Remembering Vincent Harding - 2

 1931-2014

A Life of Hope and History

There are many reasons to remember Vincent Harding, but chief among them are his deep love for the humanity of black people, and his prescience.   He never studied black people as if they were anything other than fully human; and he looked into the past to see the future.  Take, for example, this passage from There is a River, written in 1980 about the year 1800:

"For in 1800, there was no state in which black people could educate their children, earn a living, find proper housing, exercise voting rights--in short, exist in dignity--without constant, often brutal struggle against the white majority and its laws and customs."  

Re-reading that passage sent a chill down my spine.  Here's why:

Educate their children?

In what state can we say that now, in the year of Vincent Harding's death, we are anywhere near achieving high quality education of black children?  While it may be true that it is no longer against the law for us to learn to read or go to school, the relative quality of black schools compared to those that white children attend is still very poor.  The old Jim Crow maintained that black children didn't need anything more than hand-me-down textbooks from white schools; the New Jim Crow just doesn't pay for anything more than hand-me-down buildings, programs, and services. Nearly every state has figured out a way to squeeze the life out of education offered to black children.  Black parents are so desperate that they settle for anything other than what is labeled "regular education," since they know that in most cases it is a poor substitute for 21st century learning. Here in Philadelphia, we have an overseer (the School Reform Commission) controlled by state functionaries who think nothing of serving up a school "system" stripped down to its skeleton:  no music, no art, no libraries, no nurses, football if you can get it, 35 kids in a classroom, and a commitment to insuring that every year there will be a  "will it or won't it" school opening crisis. How are parents and community members supposed to feel when The Nation features an investigative article about Philadelphia entitled "How to Destroy a Public School System"?

Earn a living?

Where should we start?   That African Americans experienced much more damage from the Great Recession than whites?    Or since 1952, when employment figures began being kept by race, black unemployment has been consistently double white unemployment, both in good times and bad? Or maybe that  black college graduates are as likely to be hired as white high-school dropouts?  We won't even get into the plight of formerly incarcerated folks, whom Michelle Alexander describes, a la Jeremy Travis, as being subjected to "invisible punishment," where they will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives--denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits."

Housing?

Ta-Nehesi Coates and Isabel Wilkerson have both reminded us of the centrality of housing woes to the health of black communities.  In  The Atlantic's recent cover story, "The Case for Reparations,"  Coates delves deeply into the effects of racist housing policy on black people and our communities.  Isabel Wilkerson, in The Warmth of Other Suns,  describes the massive exodus of black people from the south in the first half of the 20th century as a movement of refugees--of people who were terrorized away from their homes. And in case anyone thinks that these historical examples are, well, history, the Great Recession provides a backdrop for the latest housing catastrophe to roil black communities.  Here's a quick summary, courtesy of CNN:

"More African-Americans are being squeezed out of the housing market.

Not only are they less likely to apply for a mortgage than any other ethnic group, but African-Americans are also 2.4 times more likely to get denied a mortgage than Whites, a recent study conducted by Zillow and the National Urban League found.

As a result, far fewer African-Americans have achieved the American dream of homeownership.

And those who own homes were hit hard by the housing bust and are recovering at a much slower pace.

The losses have had a huge impact on wealth, according to Shaun Donovan, secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). "African-Americans and Hispanics have had a higher share of their wealth tied up in their homes than Whites," he said."

ncome

• $39,715
  At the median, black families made $39,715 in 2010, down from about $44,000 in 2000. As a percentage of white median family income, blacks made 61 percent in 2010, down from 63.5 percent in 2000.
• ↓ 10.1%
  The Great Recession wreaked havoc on household incomes for blacks. From 2007–2010, the median black household’s income fell 10.1 percent, compared to 5.4 percent for white households.

Wages and benefits

• 36%
  In 2011, 36 percent of blacks, including 38.1 percent of black women, were employed in low-wage jobs (earning poverty-level wages or less). Among the white labor force, 23.4 percent were employed in low-wage jobs.
• 49.5%
  In 2010, about half (49.5 percent) of blacks age 18-64 had health insurance provided by their employer, a nearly 14 percentage-point reduction from 1979.
• 38%
  Nearly 38 percent of blacks age 18-64 had employer-provided pension coverage in 2010, an 8.1 percentage-point erosion since 1979. This is more than double the rate of erosion in pension coverage for whites.

