Posts 1-10

For my blog posts I have decided to do a kind of mass drop. This collective essay will focus on 10 different icons and ground-breakers in the Black Activist tradition. These essays will strive to be brief snapshots of a very strong tradition that is indeed still thriving.

1. Tami Sawyer: In a class I had last semester with professor McKinney, we occasionally had guest speakers come in and basically take over class for the day. Generally, these classes a and guest were centered around tracing the roots of and crafting a blueprint to the greater freedom of African Americans in Memphis. Tami Sawyer, whose twitter biography reads “I speak, write and organize because I cannot be silent nor still in the face of oppression. #TEDx 2016 & 2017. Day job @tfamemphis. #blacklivesmatter,” is kind of a modern day renaissance woman. She’s a writer, teacher, political candidate, and activist. This is a person out there doing thing in our community, and she happens to be running for office. Her website, tamisawyer.com, endorses the following: “decreasing recidivism through inmate training and back to work programs, statewide police standards that include use of body cameras and negotiation tactical training in lieu of neutralizing perceived risks, Creating a bi-partisan taskforce that would examine and propose solutions for the school to prison pipeline, Increasing… minority and women business owner based contracts across the state of Tennessee, blocking legislation that limits women’s control over their own bodies, and requiring all law enforcement agencies to develop and implement adequate rape kit testing protocol which includes staffing and funding to decrease turnaround of results and backlogs.” In short, Tami’s a bad ass, check her website out.

2. James Baldwin – Activism does not always have to take a certain form, which is good because James Baldwin’s career as an activist was quite diverse. He spent time in the arts, but was also an unabashed social critic. Baldwin’s last great work, titled Remember this House and recently reimagined as a film in 2017. According to npr, “it was to be Baldwin’s personal reflection on the lives and assassinations of MLK, Malcom X. and Medgar Evers, all of whom he was close with. ‘I want these three lives to bang against and reveal each other,’ Baldwin wrote. And as these lives bang, Baldwin’s gaze turns: from the… struggles of the 1960s to America’s insistence on imagining great social progress where little has occurred.” (npr.org). After watching the film, which uses the raw text of Baldwin’s personal archives, I must agree that it does paint a harsh reality. One that is visually spattered with snapshots of black citizens shot by police (in the contemporary moment), BLM footage, and President Barrack Obama. Needless to say, there is a lot going on. The documentary I mentioned earlier is called I Am Not Your Negro and its worth a watch.

3. Lebron James, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul, and Dwyane Wade all play on different teams, although that wasn’t always true. The point is, they have no practical reason to really interact with one another, but they do. Whenever the four stars get together, whether its summer vacationing or on the court, the world is always watching. How does this circle back to black activism? This is where the 2016 ESPY’s come in. Like I said before, whenever athletes of this level come together, their voices will be heard. Lebron James, backed by Carmelo Anthony, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Paul were acutely aware of this fact. They were aware of the power that their voices held, and continue to hold. They were also aware of a string of examples of ‘police overreach’ that had been occurring with a curiously frequent regularity. In the wake of a year seemingly filled with police brutality, these guys spoke out. They challenged the crowd to realize that black and brown lives matter. They challenged the police to end their shoot to kill mentality. They challenged their audience to realize that these problems are not new, something that a frighteningly high number of people do not realize. Most of all they challenged us to educate one another. “The conversation cannot end,” the group added. Athletes haven’t made stands like that in some time, and its about time it started again. Quite frankly, simply being excellent is not enough. Action must be taken.

4. Colin Kaepernick's decision to sit out, or protest, the national anthem before NFL games is an event that captivated the nation this fall. Compelled to speak out against police brutality, Kaepernick refused to stand for the country's anthem. Thus, sports anchors around the nation were suddenly debating whether his actions were disrespectful from morning until night. Coming from a player who was at the time riding the bench, that’s damn impressive. Personally, I think Kaepernick simply chose do stand up for something he believes in, caught a lot of flack for it, and has thus become a divisive figure in the National Football League. However, his polarizing nature is not what incensed African American debate show host Stephen A Smith. No, what drew the most outrage was, come election time, Colin decided not to vote. The consensus that most news networks reached, was that Kaepernick lost credibility. Sentiments like, "If you love it change it," and "he's lost the right to complain... I don’t want to hear another damn word from Colin Kaepernick" were thrown around like wildfire. What people are missing though, is by refusing to exercise his vote (in a state that went Blue, and always will go blue), Kaepernick was making a statement. He was exercising his voice without saying a word. Voice, as an interpretive concept, is not merely oral in nature. One's voice can manifest itself in art, music, speech, or written word. It can also manifest in action, or more importantly, the refusal to act. By not voting, Colin Kaepernick was not just critiquing a political party or popular candidate. Instead, what his inaction showed was a critique of American Political and Cultural infrastructure. Rather than take part in a system that accepts the killing of innocent black men and women, Colin Kaepernick refused to vote for either party. Likely feeling disenfranchised, Kaepernick chose to stop forcing something that was never there: a sense of belonging an respect in this country, Kaepernick chose to instead say, if I am not valued, why should I take part in this system. He tried to break the wheel, and sure he fell short, but at least he followed his conscience.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiArDHmlQKc

