Six on History: Black History is Every Month
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1) On the Many Miracles of Aretha Franklin, Literary Hub
"When Aretha Franklin, born in Memphis and raised in Detroit, channeled Jesus Christ, born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth, and called for Lazarus of Bethany to come back from the dead, somebody or bodies in Watts heard and heeded her voice and got up walking like natural men. It was the second and final night of Franklin’s January 1972 performance recording of Amazing Grace in Los Angeles at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church. That night, Franklin, clothed in heart-chakra green and angel white, came to relay the good news in an old-time way: through a good Jerusalem rocking and the performance of a miracle.
Footage of her calling Lazarus back from the tomb during “Mary Don’t You Weep” is missing from the album’s documentary film, released in 2018. To be sure, the footage and the film it finally became had a troubled technical and spiritual history. It was infamously lacking the clappers that facilitate the synching of video and audio, and it had to await the arrival of modern technology to reveal it like some DNA sitting in an evidence locker. And Franklin famously did not want it to be released and blocked it in all the ways she could until she flew home. When it was released, and we flocked to see it wherever it was screened, possessing and consuming it, willing it to fill us up full, we were collectively viewing it over Franklin’s dead body.
I know why we all wanted to pull the film into our hearts with our eyes and ears and whatever other senses we could reasonably lay on it. The Amazing Grace album had been and still is a quintessential staple of Black American families, as synonymous with the Black domestic realm as the blues is with Saturday morning house scourings. It is a reminder of and testament to ’Retha’s gospel roots lest any of us got silly and forgot; in a pinch, it’s a damned good substitute for church.
As ravenous as anyone else, the thing I had most wanted to see in Amazing Grace was Franklin calling Lazarus. I had most wanted to see the miracle performed, had longed to see the shape of Aretha’s mouth when she called him forward, to confirm with my eyes that somebody was raised and had come walking in the church loosed of death. But alas it was not there. The editing of the documentary conspicuously skips from Franklin recounting what Jesus had said just before the resurrection—“for the benefit of you who don’t believe”—to just after that moment when Lazarus comes forth from the tomb alive and well. I wondered who in Watts was restored that evening? From what tombs did they emerge with full, warm breaths in their bodies again? Did they walk into a corner store on South Broadway and ask for water? I chuckled at Franklin’s protection magic on earth and in heaven. The last time Jesus raised somebody from the dead in front of a crowd of witnesses he was crucified.
The practical reason I wanted to see the mechanics of the resurrection was for research purposes. I wanted to understand what went wrong two years prior when I had tried to call my daddy Arthur Lee Robinson, born and raised in Glendora, Mississippi, and how to make it right so it would work this time. In the hours after I learned of his death, I had set an altar for him on an old vanity with his picture, three white candles, some shells from a beach in Accra, a glass of water with a lot of ice, and his third-favorite vice, peanut M&Ms. I turned up “Mary Don’t You Weep” very loud, louder even, drowning the sound of my own moaning and keeping it there under water until it hushed. I went three miles from my house to Aretha’s birth house on Lucy Avenue to see if I could borrow some dirt from her yard to aid the miracle, but when I got there and got out, seeing the house proud and abandoned, I got shamed.
Who was I to come over there all greedy and ask for a resurrection miracle from a thing that was itself fighting to live? I went on back home and waited. It was still yet early for him to hear me in that space between being absent from the body and being present with the Lord, but I would be ready and sure that my voice, along with that of Aretha calling Lazarus, would be the first and loudest on that line. Intercession was still possible. Hello? Come on back home. He would laugh so hard at how good he had gotten us, the greatest trick of his life. And we would never live it down, and that would be just fine. I was not ready to hear myself weep and moan.
“Mary Don’t You Weep” is one of many spirituals that promises deliverance and repair by telling of God’s other miracles, notably the parting of the Red Sea that facilitated the Jews’ escape from the pursuing Egyptian army. In early versions of the song, like one offered by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the mere capacity to run or fly away one day is enough of a covenant to hold a body over through the world’s injustice. The rewards in heaven will be plentiful, and any trauma of the earthly experience will be erased. (But I am still weeping and moaning here, on Earth, now, I say.)
The spiritual deliberately marks the drowning of Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea behind the escaping Israelites as empirical evidence of a coming salvation. As lagniappe insurance, God ensures the Egyptians’ dead bodies are visible on the beach. Because it focuses on a miracle in which the antagonist is not the devil, or a whale, or a lion, or a difficult test from God himself, but rather an oppressive state, its army, and its leader, “Mary Don’t You Weep” is a central Black American rumination on divine justice and balance in the wake of enslavement and its immortal afterlives.