Jobs

• 15.9%
  During the aftermath of the Great Recession, the annual unemployment rate peaked at 15.9 percent for blacks in 2010 and 2011.
• 8.3%
  The highest annual unemployment rate for whites since the onset of the Great Recession was 8.0 percent, still less than the pre-recession annual unemployment rate (8.3 percent) for blacks.
• 18.3%
  From 2007–2011, high school–educated blacks (with no higher educational attainment) saw their unemployment rate rise from 9.6 to 18.3 percent. Black college graduates saw their unemployment rate rise from 3.5 to 8.2 percent.
• 50%
  About 50 percent of unemployed blacks were out of work for more than six months in 2011, the largest long-term unemployment rate among racial/ethnic groups.

Wealth

• $4,900
  In 2010, the median wealth, or net worth, for black families was $4,900, compared to median wealth for whites of $97,000.
• 33.9%
  Blacks are nearly twice as likely as whites to have zero or negative net worth—33.9 percent compared to 18.6 percent.

- See more at: http://stateofworkingamerica.org/fact-sheets/african-americans/#sthash.l3eoyjcl.dpuf

 

Remembering Vincent Harding -1

A blog named Signposts has a duty to celebrate Vincent Harding--a man I never knew, but whose work has inspired me for as long as I can remember. Recent pictures of him remind me of someone's favorite uncle:  dark-skinned, kindly, framed by white beard and hair.

   

1931-2014

Most history is written in a way to distance the reader from what is being reported.   Not Vincent Harding's history.   His history was written from the inside.  He cared about what happened to the people he wrote about.  He wanted to understand them, to dig deeply into their motivations and hopes in order to better understand our own.  He wrote about them as if they were sitting there with him in the room.

I've been re-reading There is A River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America, originally published in 1981.  I forgot how deeply he empathized with his subjects;  how much he identified with their dilemmas, challenges, tragedies, and deepest desires.   He was a historian, yes, but Vincent Harding was also a signpost.  An exemplar.  A model for being in the world.

I thought of him last week, when so many folks were sharing the video of the actor Wendell Pierce on Bill Maher's late night show on HBO.   Wendell was holding it down for how and why so many black folk had come to practice "disciplinary violence."  Don't get me wrong.  I don't believe in "disciplinary violence," for adults or children.  But Wendell said, correctly I think, that this practice had been learned at the feet of folk who had practiced some of the cruelest violence around--namely Europeans who came to the Americas stealing the lives, labor, and land of Africans and Native peoples.

I wondered how many people thought he was exaggerating, and that's when I thought of this passage from There is a River:

"Near Christmastime in 1769, a group of blacks on a plantation in Hanover County, Virginia, decided to turn on their new steward and a neighboring overseer.  They tied up the two men and, perhaps remembering their own experiences under the lash, whipped their white bosses "till they were raw from the neck to the waistband.

Not long after, in Louisiana, several men and a woman, including at least one who was African-born, killed their master and attempted to organize a larger insurrection.  They failed, and the penalties were brutal.  Two of the leaders were "condemned...to death by hanging...dragged to the gallows from the tail of a pack-horse with an ...halter tied to the neck, feet and hand,"  ...It was decreed [that the leader] was "to remain on the gibbet and to have his hands cut off and nailed on the public roads.  Pedro is to receive 200, and Mariana 100 lashes at the foot of the gallows, and their ears cut off close."

Wendell was not exaggerating.

Gibbet:  a gallows with a projecting arm at the top, from which the bodies of criminals were formerly hung in chains and left suspended after execution.

