Defining Moments in Black History

Dick Gregory

• Editorial: Amistad
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780062898937
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Multicultural Education

NAACP 2017 Image Award Winner

With his trademark acerbic wit, incisive humor, and infectious paranoia, one of our foremost comedians and most politically engaged civil rights activists looks back at 100 key events from the complicated history of black America.

A friend of luminaries including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Medgar Evers, and the forebear of today's popular black comics, including Larry Wilmore, W. Kamau Bell, Damon Young, and Trevor Noah, Dick Gregory was a provocative and incisive cultural force for more than fifty years. As an entertainer, he always kept it indisputably real about race issues in America, fearlessly lacing laughter with hard truths. As a leading activist against injustice, he marched at Selma during the Civil Rights movement, organized student rallies to protest the Vietnam War; sat in at rallies for Native American and feminist rights; fought apartheid in South Africa; and participated in hunger strikes in support of Black Lives Matter.

In this collection of thoughtful, provocative essays, Gregory charts the complex and often obscured history of the African American experience. In his unapologetically candid voice, he moves from African ancestry and surviving the Middle Passage to the enjoyment of bacon and everything pig, the headline-making shootings of black men, and the Black Lives Matter movement. A captivating journey through time, Defining Moments in Black History explores historical movements such as The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance, as well as cultural touchstones such as Sidney Poitier winning the Best Actor Oscar for Lilies in the Field and Billie Holiday releasing Strange Fruit.

An engaging look at black life that offers insightful commentary on the intricate history of the African American people, Defining Moments in Black History is an essential, no-holds-bar history lesson that will provoke, enlighten, and entertain.

1

Searching for Freedom

It was in the New York Times that there are 1.5 million black men missing. They are not in jail. I couldn’t imagine where they were until I saw the movie Get Out.

Everyone knows that slavery wasn’t right. Not just human slavery, but all forms of slavery are wrong. Folks that own dogs and cats and other animals should recognize that they are practicing a form of slavery. Every time we go to the zoo, we condone slavery. The same universal God that made me and you also made dogs, cats, elephants, and gorillas. Straight up. When you own a dog, you determine when it’s going to mate, when it’s going to pee, when it’s going to eat, when it’s going to poop. You have to see that’s slavery, because once you start off with the idea of something as being beneath you, you’re lost. I tell people, you’ll find out on Judgment Day. You’ll see a slave master, and you will all be in the same room waiting to get that train to hell.

When you submit to another human being and let him do something to you, that violates God, violates the universe. During the slave trade, hundreds of thousands of Africans jumped off the ships carrying them and died. Our revolts against slavery are what I like to focus on, so let’s go back to the discussion of “his”-story again. When you look at what’s taught to most of us about slavery, you would almost think that except for just a couple of exceptions, we just suffered there in silence. But when you think about it, how would such a powerful and mighty people succumb so quickly? The fact is, we didn’t. The story of our never-ending battle against being enslaved is the most under-told aspect of the history of slavery. Maroon colonies, self-determined and controlled black communities that our ancestors formed when they ran from the plantations, were plentiful, not just in the Caribbean, but throughout the United States as well. We were never taught the particular stories of places like Igbo’s Landing, the location on St. Simons Island off the coast of Georgia where in 1803, hundreds of kidnapped Africans turned and walked into the Atlantic to their watery death, and “Go back home,” rather then face the horrors of enslavement in a foreign land.

Think about it: somebody comes over to where you’re living, someone you’ve never seen, because most Africans had never seen white folks at that point. They’ve come there to steal your children and to send you, the dad, to one place, the mama someplace else, and the brother yet someplace else.

We arrive in a new land. The people in America do not speak my tongue and they do not practice my religion. Today people laugh at me and want to know why I speak English so bad. Because when the whites brought me here I wasn’t speaking anything but pure Swahili. That’s why. They should not try to embarrass me. And don’t get me talking about how Ebonics, what we’ve wrongfully been taught to call Black English or Bad English and to feel ashamed of, actually stems from the Niger-Congo language group and is more linguistically correct than the English language.

The same God that made the sun made me. I went and looked at all the Seven Wonders of the World, and I came back and I said, “Wow, none of them was made by God.” How come the ocean isn’t one?

I went to Egypt. A man there told me that Egypt has the third-largest tourist economy in the world. Everybody comes to see the pyramids. So, the Egyptian said, “I’d like for you and your friend to join us tonight where the superrich go, to sleep under the pyramid.” I said, “Man, look at this here.” I pointed at my nose. “That’s the pyramid, you understand? And as long as I sleep on my back, I get a thousand times more energy than I’d get from that mess you’re selling. My nose is my pyramid.” God made it.

That’s the power and the experience we came from. So from the second they snatched the first one of our ancestors off the coast of West Africa, through the holocaust that was the Middle Passage, to Toussaint L’Ouveture and his comrades in Haiti snatching their liberation back, to even after the last cannon fired in the Civil War, we resisted.