5- It’s not exactly a new phenomenon that young African American men and women are being killed by the police of our country. The practice itself is part of the same violent disease, manifested as lynching, that plagued the South: circumvention of the law, now through on-duty law enforcement, to exterminate African Americans through extra-legal (and immoral) methods. What’s even worse, if you can believe it, is that the perpetrators of these crimes are not being held accountable for their actions. There have been no indictments, there has been no righting of wrongs, so far. This is the climate our nation rests in right now. Enter: The Fantastic Negrito. Born as Xavier Dphrepaulezz, the “Fantastic Negrito” describes is an African American out of Oakland, who bills his sound as “Blues with a punk attitude” (fantasticnegrito.com). “Negrito,” in his debut album under his new, awakened identity explores the blues. More importantly, he also explores life as an African American living in America today. One song in particular – “In the Pines,” a Leadbelly cover with lyrical additions – directly addresses gun violence and police brutality. In the short film released with the song, “Negrito” dedicates his work to “Mothers that have had to bury their sons” because of police killings. Later in the video, it is revealed that this incredible artist lost his own brother to the police when he was only fourteen years old. These painful memories are very evident in his lyrics: “Black girl black girl/ Your man is gone/ Now you travel the road alone/ And you raise that child all by yourself/ Then the policeman shot him down” (In the Pines), the Fantastic Negrito laments. It isn’t just his lyrics though, the style that he produces has a roots-y twist to it. It feels like gospel, and maybe it is.  There is certainly a spirituality to it.  Furthermore, the song, which is essentially about modern day lynching, harkens back to a sound commonly associated with the hymns sung under the bondage of slavery. I very much encourage all of you to give the record a listen, and to take a peek at the short film. Even if the “Fantastic Negrito” doesn’t have solutions yet, he is using his voice to shed light on a huge problem in this country. Props.

Link to the Short Film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp_rRCNnUkk

6. Terrance Hayes is an African American poet and winner of the National Book Award for his 2015 effort How to be Drawn. The book, a series of poems, explores black identity and reality through resistance. Something that spoke to me was his portrayal of Black womanhood and beauty. In his “American Sonnet for Wanda C.” Hayes is infatuated with a mysterious woman. It is clear that this calamity of a woman is indeed black, and the language used to describe her is something that is very visceral indeed. Particularly striking is his description of her hair, describing it as “her bomb hair: Shells full of thunder” (Hayes 44). This imagery brings to mind something dangerous, electric. Like its about to explode. He’s taking something from his culture and thrusting it out into the mainstream to be either judged or loved by his audience. The beauty of it all comes in his unabashed pride here. He’s fearless.