             

Time to Go Upstream: New Resources to Help PREVENT Officer-Involved Killings

The streets of this country are awash in cell phone video capturing the mental illness of a significant number of cops.  This is the only way to describe highway patrolmen who continuously punch elderly homeless women in the mouth; of county policemen who brandish military grade weapons at peaceful protesters and threaten to kill them; of state police who chase a mentally ill homeless man and kill him on a hillside; or of two police officers who oblige the crazed ramblings of a young man with a knife who cries out “Shoot me!  Shoot me!.”  Add to these the chokehold death of Eric Garner and the shooting death of Mike Brown, and there is no doubt that American policing is in crisis. The call for justice to be done in these cases is important and righteous.  But it is way past time  to promote new approaches to policies to PREVENT it.

Research and Policy Approaches to Preventing Officer Involved Killings 

Since over 90 percent of 12,000 law enforcement agencies in the US use psychological pre-employment screening tests, one can only conclude that existing pre-employment testing does not do a good job of screening and/or predicting who, when, or how racial animus surfaces under stress.  The federal government should support a research program out of the Justice Department that should begin with establishing a repository of cell phone videos and other social media focused on officer-involved killings.  Second, the Justice Department should fund scientific research that examines these resources for common markers of officer-involved shootings of black, brown, and white victims.  Questions such as what precipitates these encounters; roles of bystanders;  roles of officer partners and colleagues and whether pairs of officers are more or less involved in escalating tense situations into killings; psychological profiles of officers involved in such incidents, etc. would be a gold mine for learning more about the interpersonal dynamics propelling these incidents.
 

This kind of research base would also enable serious tests of the validity of psychological testing in predicting racial animus under stress.  It seems reasonable to think that existing psychological tests—perhaps perfectly fine for ordinary police work-- do not predict the key psychological attributes that coalesce into racial animus under stress.  Better information about this variable would support the wholesale revision of existing psychological batteries. It would also provide a fuller information base for police screening, training, and continuing education focused specifically on preventing officer-involved killings of black and brown victims.

The Police are Public Employees

The idea that we pay the salaries of people who kill us--most often without even a sense of remorse--is way beyond enraging.  Mayors, police commissioners, and others whom we elect or appoint to supervisory positions are the ones who must be held accountable FIRST.  Killers should not be on the police force, and since they're so hard to get off, we have to prevent them from ever getting on.  Mayors and others will understand the crisis we face when we hold them accountable for the kinds of police forces they assemble and run.  American policing is in crisis.  It's time to demand not only justice, but prevention.   

Barging into the Present - Part I

"Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures: 47 black
faces: my father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead), grand
fathers (both dead), brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts,
cousins (1st & 2nd), nieces, and nephews. They stare
across the space at me sprawling on my bunk. I know
their dark eyes, they know mine. I know their style,
they know mine. I am all of them, they are all of me;
they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee."

Etheridge Knight - The Idea of Ancestry

The Shoulders We Stand On

Faulkner's quip that "the past isn't dead.  It's not even past" always seemed right.  But for African Americans, the past is an inexhaustible, hardly explored resource--despite years of Negro, Black, and African American history observances.  For understandable reasons, we have used those occasions to practice "Great Man" (and Great Woman) history--heroic exploits, legions of "firsts," and whatever we could find that disproved the racist accumulation of beliefs that attacked our humanity. By the time social science got around to cataloging the effects of hundreds of years of what Ta-Nehesi Coates aptly called "plunder," Great Man//Woman history was more necessary still.  Anti-stereotypes were all we had, since the culture and the "science" converged on the idea that we were worthless, helpless, and hopeless.

But that focus came at a cost.  We lost sight of ordinary people who, under the circumstances, were doing extraordinary things.  The last three decades have seen the painstaking recovery of thousands of accounts of ordinary people throughout our history.  A torrent of scholarly works appeared--The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, Been in the Storm So Long, a series of books by Eric Foner on Reconstruction.  More recently, ordinary people began to make their mark on popular history --Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters and Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns come to mind.  Novels--both the recovery of older works such as Their Eyes Were Watching God, as well as more recent work by authors t0o numerous to name--have swelled the material available about ordinary black folk. And finally, the art:  musicians, singers, composers, painters and others have all helped to reconstruct our past. 