In later versions of the song, like the 1958 version by Inez Andrews and the Caravans, the drowning becomes merely prologue to the apex miracle, the resurrection of Lazarus. Women’s versions tend to tell the full story of the weeping and mourning Mary and Martha, so listeners can understand the color and context of the women’s grief beyond the sometimes-chastising refrain, “oh, Mary don’t you weep / oh Martha don’t you moan.” It is the sisters’ grief, after all, that is at least in part the cause of Jesus’s own tears. In this version, the women can cease their mourning not solely because of Lazarus’s eternal life with God in heaven, but moreover because he will be restored to life again on Earth. It is one thing for the oppressor to be drowned; it is another for its victims to have their lives restored. It is the Caravans’ version, one tender with women’s grief and sensitive to their desires for a justice in the here and now and not just in the hereafter, that Aretha offers on Amazing Grace.
While you wait for the drowning, you fly. Hundreds of thousands of Black folks flew from the South after the Second World War in search of new lives and new freedom. They brought with them all the chocolate cities of the South, the songs and prayers and chants, the hoodoo and the haints, a quarter of the tambourines, and an eighth of the cooking. Daddy would say Los Angeles was just Mississippi niggas who got so tired of Texas they went all the way to the ocean. They made and grew themselves anew in that hot concrete. They were artists, revolutionaries, and glamorously famous; their descendants made streetwear, crip walking, and funk-inspired gangsta rap. But at the ocean, each generation found more war, familiar and foreign, but with similar outcomes. Still, they looked up at the sky and patted their chests and said, “Oh, but hallelujah, we ain’t in Texas/Mississippi/Arkansas/Louisiana no more.” It can be so hard to fly home.
Seven summers prior to Aretha’s flight from New York City to Los Angeles to perform the miracle on South Broadway, the Watts community in Los Angeles had been the site of an uprising against police brutality and a retaliatory massacre. Most of the thirty-four killed by the combined state forces of the police and the National Guard were Black. More than one thousand were injured, generations broken by memory and matter. What was destroyed materially by fire had already been tainted by the socioeconomic and psychic harm racism had wrought. It bore the mark and was not spared. Sometimes while you wait for the drowning, you try clearing the land with hot orange light and beginning again.
In the years leading up to that 1965 summer, and predictably in the years after, the story was the same as it was everywhere up South and out South and down South—housing conditions were dangerous, education was racist, police were abusive, destructive, murderous. In the spring of 1962, police had raided and desecrated a Nation of Islam mosque, injuring several people and killing Ronald Stokes. In 1964, non-Black California voters repealed, via a proposition vote, a fair housing act that would have ensured that the swelling numbers of Black people redlined in South Central Los Angeles could more freely move about the city and state and away from conditions of repression and harm.
After the years of crescendo, the raucous and massacring wave of summer ’65, and the inevitable crash to sameness thereafter, some people thought that if they changed the name or didn’t call it Watts anymore, the murdered and the survivors and the inheritors would forget. But they carried the memories everywhere in their mouths. Plus, even if you burn it down, a place never forgets its own name. Sometimes fire is the only way to make sure somebody remembers.
Migration, or birth or death, is flight: flying to earth from some otherworldly space, moving across the world from place to place, flying home to the sky again. Prayer or ritual or worship is intercession: sequential chants of magic aimed toward an outcome. Resurrection, rebirth or re-living, is reparation: to put something back as it was and also anew. Black people had moved everywhere across space and time in search of a place to just be and after all of that Tulsa was Atlanta was Detroit was Buttermilk Bottom was The Other Side of the Tracks was only as different as they could make it, which was often a marvel, given they were up against the same kind of white folks everywhere. After what Pharaoh had done to the people of Watts for so many years, a flight, a prayer, and a resurrection or few was the tiniest but mightiest kind of balm.
With James Cleveland and the Southern California Community Choir, Aretha and her band prepared a way for the resurrected to come through. The revival begins at the end of “God Will Take Care of You,” as the sounds of the sanctified church, that migrating bass, the organ, the tambourine, and all manner of percussion—hand, feet, and drum—electrified New Temple. In concert with the ancestors, the saints opened a portal from that side to this one for whosoever, persecuted on earth, wanted to come forward again, for just a moment or for the rest of a new, natural life, and dance in praise. Then on “Old Landmark,” Franklin indicates that she is about to preach in the old way, to show and not just tell, to perform an old miracle. Kneeling and praying and telling the story. From there, “Mary Don’t You Weep” is a calculated, intentional march toward the miracle at the ocean. I don’t need to see it on some tape to know it happened.