The Middle Passage

Slavery in America didn’t start with black folks. In the 1500s, people from Spain and Portugal were over here enslaving Indians. That’s what they called the natives living here, Indians, because when that dummy Christopher Columbus came here, this fool gets lost and all of a sudden he done “discovered” something. He thought he had reached India, and the mistake stuck. So, they took those poor “Indians” from their homes and sent them every which way to work in mines and fields in the Caribbean, Peru, and Panama—the ones who hadn’t already died from being exposed to European germs, that is. Then word got back to the king of Spain, Charles V, about how bad the “Indians” were being treated, and he outlawed slavery in the so-called New World. (Of course, it wasn’t new to the people who had been living there!) Too bad Charles waited until after most of the natives had been worked to death or died of disease, huh? Plus, Charles didn’t have control over what the other European countries did. Even after Spain backed off, Portugal was still in the game, and then the Dutch got involved, and then—watch out—there came the English. When the English started setting up colonies over here in the Americas, in the 1600s, let me tell you, that was bad news for black folks. The English wanted slaves, too. For a while they used poor white folks from back home as what they called indentured servants, but that didn’t work out too well, because they had to honor the servants’ contracts, or else the servants ran away, and because the servants were white, they could blend right in wherever they went. Guess who couldn’t blend in? And so, the English and other countries soon set their sights on Africans, and the slave business was on for real.

Now, the Middle Passage—that’s what they called the brutal journey that brought enslaved Africans by ship from Africa to the Americas. Think for a second about why it’s called the Middle Passage. For something to be in the middle, it’s got to be between two other things. And those two other things tell you what the whole deal was really about.

The Middle Passage was the second leg of the journey. The first leg started in Europe. Folks from countries like Spain and Portugal, but also England and France—the same folks we think of today when we think of grace, style, and good manners—they went to Africa and traded some cheap mess they had made for live Africans. (Notice I didn’t say “slaves.” We weren’t slaves till we got here.) Then, on the Middle Passage, they brought the Africans to America and the Caribbean and traded these living, breathing people (or, rather, the ones who were still living and breathing) to white folks here for stuff they could take back with them to Europe. The third leg of the journey was the trip back across the ocean to the homes of those dainty, graceful, civilized, slave-trading European bastards.

The main word here is trading. That’s what the whole thing was about. The people who started the slave trade didn’t hate Africans, didn’t hate black folks. They didn’t care about us one way or another—until they realized they could make money by capturing us and selling us as free labor. It was when the Africans got here and became American black folks that the real hating started. To justify keeping somebody as a slave, you’ve got to say—and you’ve got to believe it—that that person is not a real human. And the more human people seem to you, the more you’ve got to tell yourself they’re not. If whites had admitted to themselves that they could treat other humans in such a horrible manner, it would have meant admitting that they themselves had a problem acting like human beings. So, their questioning our humanity had more to do with them than with us. One of the reasons that racism doesn’t end is because we’re seen as a commodity, not as human beings.

You know and I know that the Africans brought over here on those slave ships were as human as anybody else. In fact, coming from the Motherland, they were the original humans. That’s what makes thinking about what our ancestors endured during the Middle Passage so horrible. But we need to think about it, because it’s our history.

Think about the last time you were on a bus or subway car on a hot summer day when the air conditioner wasn’t working. You’re squeezed in like socks in a drawer fresh from the laundry, except fresh is not the right word—the man in front of you is sweating like a farmer, the man behind you smells like he took a bath in pig manure—and pretty soon you get to sweating and smelling your own self. Now imagine that instead of sitting or standing up, you’re all lying down. Imagine that instead of just starting and stopping, like a bus or subway usually does, this thing you’re on rises and falls like a roller coaster, making you sick to your stomach. And imagine that your stop never seems to come. An hour passes, a day, a week, two weeks—but your stop still doesn’t come. Then, when it does come, you can’t get off, because you’re shackled to the man next to you. Maybe you start talking to each other; pretty soon you’re both crying, because neither one of you knows where you’re going, or what’s going to happen when you get there, or whether you’ll ever see your wife or son or daughter or mother or brother again. Then you notice that you’ve been doing all the talking, and it’s been a while since your new friend said anything. Maybe he’s sleeping. Then you realize that, no, he’s not sleeping. He’s dead. Now you’re really crying, or you would be, except the odor down there has gotten so bad that you start to vomit instead. Now there’s vomit all over you and nothing in your stomach, and you don’t know if there’s ever going to be anything in your stomach, because the people who brought you here haven’t said a word about feeding you.

Now they do bring you some food, because you have to be healthy enough to be sold. But even if it weren’t disgusting, which it is, you feel too sick to eat it. You eat anyway, because you’ve got to stay alive. That’s the only thing you know: you’ve got to stay alive.