But the past six months have convinced me that the hunt for ordinary people really must begin in our own backyard.  Every black person in America--from kids through the elderly--should take a walk down what we've called the Ancestry Trail.  It's one thing to learn about what extraordinary individuals did to push our struggle along.  It's another thing entirely to discover where you, yourself, came from.  It is powerful; it is humanizing; it is humbling.  It causes the past to barge into the present in ways that are unexpected, joyous, curious.  You feel connected and responsible.  You dig into the shoulders you are standing on with your own two feet. 

Risk-Takers for Change

The 50th Anniversary of Mississippi Freedom Summer happened just in time.  For months now, I've been  stewing about the cascade of people who have lost their way. (They know who they are.)  Watching Stanley Nelson's American Experience documentary of that summer 50 years ago, when a thousand college kids streamed into Mississippi to run Freedom Schools, register the unregistered to vote, and stand up a new version of the Mississippi Democratic Party (the Mississippi FREEDOM Democratic Party) crystallized the thought. Fifty years ago, student volunteers knew what it meant to offer up your life to help push our people forward.  Some gave their lives, others broke with their families, all were accountable to the vision they shared:  Mississippi had to change.  America had to change. 

Back then, their purpose was to shine a light on the backwater of American racism.  Today, too many "leaders" thrive in the backwater and the shadows, using this country's neglect as a shield to pursue personal gain.

Mississippi Freedom Summer brings back the question of what it means to take risks for change.  I'm always fascinated by those who believe that risk-taking for change is easy; that they "never would have stayed in slavery," or "never would have let somebody keep me from voting,"  or even "never would have joined the Nazis." What this amounts to is a failure of imagination:  an inability to identify with  the vulnerability, the fear, and the courage required to take risks for change. 

Risk-taking for change is fraught with uncertainty.  You cannot know what enemies you will create. You can never know whether you will succeed or not, whether your contribution is important or enough, or even when your number is being called.  You cannot know how or if history will judge you.  You cannot even know whether the change you seek is the crucial one. You could win.  Or you could lose everything.  You just don't know.

This is why being ready to take risks for change is so important.  It means keeping your spirit ready. It means a daily sharpening of your principles and sense of accountability.  It means knowing what change is worth to you, and keeping in sight the people you want to benefit from the change you seek.

All of this is why there are not many people who are risk takers for change.  Even the Civil Rights Movement, as massive as it seems, involved relatively few people.  

A lot has changed since that summer 50 years ago. Barriers and challenges to African American development have now appeared in many places we're not used to seeing.  To the ranks of the Bull Conners, George Wallaces, and Frank Rizzos have been added a new swath of both opportunists and the lost--those who have lost sight of principle, accountability, and social purpose. They don't know where they're going, so any road will take them there.

Which is why I want to give a shout out to Maisha Ongoza and her fellow Board members at Imhotep Charter School.  As board members of a relatively small charter school in a small Philadelphia neighborhood, it would be easy for them to turn away from their findings of nepotism, test-taking fraud, financial improprieties, and other shortcomings of Imhotep's operation. Only by focusing on the welfare of the students at Imhotep, and what they deserve, would make the risks they took worth taking. 

The ranks of the lost are growing.  We need more risk-takers for change to pull them back onto the path toward progress.

The Ancestors' Trail

The Ancestors’ Trail

(Reflecting on the deaths of Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Vincent Harding, Nelson Mandela, and many, many more)

Our urge to

encircle them with

outstretched arms.

Irresistibly insistent.

We sheltered in the canopy of their lives.

A steady trickle of lights

dance, tumble

Dimming, but twinkling

Along the Ancestors’ Trail.

They are a new
Crowd
of lights
cheered and
embraced by the

cloud of witnesses 

already there.

flickering,
glittering

on the Ancestors’ Trail.

They leave us with

Less music, less vision, less courage, less light.

Unless, unless

We scoop buckets of sorrow, absence, yearning and hope

Into the drinking gourd.

Slurp the promise to do as they did.

Exclaim.

Exhort.

Explain.

And
drunk with love,

Fight.

