Black History is Every Month: Eulogy for James Baldwin: 'Jimmy. You crowned us', by Toni Morrison - 1988; 55 years after ‘Bloody Sunday,’ voting rights are still under attack; new DNA study offers insight into the horrific story of the trans-Atlantic
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Thanks
for James Baldwin: 'Jimmy. You crowned us', by Toni Morrison - 1988
20 December 1987, published New York Times, USA
Jimmy, there is too much to think about you, and too much to feel. The difficulty is your life refuses summation - it always did - and invites contemplation instead. Like many of us left here I thought I knew you. Now I discover that in your company it is myself I know. That is the astonishing gift of your art and your friendship: You gave us ourselves to think about, to cherish. We are like Hall Montana* watching ''with new wonder'' his brother saints, knowing the song he sang is us, ''He is us.''
I never heard a single command from you, yet the demands you made on me, the challenges you issued to me, were nevertheless unmistakable, even if unenforced: that I work and think at the top of my form, that I stand on moral ground but know that ground must be shored up by mercy, that ''the world is before [ me ] and [ I ] need not take it or leave it as it was when [ I ] came in.''
Well, the season was always Christmas with you there and, like one aspect of that scenario, you did not neglect to bring at least three gifts. You gave me a language to dwell in, a gift so perfect it seems my own invention. I have been thinking your spoken and written thoughts for so long I believed they were mine. I have been seeing the world through your eyes for so long, I believed that clear clear view was my own. Even now, even here, I need you to tell me what I am feeling and how to articulate it. So I have pored again through the 6,895 pages of your published work to acknowledge the debt and thank you for the credit. No one possessed or inhabited language for me the way you did. You made American English honest - genuinely international. You exposed its secrets and reshaped it until it was truly modern dialogic, representative, humane. You stripped it of ease and false comfort and fake innocence and evasion and hypocrisy. And in place of deviousness was clarity. In place of soft plump lies was a lean, targeted power. In place of intellectual disingenuousness and what you called ''exasperating egocentricity,'' you gave us undecorated truth. You replaced lumbering platitudes with an upright elegance. You went into that forbidden territory and decolonized it, ''robbed it of the jewel of its naivete,'' and un-gated it for black people so that in your wake we could enter it, occupy it, restructure it in order to accommodate our complicated passion - not our vanities but our intricate, difficult, demanding beauty, our tragic, insistent knowledge, our lived reality, our sleek classical imagination - all the while refusing ''to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize [ us ] .'' In your hands language was handsome again. In your hands we saw how it was meant to be: neither bloodless nor bloody, and yet alive.
It infuriated some people. Those who saw the paucity of their own imagination in the two-way mirror you held up to them attacked the mirror, tried to reduce it to fragments which they could then rank and grade, tried to dismiss the shards where your image and theirs remained - locked but ready to soar. You are an artist after all and an artist is forbidden a career in this place; an artist is permitted only a commercial hit. But for thousands and thousands of those who embraced your text and who gave themselves permission to hear your language, by that very gesture they ennobled themselves, became unshrouded, civilized.
The second gift was your courage, which you let us share: the courage of one who could go as a stranger in the village and transform the distances between people into intimacy with the whole world; courage to understand that experience in ways that made it a personal revelation for each of us. It was you who gave us the courage to appropriate an alien, hostile, all-white geography because you had discovered that ''this world [ meaning history ] is white no longer and it will never be white again.'' Yours was the courage to live life in and from its belly as well as beyond its edges, to see and say what it was, to recognize and identify evil but never fear or stand in awe of it. It is a courage that came from a ruthless intelligence married to a pity so profound it could convince anyone who cared to know that those who despised us ''need the moral authority of their former slaves, who are the only people in the world who know anything about them and who may be, indeed, the only people in the world who really care anything about them.'' When that unassailable combination of mind and heart, of intellect and passion was on display it guided us through treacherous landscape as it did when you wrote these words - words every rebel, every dissident, revolutionary, every practicing artist from Capetown to Poland from Waycross to Dublin memorized: ''A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of the people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.''
