Black History: Real, Personal, Necessary

Black History: Real, Personal, Necessary

My father was a minister.

He came to his chosen profession relatively late in his career, during what turned out to be the last third of his life. For most of his ministry, which lasted from his ordination and installation in 1953 until his death at 61 in 1974, he wrote his sermons out in longhand, using a fountain pen and 5” x 8” loose leaf lined paper. He stored them in a series of thick black leather binders. Later on, some of his sermons were taped using reel-to-reel technology that preceded by several iterative generations the digital world we now know.

As his preaching matured, he would on occasion depart from his printed text. This would most often occur when he knew that someone in his congregation had been touched in some deep and personal way — perhaps the death of a spouse or a child, the loss of a job, or the revelation of a deathly diagnosis. A scholar of both the Bible and of literature, he had a way of way of relating the personal to the eternal. Even though his sermons were peppered with quotes from such abstruse or mystical sources as Kierkegaard, Niebuhr, Tillich, and Thurman, he nonetheless shared their insights in a way that made sense to the hardworking middle class strivers and strainers who filled the pews every Sunday in the 1950s and ‘60s. And he did it so well that people of disparate backgrounds would come up to shake his hand or receive an embrace in the narthex after service and tell him they felt his words had been addressed specifically to them.

They might have been right, since in those days before mega churches were invented, he knew every member of his flock, had likely been in their homes, and perhaps more tellingly, had invited all of them to his home, because it was literally their home.

You see, from 1953 until 1967, the year following my mother’s death, our home was the church parsonage [google it if you are under 40]. He moved into an apartment after that; a widower with one son in the Air Force and the other mostly away at school, he didn’t want the space, the memories, or the parsonage stairs. So he bid goodbye to 9703 Parmelee Avenue in the heart of Glenville and moved into a new apartment building on the outskirts of the city limits.

But in the fifties, with a congregation growing by leaps and bounds, he started a tradition by hosting an Open House for church members and friends on New Year’s Day. Hundreds of people of all ages, sizes, and dispositions trekked to that three-bedroom colonial to eat, drink [punch], socialize, satisfy their curiosity about how their pastor lived [very modestly], and sometimes plop down to watch one of the classic bowl games [Rose, Sugar, Orange, or Cotton]. I thought those Open Houses were one of the coolest perks of being a preacher’s kid.

I didn’t know I was going to write any of this when I sat down. I just finished listening to the broadcast of today’s Civic Commons show, which ends with my trying to accelerate the pace of my mellifluous drawl in order to cram 500 words about black history into my allotted three minutes. At the conclusion of the show, one of the hosts says that you can find my just-delivered commentary in this space. And that evoked this reverie.

My dad understood that writing a message for the ear is different than writing for the eye. It was principally for this reason that he never wanted his sermons published. A second reason was that he occasionally departed from prepared text.

Many of the sermons that survived him in physical form [the notebooks and the tapes] now rest in the archives of his alma mater, the Howard University Divinity School in Washington, DC. One day I discovered a few of his written sermons in my possession. I sat down and transcribed them over a fortnight or so. As I did so, I could hear him speaking. Where the handwriting was near indecipherable [he was a converted left hander], I had the filial satisfaction of knowing that I was a sympathetic editor.

I think it is partially by virtue of the experience of having typed out those sermons that while my memory of my mother is visual and tactile, my sense of my father is aural.

Well, I have now subjected the more loyal or physically fit of my readers to a preamble to a commentary on black history that is longer than the commentary itself. If you are still with me, you can read the commentary below, or listen to it at the end of this podcast [the discussion about sustainability that precedes my commentary is pretty good, too!].

I’ll be back later today [I promise!] with my thoughts about who should be the next prosecutor in Cuyahoga County.

• • •

Remarks prepared for airing at 12:30PM February 28, 2012 on the Civic Commons Radio, WJCU 88.7 FM. [podcast on iTunes]

Warning!! Dangerous Curves Ahead! We are about to discuss Black History. Don’t worry: there won’t be a lot of dates to learn. This is more a discussion about your attitude towards black history.

From one perspective, these are the best of times. To begin with, there is that brilliant, handsome, Christian, family-centered, hard-working, compassionate, high achieving black man in the White House. His very presence there connotes the progress  now possible for the descendants of the captured peoples brought chained together through the terrible Middle Passage to an unimaginably bleak future, their histories, identities and lives stolen and tossed overboard. 

By some cultural alchemy President Obama has internalized and represents that history even though his hereditary tree is not the typical African American one.

Through perseverance and scholarship, a good portion of black and African history continues to be recovered, even as black history continues to be made. New achievements abound for Africans in America on almost every civic, cultural, commercial and social front. New identities have also been established, tied to the old in ways we don’t always comprehend. 

We especially don’t understand them when we consider that these are also the worst of times, with so many fellow citizens chained to plantations where the new slave quarters are poisonous schools that multiply ignorance, ghettos whose zip codes are predictors of ill health and quickened existence, and where too many pathways are pipelines to despair and incarceration.

This new Jim Crow is also part of our American history. 

When our great grandchildren study our era, they will learn that underneath an America of wealth and privilege and unprecedented possibility for some, there existed another, mostly darker, America with virtually no access to those prizes at any point from birth to death.

They will learn these things only if their history books are more inclusive than the ones I saw in the nation’s best schools. In those books notions of Manifest Destiny basically kicked to the gutter anything that didn’t support the United States as the home of the free and the land of the brave.

It was that narrow chauvinism, admittedly present in just about every society, that led Frederick Douglass in 1851 to ask, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, to say on that Independence Day in Rochester, New York: “Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them.”

