single bill, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Solomon Burke, the Temptations, and Joe Tex. Seats in the first balcony cost $1.75. Elsewhere, in small clubs in New York City, I saw Muddy Waters, I saw Jimmy Rushing, I saw John Lee Hooker, I saw Etta James, and I’ve written here about seeing Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot and Slim Harpo at Steve Paul’s Scene. No matter what was charged at the door of those clubs, even if it was a fortune, it could never cover the debt we owe these giants who opened up their lives to us.

It was Black History. All of it. That was what was behind the music and the art and the books – history, personal and cultural and political – history as it was lived by every one of those artists and musicians and writers. Can you imagine opening up and letting others into your lives like that?

Racism and Black History cannot coexist. That is why Republicans like DeSantis are trying to censor it. But they’re fighting a losing battle, because Black History is all around us, shared by Black artists and writers and musicians. It is a powerful truth that no politician, no racist policy, no discriminatory practice, no ignorant rhetoric, no Supreme Court decision, no hateful speech can ever erase. Up against the richness and power of art and music and literature that is Black History, racists lose.

All there is to do, this Black History month and every Black History month, is to give thanks. Have a look at that 1967 film of Otis Redding and Sam and Dave and Booker T and the MG’s and tell me that’s hard to do.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

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We Seem To Need A Blackface History Month

We Seem To Need A Blackface History Month

February is the time for the ritual observance of Black History Month — a brief period when schools, government institutions and even commercial enterprises feel compelled to commemorate a handful of famous black folk who made substantial contributions to American history. It’s a gimmick, an awkward and superficial observance aimed at ameliorating the centuries spent dismissing black Americans as marginal or worse, and I don’t care for it.

But this February has been overwhelmed by some perplexing news events that give me reason to think that some black history lessons are in order. If white men in power are as cavalier about smearing black shoe polish on their faces to mock their fellow black citizens as news reports suggest, then we ought to have a serious discussion about history. Not black history, but American history. The sojourn of black people in this country is, after all, part and parcel of American history — not some footnote or sidebar that is separate and distinct from the story of this nation. And much of that story, if told accurately, must dwell on the brutality, oppression, and rank discrimination that black Americans have endured.

The popularity of minstrelsy and blackface in the 19th century came out of that era’s ugly insistence on white supremacy and black inferiority. In minstrel shows, white performers smeared their faces with burnt cork to lampoon black folk as lazy, stupid, libidinous and criminally inclined. As whites portrayed them, blacks were happily enslaved, desperately in need of the “civilizing” hand of their white masters.

Nor was this “entertainment” limited to the Deep South. A group of singing, dancing, strutting white men in blackface, calling themselves the Virginia Minstrels, first appeared at a New York City theater in 1843. The stereotypes endured long after the war ended.

And their success spawned many imitators. Frederick Douglass once called blackface minstrels “the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens.”

Perhaps the particulars of that history have largely been lost to many of the whites of our era who have found donning blackface funny. That group includes not only Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam but also Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, who admitted, days after controversy engulfed Northam, that he, too, had donned blackface as a college student. It also includes former Florida Secretary of State Michael Ertel, who resigned last month after photos emerged showing him in blackface at a Halloween Party in 2005.

But you need not know the particulars of history to know that this is a cruel form of mockery, a throwback to a time and place when black people were deemed inferior by law and custom. Ertel was certainly mocking the traumatized black victims of Katrina when he presented himself for a party wearing blackface and a shirt that read, “Katrina victim,” with fake boobs underneath. The party was held just two months after the massive storm that killed more than 1,800 people and devastated countless more. That’s funny?

Northam has, so far, refused to resign, insisting on presiding over a statehouse struggling in a tsunami of scandal. (Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, who would presumably take the office if Northam resigned, has been accused of sexual assault.) Indeed, after first apologizing for appearing in blackface in a photo in his medical school yearbook, he later said he wasn’t in the photo. (Northam did, however, admit to smearing black shoe polish on his face to imitate Michael Jackson during a college dance contest.) He plans to hire a private investigator, according to published reports, to solve the mystery of a how such a photo could have appeared on his yearbook page. In the picture, by the way, the person in blackface is standing next to someone dressed in a Ku Klux Klan robe and hood, another costume meant to be … amusing?

It is hard to imagine that anything uplifting or inspiring can come out of these tawdry episodes, but perhaps a bit of commonsense instruction is enough: Blackface is offensive and suggestive, at the very least, of racism. That bit of history should be consigned to the dustbin.

America Rarely Lets You Forget That You’re Black

America Rarely Lets You Forget That You’re Black

So I had myself an epiphany.