The third gift was hard to fathom and even harder to accept. It was your tenderness - a tenderness so delicate I thought it could not last, but last it did and envelop me it did. In the midst of anger it tapped me lightly like the child in Tish's** womb: ''Something almost as hard to catch as a whisper in a crowded place, as light and as definite as a spider's web, strikes below my ribs, stunning and astonishing my heart . . . the baby, turning for the first time in its incredible veil of water, announces its presence and claims me; tells me, in that instant, that what can get worse can get better . . . in the meantime - forever - it is entirely up to me.'' Yours was a tenderness, of vulnerability, that asked everything, expected everything and, like the world's own Merlin, provided us with the ways and means to deliver. I suppose that is why I was always a bit better behaved around you, smarter, more capable, wanting to be worth the love you lavished, and wanting to be steady enough to witness the pain you had witnessed and were tough enough to bear while it broke your heart, wanting to be generous enough to join your smile with one of my own, and reckless enough to jump on in that laugh you laughed. Because our joy and our laughter were not only all right, they were necessary.
You knew, didn't you, how I needed your language and the mind that formed it? How I relied on your fierce courage to tame wildernesses for me? How strengthened I was by the certainty that came from knowing you would never hurt me? You knew, didn't you, how I loved your love? You knew. This then is no calamity. No. This is jubilee. ''Our crown,'' you said, ''has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do,'' you said, ''is wear it.''
And we do, Jimmy. You crowned us."
* A character in ''Just Above My Head'';
** a character in ''If Beale Street Could Talk''; two novels by James Baldwin.
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A new DNA study offers insight into the horrific story of the trans-Atlantic slave trade
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"The Black Lives Matter group made their way to the south side of the square, facing the road that was still open to traffic, and waved their signs to a mixed bag of supporters, curious onlookers, and outright detractors like the man on a motorcycle with a rebel flag bandana pulled up over his face.
Of course, busloads of antifa protesters never materialized. A handful of people gave speeches, and it was almost over within an hour. Campbell had promised the police department and the mayor that they would clear the square by 5:30 p.m., a concession she now regrets. But she also knew some of the protesters wanted to be out of the town before dark, and so she asked if anyone else wanted to say something before they left. Hood raised her hand.
“My name is Maya and first off I just want to say how proud I am of this town,” she said. “Growing up where I grew up, they tell Black kids don’t go to Harrison.”
“That’s a lie!” A woman in the crowd yelled.
Hood raised her voice to speak over her, and made it through a few more sentences. “All lives cannot matter until Black lives matter.” Then she froze up.
“I was just overwhelmed with emotions,” she recalled later. She thought of not just the white woman yelling, but also her stressful job treating heart patients at the hospital, the Internet trolls harassing her, the pressure to be the voice of Black people everywhere. “I wasn’t doing it for the attention, I was doing it because I knew the attention would be there, and I knew that my voice would be heard by somebody you know.”
For a few long seconds, Hood just stood there quietly. Campbell and the other women organizers came forward and gave her a group hug. The crowd cheered. Hood wiped her eyes and went on: “It has to start with each and every one of us. It has to start here in our hearts, it has to start in your mind. Educate your children, educate the people around you. Do not stay silent, silence is violence. Say their names, and now go, and get the job done.”
It was one of the bravest things I think I have ever seen."
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An ebullient speaker with a confrontational personality, Rev. Vivian became a stalwart of the King-led Southern Christian Leadership Conference but was not part of King’s innermost circle, which included leaders such as the Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, Andrew Young and Dorothy Cotton.
As director of affiliates, Rev. Vivian presided over dozens of SCLC chapters and helped orchestrate protest activities and training and community development efforts. He traveled to Danville, Va.; St. Augustine, Fla.; and other cities fraught with civil rights tension, and he carried the scars to prove it.
He drew national attention in Selma, Ala., on Feb. 16, 1965, during his showdown with Dallas County Sheriff James G. Clark, whose fondness for military-style helmets and jackets and whose aggressively brutal use of a nightstick made him one of the most notorious law enforcement officials in the Deep South.