Entries into and exits from this world, however they come, by whoever’s hands, a loving strong catch of a midwife on Lucy Avenue or strangling state hands that steal breath on Every Street, always mean flight. They mean heaven. They mean tables prepared for us. They mean death came and we still won because we’ll never grow old. For the rest of us, they mean a whole lot of weeping and moaning while we wait for the drowning, and finally, the restoration, where we all come out again walking like natural men."
The all-Black Third Battalion of the U.S. Army’s 24th Infantry Regiment was tasked with guarding Camp Logan in Houston, Texas, in a town ripe with racism and discrimination. According to the Associated Press, law enforcement originally reported that it was a “premeditated assault”, but now it’s believed that the men were defending themselves against a white mob following a deadly bout of hearsay.
Here’s more from AP:
The all-Black regiment had been dispatched to Houston to guard Camp Logan, which was under construction for the training of white soldiers who would be sent to France during World War I.
In Houston, a city governed by Jim Crow laws at the time, tensions boiled over.
The riot was fueled by a confrontation between white Houston police officers and a Black woman whom they accused of hiding a wanted man. A soldier from the 3rd Battalion came to her defense and the officers beat him. The beaten soldier was released from custody, but rumors swirled that he had been killed. Some soldiers urged the unit to march on the police station, and others heard of an angry, white mob heading for the camp.
During the riot, 19 people died, including four Black soldiers and 15 white civilians, according to Prairie View A&M University. Five local police officers died.
While advocates note many of the Black soldiers disobeyed orders and left camp fully armed, they add there was a lack of due process, a rushed court-martial process and an inability of local civilians who witnessed the killings to identify which soldiers were responsible.
Camp Logan is now Memorial Park, a popular community gathering space.
“People walk or jog through the park today not knowing the untold history of Camp Logan took place,” said president of the Houston Chapter of the NAACP, Bishop James Dixon, according to KHOU.
The South Texas College of Law Houston and the NAACP Houston branch are planning to ask the Secretary of the Army to posthumously grant the men honorable discharges as well as fight for pardons from President Joe Biden.
“The punishment they served can’t be changed, but their reputations can be,” said Professor Geoffrey Corn from South Texas College of Law Houston, according to KHOU.
"On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that if Republicans continue to block a voting rights bill, the chamber would vote on changes to filibuster rules. Then he set a deadline for the vote: Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Every January, as the holiday approaches, politicians of every stripe start posting quotes from the famed civil rights leader to social media. A lot of the time, it’s the quote about King’s children being judged by the content of their character, taken from the “I Have a Dream” speech.
The quote-a-thon has gotten to the point where King’s daughter Bernice King has told people to “enact policies that reflect your birthday sentiments,” and at least a dozen times, she has urged them to learn another quote and/or stop taking that one out of context. So has King’s son Martin Luther King III.
And his children regularly respond when officials and lobbyists wrongly invoke his name while pushing their agendas in support of, say, a border wall, or concealed-carry gun permits, or their boss who might get impeached.
One interview was with “Press Conference U.S.A.,” a government-funded television show distributed internationally. By law, each broadcast could not air domestically until 12 years after it was recorded, according to C-SPAN. King was questioned for 30 minutes by a panel.
Toward the end, William Workman of the State, a Columbia, S.C., newspaper, brought up Kennedy’s civil rights bill. Would King, he asked, be amenable to bringing Kennedy’s proposals to a national referendum?
King then moved from the journalist’s hypothetical to the real world, continuing: “I think the tragedy is that we have a Congress with a Senate that has a minority of misguided senators who will use the filibuster to keep the majority of people from even voting. They won’t let the majority senators vote. And certainly they wouldn’t want the majority of people to vote, because they know they do not represent the majority of the American people. In fact, they represent, in their own states, a very small minority.”
It was that way “all throughout the South,” he said.
So: not a filibuster fan.
For decades, a coalition of Southern Democrats and some Republicans had successfully used the “talking filibuster,” cloture rules and other delay tactics to block civil rights legislation, including bills that would have ended poll taxes and literacy tests at the ballot box. In 1946, five senators spoke long enough to kill a bill that would have cracked down on workplace discrimination. The longest speech in Senate history — 24 hours and 18 minutes by South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond in 1957 — was a failed attempt to stop another civil rights bill.
