“So, people like A. Philip Randolph formed mighty and militant organizations that not only fought for economic justice, but fought for civil rights.”
by Keon Skelton
Year after year “Black History” is memorialized in the United States. This past year, a large monument of the late great Martin Luther King Jr. was unveiled. Many gathered in awe. I certainly plan to make a trip to see this monument at some point. But there is a parallel between the sculpture and the treatment of “Black history” in the U.S. It has been perfectly kept in its place where it can no longer threaten the power structure, as it once did. Black history’s educative potential has been suppressed. Instead we celebrate by mentioning the names of great individuals. We also spend a significant amount of time recognizing the achievements of outstanding African-Americans. But a critical eye sees the achievements of the few and expresses pride in them.
The critical eye also recognizes that the vast majority of Black people have moved from slavery and to the confines of the institution of poverty. The critical thinker also notes that the dominant society has pronounced the end of the Black struggle for radical equality, when in fact it is needed more than ever. And finally, the critical thinker takes note of how dominant society has endeavored to segregate the interests of Black people from the interests of other people of color and the oppressed throughout this nation and the world. For that reason we must do as Du Bois demanded of us. We must educate or engage in “a process through which human powers are brought forth.”
To truly understand the importance of Black history we must reflect deeply on the genesis of the Black identity. Upon critically engaging with the History of Black people we begin with People being forced out of their lands. The sound of chain links and groans sound off creating the sound of a dirge. Finally, they are forced onto ships in which the various tribes from whence they’d come would soon be erased from historical memory. Expelled from Eden they crossed the Atlantic in the bowels of a beast that would severely maim their humanity. In the bowels of these ships, bodies stacked on top of each other like cargo. But a new identity among the enslaved began to foment. When they left the ships they were not only slaves but Black slaves.
On those ships the Black man and woman were formed. They were formed in the womb exploitation. And they began their struggle for liberation in the womb itself. Men and women threw themselves over board refusing to be chattel. Others rose up in revolt and attempted to take control of the ships. By the time the Black man and woman got off the ship, the ideas of liberation, revolution, and radical equality had already developed in their being. In every land where Black slavery existed, the Black man and woman resisted and rose up. In 1811 Black slaves along with Native Americans, the only other people to be so terribly despised and inhumanely brutalized, organized themselves. They dressed in military uniforms, gathered weapons, and strategically went about to end slavery in New Orleans and conquer the city.
The Black identity is not the consequence of the color of one’s skin, the texture of one’s hair, the music one prefers to listen to or the way one talks. The genesis of the Black man and Black woman was the struggle for Revolutionary and Universal Equality. And this struggle remains necessary and urgent today. The Black identity is the product of a people’s continuous struggle to overthrow all social and economic orders that denied human rights and self-determination. They struggled to overthrow all institutions and policies that would reduce human beings to fixed categories destined to be subordinated to the will and desire of others. In other words, the history of Black people is a history of revolution; a history of struggles to restore the radical potentialities of humanity and all its members.
There are of course those who will dismiss all mentions of radical equality, freedom, and justice, as philosophical discourse. But they are of course incorrect on all fronts. This discourse is not bourgeois or abstract. Rather, it came directly out of a concrete history of Black people. Whereas, bourgeois philosophers and theorists only wrote and spoke of liberty, equality, and justice for all, the Black people made the imaginary real. When the French spoke of the Rights of Man and equality, the slaves for on whose backs French civilization rested rose up and shook the colonial world. For when Oppressed peoples reach towards the imaginary ideals of their Oppressors a mighty contradiction is unearthed and the system collapses under the weight of its deceit.
In the U.S., slaves revolted. Many fled to form abolitionist organizations. People like Harriet Tubman escaped but kept going back for others. And she made it clear that it was freedom or death. Frederic Douglas escaped slaver and taught himself to read. But despite his excellence he knew that it must be used towards the liberation of his captive people. Even after slavery when Blacks were not allowed to join unions they formed their own organizations for economic justice. They knew that without economic justice human dignity was impossible.
So, people like A. Philip Randolph formed mighty and militant organizations that not only fought for economic justice, but fought for civil rights. Randolph along with people like W.E.B. Du Bois, and Paul Robeson fought to transform the social and economic order so that all human beings and their lives would be reflected in the nation’s economic and social values. It was Randolph along with Bayard Rustin who organized the first March on Washington. During the 1950s and 1960s people like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X led the charge against racial inequality, political exclusion, and economic injustice.
These individuals are just a few of the most well-known leaders. But it in order for them to be great leaders there had to be great deal of brave and determined people that produced them, and followed them. The point here is that Black history is a political and revolutionary history. It is a history of struggle shaped by a people’s particular history rooted in colonialism and slavery. But at the heart of the struggle is the most essential human desire: freedom.
Those who aspire to have a democratic revolution where justice is law and liberation is order, then they must do so by re-engaging the struggle against racism and thoroughly revisiting the history of Black people in the U.S and the rest of the Americas. The very foundation of the Americas, and Europe was built on the backs of the Black slaves. And today it is Black, Brown, and Yellow people, with the women of each group carrying the heaviest burden, of the worse exploitation.
To revitalize the socialist dream of prosperity and equality for all we must remember the History. History for us is not the recollection of some distant past. The History of Black people must flow from past to present like the mighty river which flows through the land of Cush and through Egypt’s delta. Without it no life could be. The past bleeds into the present, as it perpetually gives birth to the future. And the future can only live through the critical revival of the past through the struggle to overthrow racism, which along with gender, and economic oppression, is an essential part of capitalism.
The end it must be made clear that Black History can only be celebrated through the practice and living of Black History. That is to say that Black history is a continuous struggle towards human self-determination, cultural freedom, political liberty, and economic justice, which are the foundations of a genuinely and radical social equality: the definition of a free human community. The past is present! And the future is what we make it today. The history of Black people is inextricably bound up with the future of the world. And the possibility of liberation is evident in the struggles of Black people. For Black history is an ongoing story of liberation. Again, I cannot express it enough. The history of Black people is not a story of moments past and memorialized, but a story still in the making, whose outline is embedded in The Souls of Black Folks.
Our history is today! The world awaits us.
Keep the faith,
Keon Skelton