A similarly informed understanding led W. E. B. DuBois in 1903 to write in The Souls of Black Folk of the “double consciousness” of black people, and prompted Carter G. Woodson in 1926 to establish the Negro History Week that has now become Black History Month which may one day be known as African American Heritage Month.

Until all Americans consider this month’s focus to be a part of their history, this annual period of celebration and study will be needed.

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Fudge-Turner: What’s Really at Stake?

I start this post fresh from my unannounced but necessary pre-holiday hiatus with renewed energy and a heightened sense of urgency. Real Deal readers should rest assured that even when output slows, inputs continue unabated. It is my hope that occasional time off heralds a sharper perspective upon my return. But you, Real Deal followers, are the ultimate judge of that.

I began blogging in earnest back in November 2009. I had become by turns disheartened, perplexed and finally aroused by the failure of the county Democratic Party to act with swift resolve to denounce and remove Jimmy Dimora and Frank Russo from party positions which made the whole party a convenient piñata for pundits and Republicans.

So I got off my proverbial couch and started going to various Democratic Party functions, asking questions and looking for answers. I visited offices of various elected officials, county and city of Cleveland. And I tracked down and got involved in with a random group of party activists who eventually evolved into an effective but short-lived caucus under the banner Cuyahoga Democrats for Principled Leadership.

[Column interlude: last week evidence of reform was on public display at the county Democrats’ Executive Committee meeting at Music Hall. Not every incumbent was unchallenged, one — Juvenile Court Judge Joseph F. Russo saw his opponent endorsed — and party chair Stuart Garson suffered with good humor when the will of the body contradicted his own preference for an measured and orderly process.]

Looking at Cuyahoga County politics of course requires an examination of black politics, unless you restrict yourself to local Republicans, all of whose significant black players could fit inside a nice-sized powder room.

And when you look at local black politics, you see problems. Big-time problems. Disorganization. Disunity. Disconnectedness. Ineffectiveness. Perpetual Reaction Mode. All of this forms the backdrop for the most exciting political development in the black community in twenty years [Mike White-George Forbes face-off in Cleveland’s 1989 mayoral election.]

By exciting political development I refer of course to Nina Turner’s Democratic primary challenge to Marcia Fudge’s bid for a third Congressional term.

Let me state clearly on the record that if the election were held today, I am uncertain which of these public servants would get my vote. I am neither anti- one or pro- the other. I am pro-Cleveland, pro-Cuyahoga County, and pro-African American community. I am anti-entitlement and anti-establishment where either means the status quo.

My esteemed friend Dick Peery articulated a view in this forum early this month in a comment to my post on Fudge’s then-pending reelection announcement. I don’t know the habits of Real Deal readers with respect to reading comments. [I do know that I love them, read every one, answer virtually all of them, and wish there were more! I know that not everyone has the time or energy to state a reasoned view; I do know that we need a space for intelligent exchange of community views, and that remains for me a constant goal.]

Dick’s thoughts always merit consideration and response. I didn’t answer them in a comment to his comment because I was concerned that the exchange would be out of eyesight for too many readers. In essence he said that an incumbent’s challenger needs to articulate why she would do a better job and why change is necessary.

Lou Stokes became the most important black elected official in Ohio once his brother left Cleveland City Hall in 1971. He established an enviable record in Congress thanks to his skill, his seniority, his party’s majority status, and his place on the Appropriations Committee. He brought bacon home to a community in dire need of it. All of Cleveland respects him, and pretty much all of black Cleveland loves him.

As a pioneer Congressman from a unique urban area, Stokes achieved practically without effort a sort of godfather political status. He didn’t really have a political machine, so to speak, but then he didn’t need one, since he had practically no serious local challenger once he got in office. Some might say the 21^st [now 11^th] District Caucus that he and his brother established functioned as his political machine. Truth is, the Caucus had already reached its political apex by Stokes’ second term, thereafter coasting on its reputation for decades as its power and relevance steadily declined.

Lou Stokes, George Forbes and Arnold Pinkney today stand as rusty ornaments of a time when Cleveland’s black political power was respected for its ability to deliver. But a Lou Stokes-George Forbes power struggle in 1972 was precursor to the eventual departure of Forbes and Pinkney from the Caucus, leaving the Congressman in control of what was increasingly only a symbol of black political power.

The political scientist William Nelson has observed that the decline of the caucus in the aftermath of [Carl] Stokes’ departure from local politics “changed the fundamental goal of black politics from community uplift to self-aggrandizement.”

Nelson’s observation gets to the crux of the matter. What kind of leadership does the black community seek? Can we move from personalities and personal agendas and political fiefdoms to public policies? Answers to these questions have been wanting for forty years. Indeed, the questions don’t even get asked.

We applaud the upcoming Congressional primary as an opportunity to gain a hearing for these questions.

Let’s stop the bogus talk about dividing and weakening a black community that is already laughably and lamentably weak and divided.

Let’s talk instead about why our schools produce such poor results [and about the miraculous results some of our students produce nonetheless]. Let’s talk about why residents in inner city zip codes have a life expectancy so much shorter than their suburban counterparts just minutes away. Let’s talk about addressing the cyclone effects of predatory lending and how we can rebuild our communities. Let’s talk about the absence of jobs in our community and why with six billion dollars or more in major construction activity in Greater Cleveland, black contractors are still fighting for crumbs.

Congresswoman Fudge, State Senator Turner: what strategies do you have for us? Which of you is better equipped to help us rebuild our community?

• • •

Reminder: your scribe is a guest on The Civic Commons radio show today at 12:30PM on WJCU-FM 88.7. Tune in or catch it online either here or via iTunes.