Rev. Vivian was in Selma to register African Americans to vote while the county board of registrars threw up resistance, at first declining to accept applications and then insisting on literacy tests and other hurdles to slow the process. A federal district judge demanded an end to such roadblocks.
Amid a light rain, Rev. Vivian corralled about 100 followers — in a line that snaked around the county courthouse — to take shelter on the building steps. Clark and his club-wielding deputies ordered Rev. Vivian to leave and began to shove everyone off the steps.
The minister held his ground and called the sheriff a “brute” and “Hitler,” according to news accounts. Clark — a stocky 220 pounds — aimed a fist at Rev. Vivian’s mouth, sending him reeling down the stairs before he was taken to jail on a charge of criminal provocation.
The skirmishes in Selma culminated in the March 1965 “Bloody Sunday” clash at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Captured on national television, the incident galvanized congressional support for the Voting Rights Act to prohibit racial discrimination in balloting.
In a statement Friday, the former president wrote that Rev. Vivian “was always one of the first in the action — a Freedom Rider, a marcher in Selma, beaten, jailed, almost killed, absorbing blows in hopes that fewer of us would have to. He waged nonviolent campaigns for integration across the south, and campaigns for economic justice throughout the north, knowing that even after the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act that he helped win, our long journey to equality was nowhere near finished.”
He moved to Peoria, found stockyard work and eventually became recreation director at a community center. He felt a calling to the ministry, and a local church raised the funds for him to enroll at American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College) in Nashville.
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Through recent years, Rev. Vivian was a frequent lecturer on civil rights and activism, serving as a witness to history and an inspiration to younger generations. A half-century after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, he told an audience at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro that the greatest challenge of protest is to assert one’s voice in an effective way.
“This is what made the movement,” he said. “Our voice was really heard."
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Rereading a classic on its 60th anniversary
"I was probably 15 or 16 when I first read Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird.” I may have seen the movie before then (one I have watched countless times since). The story, one of my favorites of all time, solidified Lee’s unwavering status as one of my top-five authors.
This month marks the 60th anniversary of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book. For me, the enduring appeal of “Mockingbird” lies not only in the plot or characters; the book is a mirror, a source of endless and revelatory conversation about who we are and have been as a country.
This anniversary coincides with a national reckoning on race that is challenging America’s long-held beliefs and long-standing institutions. The moment presents an opportunity for Americans to finally read “Mockingbird” for the story it is — not the one too many would like for it to be. To do so is to not only see the truth Lee tries to tell in its pages but to begin to understand the truth about America.
I was born nearly half a century after the 1930s, when Lee’s story took place, and yet so much of the dynamics of Maycomb County felt familiar to me. I grew up in the shadow of my hometown of Atlanta, in the south-side suburb of Fairburn, Ga. We were the first African Americans to move onto our street; by the time I finished high school, my graduating class was nearly evenly split between black and white. Both places were charming backdrops and lovely places to grow up that maintained and protected white supremacy veiled as racial harmony.
Familiar, too, were the black characters in the story and their relationship to the town’s white citizens. Calpurnia felt like a loving but no-nonsense aunt; Rev. Sykes sounded like a community elder who might have looked out for me, my brother and our friends; the Robinsons were working-class, honest black folks like the ones in my childhood best friend’s family.
But the story is one by a white author, told through primarily white characters. Rereading the book, I was struck that Lee offers rich profiles of the story’s white characters, their personalities, mannerisms, dress, histories, but there are no such character studies to be found for any of the African Americans in this story. Their humanity is obscured from us, suggesting that it is of little consequence to the author, reader or the whites in Maycomb. White privilege means not actually having to know black or brown people, to live among them but to never really see them, even in one’s own house.
It is a myth, a lie that America tells itself that perpetuates racism. At best, he was the least overtly racist person in a racist town.
In reality, Atticus was an unwilling participant in the racial fight. He accepted the assignment not only to attempt to prevent a miscarriage of justice but to maintain the racial order in Maycomb. He was not a civil rights crusader; he attempted to save the life of one black person because he understood the implications for his town if he did not. And when he lost, Maycomb’s racial order was eventually restored.