So, in 1963, everyone assumed that the greatest challenge Kennedy would face with his “omnibus” bill would be the dreaded filibuster.
Kennedy, of course, did not live to see his bill put to the vote, but his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, did, pushing through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Johnson, a former Senate majority leader who had once tweaked filibuster rules, still endured record-breaking filibusters on his way to victory.
The Supreme Court struck down key sections of that Voting Rights Act in 2013. Senate Democrats are trying to restore some of the protections it provided. Martin Luther King III announced in December that he would spend his father’s birthday campaigning in Arizona for voting rights and an end to the Senate filibuster.
In the late 1980s, Senate rules changed, making it easier for lawmakers to filibuster; an extended floor speech was no longer necessary. One of the last of the old “talking filibusters” went down in 1983, when Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) led an unsuccessful 16-day effort to block King’s birthday from being made a federal holiday.
Here’s what you need to know about the procedure’s complicated history meant to delay, delay, delay.
"Sixty-five years ago, on Dec. 20, 1956, white people and African Americans began sitting together on city buses in Montgomery, Ala., instead of being forcibly separated in the name of Jim Crow. “Back of the Bus” was not a metaphor. It was rigidly enforced reality — enforced by jail time, as Rosa Parks discovered when she refused a driver’s order to give up her seat.
Her refusal, in December 1955, sparked a year-long boycott of Montgomery’s city buses that ended only after three Supreme Court orders.
In November, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the lower court decision, making this the third time a federal court had ruled against segregated buses. The city played its last desperate card, a petition for rehearing, which the Supreme Court quickly swatted away.
It had taken four court decisions and 380 days of boycott, but the combination of determined citizens’ action and faithful courts’ opinions brought the Constitution to Montgomery and to the former Confederate states.
Montgomery was one of the first pitched battles, and it would show whether segregationists could resist forever. It was not the first civil rights boycott, but it broke new ground and set new patterns for a new age that said official racial segregation was over.
In later years, lunch counter sit-ins followed the model fashioned in Montgomery: citizen action backed up by legal action, and court decisions by judges who took the Constitution seriously. When Congress enacted the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, it was responding to the spirit of Rosa Parks, Montgomery and the sit-ins.
We would like to see more of that spirit from U.S. citizens and Congress today."
Armand Derfner is a Charleston attorney and Vernon Burton is a Clemson history professor; they are co-authors of “Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court,” published by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021.
Real estate agents helped create today’s deeply segregated communities. In the 1930s they provided the raw neighborhood intelligence, using starkly racist language about “negro-blighted” districts and the “infiltration of undesirable racial elements,” that aided in the creation of the infamous redlining maps denying federally backed loans to people of color. They came up with the idea of loading property deeds with restrictive covenants that kept Black people out of the most desirable neighborhoods. The NAR’s predecessor organization opposed the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which barred discrimination in home sales. In case that all sounds like ancient history, multiple instances of members airing racist views on social media in 2020 led the group to adopt a formal code barring hate speech.
“Many may not realize just how far-reaching this systemic housing discrimination was, particularly for African Americans,” Oppler said on the call, before asking, “Bryan, can you speak to that a little bit?” The camera shifted to the group’s first director of fair housing policy, Bryan Greene, who had worked for 29 years at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
As one of the top federal officials in charge of enforcing the Fair Housing Act, Greene once stayed late at HUD’s offices in Washington writing a speech commemorating the law’s 32nd anniversary, then walked to a nearby hotel to hail a cab. The driver turned him down after seeing he was Black; Greene sued in federal court and won a settlement. Now he had the unenviable job of explaining a century of civil rights struggles to his audience, most of whom looked a lot like Oppler (78% of NAR members are White). After a high-level summary—he mentioned that Black people were once excluded from membership in the NAR—Greene concluded that “it’s a tough history” but “we have turned the corner.”
The hot U.S. housing market is poised to deliver a banner year for real estate agents.
Consumers have filed class-action lawsuits in Illinois and Missouri, challenging the NAR on antitrust grounds. Separately, the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust division is pursuing an investigation of its own. The heart of the matter is the Realtors’ control of the Multiple Listing Service, or MLS, where 89% of sellers in the U.S. listed their homes in the year through June. It’s an essential data source feeding into the maps of newer digital services such as Zillow Group Inc. and Redfin Corp. Before listing a home on the MLS, sellers must agree to participate in the “cooperative compensation” system, in which two agents, one for the seller and one for the buyer, split the commission from the sale proceeds. Commissions in the U.S. averaged almost 5% last year, according to the publisher and consultant RealTrends. They’re less than 2% in countries including Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, and the U.K.
