The Time Capsule: Black
America at the Turn of the 21st Century
By
Johnie H. Scott
(WAVE Newspapers, December 29, 1999)
If I were given the opportunity to place four items that best reflected the trials and tribulations of African Americans and, by extension, America itself, into a time capsule not to be opened until the next millennium, there is so much to draw from. Certainly, I could comment on the Transatlantic Slave Trade that not only endured for three centuries, but in the process created what the world knows today as the African American. I could comment, as well, on the American Civil War that brought an end to the enslavement of black peoples.
I might comment, at the same time, on the Reconstruction Period: that bold but ill-fated attempt to lift a race of peoples up from the forced ignorance and dehumanization of slavery into the light of the modern world. I might also comment on the Harlem Renaissance that allowed for the first flourishing of Black America’s cultural voices through poetry, music, theater, painting, sculpture, novels and film. So much to draw from, and few would argue with me, just with these four experiences alone.
But in this, my first turn at the Watch, I will draw from four events of a more contemporary nature as we draw near to the end of the millennium. These four events and the issues they represent, speak to the past, present and possible future of not only African Americans, but the nation itself. In sharing these four events, you will get some sense of the issues that concern me as an American, and an African American man.
The first of these would be the Civil Rights Movement itself. There can be no question that the struggle to bring about an end to the Jim Crow system o second-class citizenship that endured in the American South for more than a century was a watershed in the American Experience. The Movement produced people and events that history will forever remember while truly altering the course of word events. People like Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee or SNCC, James Forman, Stokeley Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture), the Montgomery Bus Boycott, “Mississippi Freedom Summer,” George Wallace, Eugene “Bull” Connor, Freedom Riders, the Mississippi Freedom Summer,” and the March on Washington.
There was the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15,1963 that resulted in the deaths of four African American Girls – Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley -- and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 signed into law by President Lyndon Baines Johnson that followed shortly thereafter. That bombing and the deaths of those four little girls left an indelible scar on the American soul, one which the nation may never live down. It was an event that underscored the pronouncement by Dr. William E.B. DuBois that “the problem of the 20th century will be the problem of the color line.”
The second item I would place in that time capsule would be the “Urban Unrest of the 1960s.” The result of that unrest resulted in more than 235 American cities suffering hundreds of deaths, many thousands of injuries, tens of thousands being arrested and jailed, property damage in the hundreds of millions of dollars and the coining of the now-infamous phrase “Long Hot Summer.” Those urban rebellions of the 1960s would change the tenor of race relations forever in America and the world.
People my age will remember, in particular, the explosion that took place in August 1965 in Watts that resulted in my own home community being re-christened “Charcoal Alley Number One” while the nation wrestled with the twin demons of de facto segregation and racism in its cities from coast to coast. With these urban upheavals would come Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, the emergence on the public consciousness of Jackson State College, the Black Manifesto, Affirmative Action, the War On Poverty, and the student demonstrations that gave birth to a new college curriculum known today as Black Studies.
The fact that those urban upheavals would overshadow even the conflict in Vietnam – a war that would eventually result in the unprecedented resignation of a United States President from office – makes a compelling statement in itself.
Next to enter my time capsule would be the articulation taking place from the 1960s to the 1990s of what I call, for want of a better term, a newfound sense of Black Identity. This was best expressed through the voices of African American thinkers, writers and artists. That sense of identity would have to include the songs of James Brown (“Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud”), Sam & Dave (“Soul Man”), Donnie Hathaway (“I Hear Voices”), the Impressions (“People Get Ready,” “Amen”), Marvin Gaye (“What’s Going On”) and Aretha Franklin (“Respect”).
The depth and range of that identity was
nowhere perhaps best expressed than in the work done by the jazz musicians
including John Coltrane (“A Love Supreme”), Miles Davis (“Bitches Brew”), Sonny
Rollins (“East Broadway Rundown”), Ornette Coleman (“The Shape of Jazz to
Come”), Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra, Cecil Taylor, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph
Jarman, Eric Dolphy, Oscar Brown, Jr.,
an entire generation of creative artists who stepped forward to push
this music and cultural sensibility to limits never before conceived or dreamt
with Wynton Marsalis being the most recent with his Pulitzer Prize-winning
masterpiece Blood on the Fields.
It would have to include the work of James Baldwin, (“The Fire Next Time,” “Nobody Knows My Name”), John Williams (The Man Who Cried I Am), Sam Greenlee (The Spook Who Sat By the Door), Claude Brown (Manchild in the Promised Land), Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man), Amiri Baraka (Dutchman and Blues People), and African American psychiatrists William Grier and Price Cobbs (Black Rage). These were seminal works that all spoke to the awakening of what Elijah Muhammad had called the “sleeping Black giant,” and all are still considered “must reading” for any serious scholar of African American heritage and culture.
This newfound identity found expression through the pens and voices of scholar and thinker Harold Cruse (The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Rebellion or Revolution?), playwrights Ed Bullins (The Electronic Nigger, In the Winetime) and August Wilson, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison (Beloved, Song of Solomon, Paradise), Alice Walker (The Color Purple), Alex Haley (The Autobiography of Malcom X, Roots), Eldridge Cleaver (Soul On Ice), George Jackson (Blood in My Eye: Soledad Brother), U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove (Thomas and Beulah), not to forget the Watts Writers Workshop (From the Ashes: Voices of Watts, The Angry Voices of Watts, The Education of Sonny Carson along with producing the Watts Prophets, Quincey Troupe, and Eric Priestley among others).
The final items that I would include summarize all of the progress and continuing frustrations of African Americans standing poised (although some might say “rocking and reeling”) to enter this new century.
Those items would be, on the one hand, the Million Man March on Washington. The March generated more controversy, more, more newsprint that any single event in recent memory. What was not lost on the African American community was the fact that the “controversy” focused not so much on the gathering of a million Black men in the nation’s capitol in a demonstrated show of commitment to the African American family and community as it did on the one individual who made it all possible: the charismatic Black Muslim leader, Louis Farrakhan.
On the other hand, I would have to include the most recent Report by the Bureau of Corrections out of the United States Justice Department. That report identifies 1.4 million Black men as having felony convictions – either incarcerated, on probation or parole. These men, more in number than those who gathered in Washington, D.C. on October 16, 1995, by law will never be able to cast a vote in any election whether local, statewide or national.
These men, constituting one out of every three African American males between the ages of 18 and 28 – projected to increase to one out of every two by the year 2002 – represent the confounding future of Black America.
Who
Knows What Will Be Said 1,000 Years from Today?
Those four items would be my inclusions for the time capsule to be opened 1,000 years from today. As for what the world might say upon opening and examining the contents, well, who’s to say? Perhaps they will look with bright, hopeful eyes at learning about the Civil Rights Movement, those “Long Hot Summers,” and those voices of a new Black pride.
On the other hand, who is to know what the world will think, or have to say, with regard to the challenges facing African American males and the ways in which those challenges were finally answered?
(Note that this “Word Up!” has been edited from its original published form in the WVE Newspapers- JS)