It sounds like a nightmare the way I’m describing it, but real people went through that nightmare. Millions of real people—your ancestors and mine. Are you African American? Go back enough generations in your family, and there’s somebody on one of those slave ships who went through what I’ve just told you about. Somebody just as real as your mama—probably looked something like her, too, and for good reason. Somebody just as real as you. Think about that for a minute. Now, how do you feel? In learning the real history, and replacing “his”-story, we’ve got to look at every aspect of historical events, no matter how vile, disgusting, and unbearable they may be. History is not just a chronicling of past events, it’s also a tool that can empower. It’s not just white folks who have a lowered view of black people’s humanity, it’s black people too, and every other group of peoples around the world. Why? Because we’ve all been told the same lie. So when you look back on the savagery that your ancestors endured, you need to feel every ounce of the that pain and discomfort, because there’s nothing that acknowledges someone’s humanity more, than acknowledging their pain and suffering, even if that suffering is your own.

Money and Slavery

When it comes to slavery, what people don’t think about is this: most people who were buying slaves didn’t have big money to buy them by the thousands. So, who put me on the boat and brought me here? It was the big-money folks. There was another group that sold slaves like somebody today sells cars. Let’s say you and your brother have a car dealership; you buy the cars from the automaker, and I come and buy them from you. The bankers lend you the money to get the cars from General Motors. You pay for the cars, then you sell one to me. Slavery was like that. One guy bought slaves and sold them to another guy. But the part that’s left out is: whom did the first guy buy them from? Who was the General Motors of the slave trade?

For that, you’ve got to go to Europe: Portugal, England, France, and the Netherlands. They’re the ones who came up with the idea. They’re the ones who explored the routes to Africa, who bought the slaves from West Africa or else just took them, and who then went from there to the Americas. They were the ones to make the first profits.

The Americans who bought the slaves made a profit, too, because they turned around and sold them. The ones they sold them to also made a profit, because the slaves did their work for free. But the real profits made in America off slavery went other places. Banks handled the money from slave profits, and slave owners paid insurance companies in case something happened to the slaves. And money men in the North made a fortune by investing in those banks and insurance companies. In other words, the wealth of America was built on our backs.

Many of those companies are still around: J.P. Morgan, New York Life, Aetna, Lehman Brothers, and a whole lot more. Their money has been passed down from generation to generation of white descendants, and people are born into those families with wealth they didn’t do a thing to earn. That’s where real white guilt comes from. Meanwhile, you and I are born without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.

Tell that to the next person who asks you, “Slavery’s been over for a hundred fifty years. How come black people still don’t have anything? What’s wrong with you?”

When we know the real deal, it paints everything with a different brush. Not just who got rich and who was a slave back then. In addition to the brutality of slavery that our ancestors had to endure, they and now us were robbed of our inheritance. We did the work, and we made the money for both the slave owners and the largest financial institutions. You would be hard-pressed to find a single American company with roots back to the 1800s that didn’t profit generously from slavery. But where is that money now? It’s been passed down from generation to generation creating the massive generational wealth gap we see today between white and black. Now hear me, I saw that we were robbed of our inheritance because that was wealth that we created and was literally stolen from us. Not some of it, not three-fifths of it, but all of it. So that enormous wealth gap isn’t just a result of oppression, it’s also felony grand larceny of the highest order.

Nat Turner’s Revolt

Here’s an example of how a white racist system can take something we ought to be proud of and turn it against us, use it to mess up our minds.

Now, believe me, I’m not taking anything away from Nat Turner. More people should name their children Nat Turner instead of naming them after football players. Today, a hundred fifty-some years after the end of slavery, some black folks’ minds are still messed up, but it’s not our fault. Anybody’s mind would be off if all they heard for hundreds of years was that they were nothing. But Nat Turner? That man was living in slavery but he didn’t take his cues from the oppressor. He was born and enslaved in Virginia in 1800, and slavery was all he knew. Yet he was able to see that that wasn’t how it was supposed to be. He was able to resist what racists told him, because he was in touch with a higher power, or he thought he was, which I guess added up to the same thing.

The thing about Nat Turner was, from the time he was a little boy, people around him, black and white, saw that he was special. They figured he was going to do something great one day, even if he was a slave. (If the white folks had known what that “something” was, they probably would have killed him right then and there.) The man who owned him even gave him a Bible, which Nat loved. Also, his mother encouraged him because she thought he had so much potential.

Later, Nat and his mama got sold together. After their new owner died—Nat was married by that time—Nat’s wife got sold away. That didn’t sit right with Nat. Matter of fact, that might have been the thing that pushed him to do what he did. He was still religious, but he wasn’t the turn-the-other-cheek kind of religious. More like the I-am-God’s-instrument kind. He started praying and having visions, and everything he saw pointed to fighting against slavery. And when I say “fight,” I don’t mean “protest.”

He looked to the heavens for signs. On February 12, 1831, he saw a solar eclipse and took it as a sign that it was time to free his people. At first, he planned the revolt for July 4. Isn’t that something? That would have been Independence Day, all right! But he got sick, so he waited for another sign. One day in August, the sun turned a strange blue-green color, or so Turner thought it did, and that was the sign he was looking for. He planned the revolt for August 21 and started organizing. He met secretly with just a few others at first. Before they were done, their number grew to about seventy—enslaved and free blacks alike.

The revolt started with Turner’s master, Joseph Travis, and his...