The same month Trump lost the election, the Justice Department reached an agreement with the Realtors that would have kept the cooperative system in place while requiring greater transparency about costs. The Biden administration ripped up the deal in July, however, and sought documents from the NAR showing how the association enforces the mandatory offer of compensation to buyer brokers. (The group sued in federal court in September to block what it called the “unprecedented breach” of the earlier settlement.) A Biden executive order also directs the Federal Trade Commission to investigate “unfair tying practices or exclusionary practices in the brokerage or listing of real estate.”
The Realtors’ commission is coming under scrutiny not only because of its potentially anti-competitive aspects but also for the way it perpetuates an unequal system. Historically Black neighborhoods get far less attention than those that typically command higher prices, according to Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, a sociologist at the University of New Mexico and author of the 2021 book Race Brokers: Housing Markets and Segregation in 21st Century Urban America. She followed seven real estate agents for a year in the Houston area and found racial segregation so prevalent that it seemed “normal, even natural.” This was in part because of the commission. “White agents assumed that White individuals were wealthy or would bring them the most profit, because they thought these individuals could either pay more for homes or had homes that would sell for higher prices,” Korver-Glenn writes. “White agents also viewed White individuals as requiring the least amount of work, with the smallest chance of work-related headaches. These agents then provided more and better service to White consumers.”
Fifty years ago, Matteson, a middle-class suburb of 19,000 south of Chicago, was almost all White. By the mid-1990s it was just about evenly divided between Black and White. If that sounds like a desirable turn, it wasn’t perceived as one by the town’s leaders.
Dale Taylor was a young Realtor then, living in Matteson. Today, at 62, he’s perpetually upbeat, one of those middle-aged people completely comfortable with smiley-face emojis in texts. His grandparents had moved from Georgia in the Black migration of the 1920s, and his parents built a home in Harvey, another Chicago suburb, in 1962. An uncle built one, too, but it was firebombed before completion; he finished it with the insurance money.
White families continued to leave Matteson, and by 2019 it was 81% Black. A mall that had long been a suburban destination closed and the last of it was demolished that year, leaving acres of blacktop with Illinois prairie sticking through it. Other strip malls emptied during the Great Recession and never regained tenants. “This is what segregation does,” Taylor says, gesturing to a row of abandoned storefronts.
He left Matteson for Frankfort almost 20 years ago. Homes in Matteson have sold this year for an average of $232,000, he says—little more than half the $459,000 average in Frankfort, which is 82% White. The highest sale in Matteson fetched $470,000; in Frankfort, five homes have topped $1 million and one went for $2.1 million.
The racial wealth gap has been stubborn. In 2019 the typical Black family had just over one-tenth the net worth of the typical White family, in part because of the value of their homes. The gulf in homeownership also persists: About 74% of White families own a home; among Black families, it’s 44%.
The Biden administration’s plans for social spending—passed by the U.S. House in November but stalled in the Senate—include $10 billion in down payment assistance, providing $20,000 or more for first-time, first-generation homebuyers. Biden has also formed a task force under HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge to address bias in home appraisals. The NAR has said it supports both efforts. The group formally agrees with the administration that systemic racism has denied Black households perhaps the most important opportunity to pass down wealth.
Simply acknowledging that isn’t enough, in the view of experts such as Jenny Schuetz, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who studies housing. “It may be that [the Realtors] in general see the need to shore up goodwill among elected officials,” she says. “My bigger concern with the Realtors is that it’s a cartel that protects its hold on the industry.”
The next step after an apology, of course, is atonement. In addition to supporting the down payment assistance and appraisal initiatives, the NAR and Greene, who’s now the group’s vice president for policy advocacy, last year created a new diversity training curriculum called ACT to address potential bias among Realtors. Difanis in Champaign says four of his past five hires have been Black women.
Another Illinois city, Evanston, in March became the first in the U.S. to offer reparations to Black households specifically to redress past housing wrongs, pledging $400,000 raised from a tax on marijuana and donations. Marguerite Martin, a Realtor in Tacoma, Wash., sees that as timid considering the damage. To make a difference, she says, reparations should involve government, real estate agencies and associations, and lenders—with agents perhaps contributing a share of their commissions. “We have to make a commitment as an industry that we owe this money and now we have to give it back,” she says. Martin recalls a conversation with one of the NAR’s diversity consultants, who asked her why more agents didn’t work in Black communities. “Because they’ll make less money,” she responded.