7.One summer evening of 2016, after coming home from work I pulled out my phone to check up on my friends. What I saw was not the usual battery of texts and notifications I had become accustomed to seeing over the summer. Instead of messages like, “hey, dude lets grab a beer,” or something along those lines, I saw a barrage of news alerts and even a few warnings alerting me to an “incident” taking place downtown. In the heat of the moment, reporters were (and this is a technical term) going bonkers. What would later be revealed as a successful protest, one without any violence (something the mainstream media would have people believe is a miracle these days) for that matter, was being described as something to be weary of. The incident on the bridge made people, especially the city’s top officials, extremely uncomfortable. Because the event was so tense, the same people that the incident on the bridge was directed to communicate with, city officials and the press, wound up coming away from it with a new kind of tension that has rarely been so talked about, at least in my lifetime as a student of history. So, is this a bad thing? Some people might think so. In the overly politically correct world we live in, people often opt to spare people’s comfort with self-censorship. The Bridge Incident, luckily, did not do that. Instead, the people who decided to go down town to protest made sure their voices were heard. This protest is a model for how protest should be enacted. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once wrote, “Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood” (King). This description of agency has never rung more true than when applied to the incident on the bridge. It made people scared, and that same fear that Memphis saw that summer night stems from a lack of understanding, as well as no small amount of apathy. Getting back on track, we must ask ourselves as a city what comes next. In an article published by the Memphis Flyer, Editors of the magazine urge us to dig deep and ask ourselves whether this incident will be a long term focus point, or just a fleeting blimp on the radar: “The question now becomes: Will the protest result in any real change? Or was it just a matter of the city and police artfully allowing people to let off steam before returning to business as usual. Will Memphis "stay woke” (Flyer). Personally, I have no idea which path Memphis will follow. Historically, the answer is a definite no, Memphis will not stay awakened, or ‘woke.’ However, my heart feels differently. The current generation of Memphians, who are beginning to emerge into their first forays of explorations of the public forum, give me hope. This generation grew up in a post 9/11 world; as such, one of the major themes of our generation has been that we are a reaction to all of the discrimination and othering we observed as children, even if we weren’t completely aware of it back then. We long for peaceful times, to go back to the good old days of childhood where all we wanted to do was what was right. This brave new generation, and the ones coming after us, I believe to be a tolerant group of people that display more care for their fellow humans than the generations that have come before. I would even go as far as to say that my generation has been awake for a while. We are learning about the concepts of privilege and oppression early in our lives, and we see the need for change. “To those that protested last night - We hear you,” Mayor Strickland told a town hall [which was held in Bartlett, a suburb of Memphis that has a 90% white population, go figure]. We hear you is not good enough, for the time for listening began a long, long time ago. My generation of millennials, though, has been listening for a while. Now it’s time for action. We cannot rest on the laurels of one good protest, movements simply do not work like that. So, as much as this article is a report of what happened on the bridge, it is more so a call for our city’s leaders to stop drowning out the voices of those who care, simply because we are young. We may be young, but we are capable of great things.

Sources Include: http://www.memphisflyer.com/memphis/woke-was-the-protest-on-the-bridge-a-sign-of-real-change-to-come/Content?oid=4761617

https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

8. When The Levee Breaks: For this short essay, I will briefly examine the ‘Spike Lee Joint’ about Hurricane Katrina.

Spike Lee is one of America’s finest directors today, a cultural icon. He’s directed several critically acclaimed films, and even one video game with the NBA 2k franchise. When the Levees broke puts the audience in the murky aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. With the Bush administration off waging a war on terror, aid was scarse and citizens were turned into refugees. The film, which calls out the in-effectiveness of the Bush regime, is correct in calling this out. Furthermore, the film gives a sincere voice to those effected by the Hurricane from the diaspora to recovering business owners, to families… even to the dead. It capures beautifly the idea of congregation stemming from adversity while at the same time keeping everything portrayed honeest and real. The there is hope at the end of the day, but the days are almost too long type of reality. Anyways, its worth a watch.

9. When discussing the African American Activist tradition or the African American Radical tradition, we must also as historians always examine the forces and powers that these activist groups are rebelling against. In many cases it is the federal government itself that is behind the subjectification of African American citizens. What this means is that we have a government that is unfortunately often invested in racist policy on an institutional and organizational level. Often, these types of stories may sound like mere conspiracy, but some outrageous things have happened under the ‘Feds’ watchful eye. For example, it is an accepted fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. was frequently spied on. Rumors of infidelity were common among King’s associates, and J Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI knew this. In an effort to prevent King from gaining further momentum, Hoover tried to blackmail king into at the very least retirement and the language suggests suicide. Luckily it didn’t work.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored-letter-to-mlk-reveals.html?_r=0

10. One small side of activism that we haven’t really touched on thus far is an activist’s civic responsibility. For example, Memphis had a really bad yellow fever crisis at the turn of the century. As a result, the city’s population and economy dwindled. Things got so bad that the charter was in danger of being revoked. But, luckily Robert Church had other plans. He bought the defunct charter. Memphis was, essentially, saved. Imagine how odd that would have been at the time. Church, the south’s first black millionaire, had just saved the society that whites basically ruled. Would this have hurt the city elite’s pride at the time? I think it might have. Thoughts?