Reinventing the Wheel:
Voices from the Past as a Prism for the Future
MARCUS GARVEY
"All of us may not live to see the higher accomplishments of an African empire, so strong and powerful as to compel the respect of mankind, but we in our lifetime can so work and act as to make the dream a possibility within another generation."
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W.E.B. DUBOIS
"I decided that people already know what needs to be done, if they would only act; so I switched from science to propaganda."
--As told to us by Shirley DuBois in 1970. DuBois is credited with creating the scientific study of racial relations, if not sociology, starting with The Philadelphia Negro, before he decided to change his focus. We'll never know what we lost from what he is likely to have learned and taught us had he stuck to his forte.
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HARRIET TUBMAN
"I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say-I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger. There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would take the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me. I freed a thousand slaves; I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves."
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BOBBY WRIGHT
"In a bullfight, there comes a time when after being brutalized while making innumerable charges at the movement of a cape, the bull finally turns and faces his adversary with the only movement being his heaving bloody sides. It is believed that for the first time he really sees the matador and this final confrontation is known as "the moment of truth." For the bull, this moment comes too late. The experience of black people all over the world presents an analogous situation. It is clear that the solution of our problem is the development of a Black social theory which will lead to the salvation of our children's minds."
-- Bobby Right, The Psychopathic Racial Personality, Chicago, Third World Press, 1984.
Bobby's forte was organizing, a psychologist whose passion was organizing any and everybody, from sociologists to street gangs, for political purposes. According to his publisher's "Foreword," Bobby "died in the prime of this thinking." We recall that Bobby had just been elected president of the National Association of Black Psychologists, but we lost his chance to serve in that capacity. This was a pity, because black psychology, if not mental and social health, would never have been the same.
NATHAN HARE
"Black Anglo-Saxons are chiefly distinguishable in that, in their struggle to throw off the smothering blanket of social inferiority, they disown their own history and mores in order to assume those of the biological descendants of the white Anglo-Saxons. They relate to, and long to be part of, the elusive and hostile white world, whose norms are taken as models of behavior. White society is to most of them a looking-glass for taking stock of their personal conduct. In that way, they acquire what sociologists call a "looking glass self," an image they must keep on grooming to make what they think white society imagines itself to be: like whites."
-- Nathan Hare, The Black Anglo Saxons, New York: Marzani and Munsell edition, 1965
"Sometimes called "bourgeois" and "coconuts" today, you can see them all around you, white minds in black bodies, black people who go to sleep at night and dream that they will wake up white. They forget, like too many of the best and the rest of us that, try as we may, no matter whatever we ever do, we will never get out of the black race alive."
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From the article. “A New Black Struggle,” announcing the launching of the now defunct journal of Black Male/Female Relationships
“A New Black Struggle,” Newsweek, August 27, 1979, p. 58. This article followed by several years the publication of a popular speaking out editorial written by one of the Black Think Tank’s cofounders in the February, 1976 issue of Ebony, “For a Better Black Family.”
It was an age of black intellectual focus on asserting the “strengths of the black family” and denying “pathology” in the face of the family and social decay exploding upon our people. Speaking out in Ebony, we cried that “our confusion, our negligence, in this area is both curious and shocking, because the relations between male and female are the most intimate and basic of all human entanglements and the most crucial for the subjugation of a people.“
“….We propose that we begin to establish black love groups (psychological workshops group therapy) to begin to elevate black love groups to the status of a social movement. In this way we may begin to iron out our differences and our difficulties and perhaps to arrive ultimately at a workable solution.”
The interest was great, but without a movement organization, the black male/female schism and displaced power struggle between the black male and black female soon were complicated and sidetracked by the inability of the white-dominated feminist movement then raging to answer the critical questions it had raised for the idea of black female liberation, compounded moreover by the black male-dominated black consciousness movement’s inability to incorporate black women’s liberation as an integral part of the black movement beyond simplistic and counterproductive mimicry. The black male/female relationship movement was also quickly trivialized by the mainstream publishing industry and related hip hop. It is no wonder that black males and female are finding it increasingly hard to get along together.
But now that we know, now that the dust has settled, we must return to the unfinished revolution that is tied so inextricably to the resurrection of the black family and the reclamation of the inherent and indigenous right and ability to rear our children, to reconstruct the core of their personalities and socialize them to become what we want them to be for the leadership and future of a proud and glorious people.
It is said it takes a village to raise a child, but in the process we will find it take a revolution to raise an autonomous village whose children are young, black, gifted and free.
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