I Am A War Baby
By
Johnie H. Scott
(WAVE Newspapers, Wednesday, January 12, 2000)
I am a War Baby. For those of the under-40 generations, that means I was born during World War II. It also means that I came of age during the 1960s, a time when being outspoken was not frowned upon or looked at as being “radical.” A time when, as black psychiatrists William Grier and Price Cobbs wrote in Black Rage, their classic study of inner city phobia: “To be black is to be in a state of constant rage” while carefully adding that “It is psychologically healthy for a Black person in America to have a certain paranoia about the country they live in.”
The Sixties were many things for African Americans: platform shoes, natural hairstyles that were later phased out by Jheri Curls, colorful dashikis or black leather jackets which were worn according to one’s politics; the highly-anticipated Watts Summer Festivals, musicians and musical groups running the gamut from Gladys Knight and the Pips (“Midnight Train to Georgia”) to Sly and the Family Stone (“Hot Fun in the Summertime”), Otis Redding (“Sitting on the Dock of the Bay”) to Jimi Hendrix (“Are You Experienced?”), The Temptations (“Runaway Child”) to Marvin Gaye (“I Heard It Through the Grapevine”), Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes (“The Love I Lost”) to George Clinton’s Parliament Funkadelic (“You’ve Got to Funkefize”), Curtis Mayfield (“Pusherman”) to the Dramatics (“The Devil Is Dope”), just to name but a few.
The 1960s was an era of trends, some lasting longer than others, and many of these tinged with the social awareness that came from the massive changes sweeping across the land. Those black student activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had no idea that the blue bib overalls they favored while doing voter registration in the South would come to make a fashion statement as meaningful and profound (i.e., at that time) as the gold chains and FUBU apparel popularized by rap and hip hop artists more than 30 years later.
The late Blackfilmaker Gordon Parks, Jr. certainly never imagined that his black-financed, anti-drug feature film Superfly would usher in a time period when it was decidedly unhip and unfashionable not to wear a tiny cocaine spoon around one’s neck a la the film’s pimp and cocaine-dealing anti-hero Priest (played by Ron O’Neal) in very much the same way that impressionable audiences today go to the latest youth-oriented films simply to see what their stars are saying and, much more important, wearing.
Like so many of my peers, I was influenced by what the media chose to portray – or, by extension, not show – on the television set every evening in our apartments and homes. The 1960s, lest anyone forget, was also Vietnam. The reality for millions of Americans every evening as they gathered around their television sets were the images being brought into American living rooms from thousands of miles away in a tiny country that, to many of us, seemed made up strictly of jungle and rice paddies; a place where it rained all of the time.
‘Nam gave a new meaning to the words napalm, Agnt Orange, friendly fire and, much more menacing, bodycount. The latter was the number given on the news each evening of those Americans killed in that war-torn country. It was no accident there was no place you could go and find someone – anyone – who did not know what the term bodycount meant or referred to.
Bodycount gave substance and real meaning to the actions that would be taken when the People’s Champion – Muhammad Ali – refused to be drafted into the United States Army. Instead, he made the defiant proclamation, “The Viet Cong never called me nigger!” Radical then, Muhammad Ali’s statement is just as radical today in an era when it is considered distinctly un-American not to consider every person from Middle Eastern nations like Palestine and Libya as national security threats, as potential terrorists.
Ali’s refusal as a conscientious objector to put on the uniform of his country and go into the jungles of Vietnam to fight in that conflict which never was declared a war but, rather, a “police action” stirred passions as never before. Not only was the heavyweight champion of the world a black man who could “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” he was an articulate individual very much a product of the times and environment.
I can’t help thinking about Muhammad Ali, about all those memories, about the people and faces, all the while reflecting on just how much times have changed from then to now. I am not wringing my hands, shaking my head while looking at the latest dance crazes of today’s youth. Mine is not a nostalgia for “back in the day,” nor am I simply talking about changes in fashion. You see, like so many of my peers, I was also raised in a household where one’s parents put it squarely on your mind: their expectation that you “go farther and do better” than they did.
And where my mother and father were Black folks for Louisiana who still used the word “colored” and “colored folk” all the way through the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements when referring to themselves and other African Americans, I didn’t let their self-definitions ever confuse me about what they meant for me to do or become.
Neither Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield nor Lennox Lewis, for that matter, will ever be confused with Muhammad Ali. The point I am making is that much more goes with the territory of being a champion – a true “People’s Champion” – than, as Mike Tyson was fond of saying, “entering the ring with bad intentions” (this being one statement, I might add, I have no doubt that the very-troubled Mike Tyson of today would like to take back).
By the same token, one could never rate Michael Jordan as the greatest athlete of the 20th century; not if Muhammad Ali was on the same list of names to choose from (and especially if Ali’s name were, for whatever reason, omitted). Ali, let us not forget, was an Olympic champion who tossed his Olympic gold away while questing for something far greater: Ali’s place in history will be as a person remembered for more than his athletic prowess, considerable though it was, a prowess and skill that, sooner or later as with all athletes, fades with time.
Maybe what I am saying is there’s so much we can learn from those who came before us – good and bad. Maybe what I’m saying is that there’s nothing wrong with speaking out when you know, deep in your heart and soul, it’s the right thing to do.
(This article has been edited from the original published in the WAVE Newspapers and embedded, as well, with Internet links by the author – JS)