Do What You Know

We agree in a sense with the late great scholar, W.E.B. DuBois: “people already know what it is that needs to be done, if they would only act.”

When The Black Think Tank’s Dr. Julia Hare was a student at Booker T. Washington High (“The Pride of the Great South West”) located in the heart of what was once a thriving black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma (now popularly known as “Black Wall Street” in memory of the 1921 firebombing of the majestic Mt. Zion Baptist Church from a plane, the only time this atrocious act has occurred in American history), the charismatic principal of the segregated black school would walk the halls admonishing all students within earshot: “Young people, you are as good as ninety per cent of the people and better than the rest.” He would also have them know they should begin to act that way and, whenever they found themselves in a losing competition with a rival school or otherwise in doubt, his maxim was: “do what you know.”

The Black Think Tank will endeavor to unravel and activate the many neglected solutions to our plight now all but overflowing from the fountainhead of knowledge and insights left by our predecessors and ancestors who, if they could speak, would wish to pass down to all of us the simple but eternally elusive realization that “working together we can make a change,” if we would so much as do what we already know, instead of sitting on our hands.

We recently heard two illustrious black public intellectuals boast on television, without blinking a single eyeball, that they didn’t really know what the answer is to the black condition, opining furthermore that they didn’t think anybody knew. If you recognize that you don’t know, we encourage you to get out of the way of those who think they do? Do what you know or get out of the way.

Living now as we do in a postmodern digital age, we go merrily along, circulating and shuffling around more “attachments” and information than the law allows: “Ten Things the Black Race Must Do,” “Ten Things We Learned at the Black Think Tank,” ad infinitum. We have more and more information today and less and less understanding or activism beyond an occasional “march.” Marches are essentially pomp and circumstance festivities where in people prance along in place but where the “African-Americans” of today conspire to converge by the thousands and even millions on a designated place by plane or train and stand and listen motionless to weary rhetoric from illustrious leaders and intellectuals prancing behind a podium, before we all return to the internet to slobber and ponder why we seem to be standing still. 

Several decades ago, when DuBois was in China on an invitation from Mao Tse Tung, Mao praised DuBois profusely (according to his widow Shirley DuBois). DuBois (who was prone to be ahead of his time and place and people in his thought and action, only to find himself impelled to pull back to where the people were), protested in his modesty that he had “made a lot of mistakes.” Mao told DuBois that “the only mistake an oppressed people can make is to do nothing to oppose oppression.” Everything else is a part of the process of eliminating the things that will not work, in order ultimately to arrive at a proper course, if we would only begin to do what we know – as Malcolm would say, “by any means necessary.”

This is not to encourage adventurism or the tyranny of the few. Indeed many individual actions that appear spontaneous or impromptu have in fact been wisely planned or approved by the many but are nevertheless jumpstarted by an individual or a few, while most people sit and watch the world go by, or merely wait to follow a leader or somebody else.

On December 1, 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began after the late Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. History records that she was the thirty-eighth woman to do so, but this time it worked.

Then in the winter of 1960, four black students from North Carolina A&T College sat down in a Greensboro restaurant and refused to leave. This time (not the first sit-in young black people had made), the sit-in movement began.

Remember the handful of “Freedom Riders” who braved a hostile segregated South in1961, or the Meredith March, launched in the summer of 1966 by a single individual, James Meredith, who decided to “prove that a black man could walk across the entire state of Mississippi if he wanted to.” An old white racist waylaid and ambushed Meredith from a ditch and shot him. When Meredith was hospitalized, Dick Gregory grabbed a couple of his buddies and headed for Mississippi to continue Meredith’s march across the “sovereign state” of Mississippi. The news of fourteen television cameras and news reporters started trailing Dick Gregory causing hordes of civil rights leaders and activists to converge from all over the nation to continue the “Meredith March.” One night before the Meredith March had ended, the newly elected national chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (Stokely Carmichael), stood on the back of a pickup truck on the campus of the small black Toogaloo College and eloquently took up the favorite call of a fellow activist, Willie Ricks, raising the cry heard around the nation for “black power.” That night the Black Power Movement was born. 

Remember the courage of another lone individual, Congresswoman Barbara Lee, when she stood up alone against the questionable warfare that threatens to rock the world today.

It’s easy enough to sit and read history and even to write history; but when you make your own history, you help to determine what those who read and write history will read and write about. If your leaders don’t lead, you must lead your leaders. If you don’t make your own history, somebody else -- perhaps less benevolent -- will make your history for you. 

Do what you know.

It is only necessary only to have the capacity to keep two ideas on our minds at the same time: to understand that we must build and we must resist.

The great leader, Booker T. Washington, advocated self-help but depended himself on funding from rich white corporations compelling him to be apolitical and consequently lost a portion of the respect and the following of many of the very black people he was urging to help themselves.

Marcus Garvey rallied millions of black followers around the notion of returning to Africa and sought to build a fleet of ships to transport them called “The Black Star Line.” .Who knows that Garvey or somebody else on their thirty-eighth attempt might not have someday reached some place in Africa that would take them in. Ironically, Garvey died in London after never getting a chance to visit Africa himself; but, as Martin Luther King so memorably said: “I might not get there with you, but we will make it to the Promised Land.”

W.E.B.DuBois, who clashed with Garvey over the relative merits of returning to Africa or fighting for total equality in an endlessly unrequited quest for racial integration here in America, paradoxically ended up living and dying in Africa (with citizenship in not one but two African countries, Ghana and Egypt). DuBois succumbed at the ripe old age of ninety-five while at work on an encyclopedia of Africa, when what we need is not so much to know all that is known about Africa as to change it -- and perhaps to bring the good of Africa to America and show America the way to a better world.

Meanwhile, do what you know. Then let The Black Think Tank know
about it, so we can tell the influentials and they will tell the rest.

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