© Fasaha Traylor, May 28, 2014

No, Temple, Let's Not Go Back to the Future

Open Letter to Temple’s Black Alumni

I have been waiting for the 32,000 member Temple Black Alumni Association to put out a call for an effective resolution to the ongoing problems plaguing the African American Studies Department, and  to support Dr. Tony Monteiro in his struggle to overcome the constraints and limitations of his year-to-year contract, exacerbated by his recent notification that the contract will not be renewed.  I haven’t heard from the Association, so perhaps it’s time for the Association to hear from me.

Temple's African American Studies Department has been embroiled in controversy for over a decade.  From charges of plagiarism levied against the former (and now current) chair, to a succession of appointments to the chair--some of whom resigned, others who were rejected--has added to the perception of a department adrift.  Instead of a department that is a jewel in the crown of Temple's academic offerings, the goings-on at the department leave the impression of a department in crisis.  Central to most of what has happened over the past decade has been the administrative ineptitude of Dean Theresa Soufas.  Despite the murky origins of the Monteiro contract dispute, her fingerprints are on it, too.

The troubles with the Department of African American Studies only magnify another issue:  the town-and-gown conflict with the North Philadelphia community.The 1960s brought pitched conflict between a Temple University desperate to expand and a local community just as determined not to be pushed out.  The 1970 Temple-Community Agreement brought those battles to an uneasy close.  Now, almost a half-century later, those wounds are being reopened.  The sight of North Philadelphia community members converging on a Temple University Board Meeting, all enraged by Dean Theresa Soufas' remark that there wasn't any black community, should give anyone who cares about Temple pause.  For community members, the non-renewal of Tony Monteiro's contract signals a resumption of the battle for community respect.

My father, Wayne Sylvester Clarke, was the first of his family to go to college. I never found out exactly why he chose Temple, but when I gave him my Temple pin several years before he died at age 91, I wanted to believe that it was because of Russell Conwell’s message:  acres of diamonds.  My dad was not a North Philadelphian—he found Temple  even though he grew up in Red Bank, New Jersey, not far from where Count Basie lived.  My dad never graduated from Temple—I was the first in my family to do that—but I was always proud that in the years between two world wars, my dad found Temple to have a welcoming heart for a black man at a time when not too many institutions did.

In other words, Temple’s mission attracted my father. His aspirations fit perfectly with “The Temple Idea,”  which according to Russell Conwell, [was]  to educate “workingmen and workingwomen on a benevolent basis, at an expense to the students just sufficient to enhance their appreciation of the advantages of the institution.”

My father would not be proud of Temple today.  The contempt expressed by Dean Theresa Soufas for the North Philadelphia community surrounding the campus seems a far cry from what Russell Conwell founded Temple to be.  The fact that a son of North Philadelphia could be treated so shabbily despite his upholding of the “Temple Idea”—not least of which is offering free Saturday classes for the community—is proof positive that Dean Soufas has little knowledge of or appreciation for Temple’s beginnings or purpose.

It also seems intellectually shameful that an African American Studies Department would express a desire to leave behind the study of W.E.B. DuBois, certainly one of the towering social scientists of this or any century.  W.E.B. DuBois practically invented social science not far from Temple’s campus, and this fact and his work should be known, and studied, and spread throughout the city.  Tony Monteiro has been doing this during his entire career at Temple.  For that, Temple owes a debt of gratitude to this son of North Philadelphia – not a cancelled contract.

I did graduate from Temple.  I am an alumna.  I am not pleased with how this situation has been handled and neither am I pleased with how the mission of both Temple and the African American Studies Department seems to be corroding before our eyes.  It is time for the Department to be strengthened, not destroyed; time for the President to recognize and renew the contract of one of the “diamonds” that Russell Conwell insisted were there; and time for Dean Soufas to find another institution to “manage.”  As they say all the time in the private sector:  it just isn’t a good fit.

Finally, it is time for Dr. Tony Monteiro to be placed firmly on a tenure track.

The issues embedded in this struggle are so much bigger than any individual—and have cast a harsh light on the roles, relationships, and responsibilities of Temple’s administration.  Being an alumnus ought to mean more than networking, basketball, and happy hours.  I’m hoping that many of Temple’s black alumni agree with me, and will educate themselves on the issues and speak out.