Actually, that’s not quite the right word. An epiphany is a moment of sudden clarity, but mine rolled in slowly, like dawn on a crystal morning.

I’m not sure when it began. Maybe it was in 2012 when Trayvon Martin was killed and much of America held him guilty of his own murder. Maybe it was in 2013 when the Voting Rights Act was eviscerated and states began hatching schemes to suppress the African-American vote. Maybe it was on Election Day. Maybe it was a few weeks later, when a South Carolina jury deadlocked because the panel — most of them white — could not agree that it was a crime for a police officer to shoot an unarmed black man in the back. Could not agree, even though they saw it on video.

I can’t say exactly when it was. All I know is that the dawn broke and I realized I had forgotten something.

I had forgotten that I am black.

Yes, I know what the mirror says. And yes, I’ve always known African Americans face challenges — discrimination in health, housing, hiring, and a racially biased system of “justice,” to name a few. But I think at some level, I had also grown comfortable in a nation paced by Oprah, LeBron, Beyonce, and Barack. The old mantra of black progress — two steps forward, one step back — had come to feel … abstract, something you said, but forgot to believe.

So when we hit this season of reversal, I was more surprised than I should have been. I had forgotten about being black. Meaning, I had forgotten that for us, setback is nothing new.

Right after the election, as I was grappling with this, I chanced to see this young black woman — Melissa “Lizzo” Jefferson — on “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee,” and she performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also known as the “Negro National Anthem.” Something about that song always gets to me. Something about it always stirs unseen forces, shifts something heavy in my soul.

“Lift Every Voice” was written by James Weldon Johnson in 1900. That was 23 years after the Republicans sold out newly freed slaves, resolving a disputed election by striking a backroom deal that made Rutherford B. Hayes president on condition he withdraw from the South federal troops who had safeguarded African-American rights and lives since the end of the Civil War. It was five years after the first “grandfather clause” disenfranchised former slaves by denying the ballot to anyone whose grandfather did not vote. It was four years after the Supreme Court blessed segregation.

And it was a year in which 106 African Americans were lynched — a routine number for that era.

Yet in the midst of that American hell, here was Johnson, exhorting his people to joy.

Lift every voice and sing

Till Earth and heaven ring

Ring with the harmonies of liberty

Let our rejoicing rise

High as the listening skies

Let it resound,

Loud as the rolling sea.”

Lord, what did it take to sing that song back then?

I pondered that as the year deepened into December, as Christmas came and went, as the ball dropped in Times Square. Now here it is Black History Month, and I know again what I had somehow forgotten.

I had forgotten that we’ve been here before, that our history is a litany of people pushing us back after every forward step. I had forgotten that it long ago taught us how to weave laughter from a moan of pain, make a meal out of the hog’s entrails, climb when you cannot see the stairs, and endure.

I had forgotten that America is still America — and I am still black.

But it won’t happen again.

IMAGE: U.S. President Barack Obama (R) is joined onstage by first lady Michelle Obama and daughter Malia, after his farewell address in Chicago, Illinois, U.S. January 10, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

#EndorseThis: Seth Meyers Presents The Mind-Boggling Sean Spicer

#EndorseThis: Seth Meyers Presents The Mind-Boggling Sean Spicer

Glancing back over the second week of the Trump presidency, Seth Meyers noticed its duality — on the one hand, multiple constitutional crises, and on the other, mundane mistakes of mind-bogging stupidity.

Among those imbecile moments was Trump’s comment at a Black History Month event, praising the abolitionist leader and former slave Frederick Douglass as if he were a living civil rights leader. “He didn’t know Douglass was dead!”  exclaimed the Late Night host, noting that the great author, editor, and diplomat passed away back in 1895. “Yeah, keep your eye on that Fred Douglass kid!”

The coda to Trump’s ignorance came when Sean Spicer was asked by a reporter about the Douglass gaffe. If you missed his revealing response, Meyers replayed it in this segment — and wondered why this obvious incompetent hadn’t bothered to research Douglass before his next press briefing.

Speaking of Spicer, who will be a consistent source of offensive comedy gold until the day Trump finally dumps him, the White House press secretary provided many laughs when he insisted that the immigration and travel restrictions announced last week are “not a ban.” But as Meyers observes, with clips, that was precisely how Spicer — as well as Kellyanne Conway and Trump himself — had described the executive order.

And Meyers reviews the Betsy DeVos fiasco, as Trump’s designated education secretary first failed to answer questions in her confirmation hearing, and then got caught plagiarizing her replies to supplemental written questions.

Is every week going to be like this for the next four years?