We Must Come Together To Overcome

When we were chained, we believed in freedom.

When we were denied justice, we believed in the courts.

When we had no vote, we believed in the ballot.

What does black America believe in now? It’s a question occasioned by recent harsh setbacks from the Supreme Court on the issues of voting rights and affirmative action.

On a deeper level, though, the question is occasioned by a sense that something vital has gone out of us in the last 20 years. Or perhaps more accurately, that something has come “into” us that is leaden and old.

“Why don’t more black people vote?” a friend asked the other day.

And you know, I had to stop and think about that. Approximately 37 percent of eligible blacks voted in the last congressional election, as opposed to 44 percent of all Americans. For people who, 30 years ago, bled and died for the ballot to turn around and leave it unused speaks not only to the laziness and apathy characteristic of American voters in general, but also to something more specific and disturbing.

Many in the black underclass seem to have withdrawn their investment in the greater us.

Even before the civil rights movement, black people shared a sense that “we shall overcome someday.” In its place now, there is a soul silence as if to say, maybe we won’t. And if we won’t, then why boycott? Why march? Why vote? Ain’t gonna change a damn thing.

It’s an attitude that breeds children old before their time, for whom the future is some distant land that may or may not exist and lies, in any case, on the far side of a minefield of violence and drugs, sex and temptation. You do what you’ve got to do; the future does not matter.

Is this racism’s fruit? Well, they keep telling me there is no more racism here in the good old U.S. of A., but of course they are wrong and the answer is yes, it is.

But racism is not the only thief of faith. The black American middle class has not carried out its responsibilities. It has made the right noises and, on an individual level perhaps, even done the right thing. But it has never organized as a group to lift and teach the sisters and brothers who weren’t as lucky.

Instead, we moved away.

And save a slice of the blame for the African-American underclass itself. Black folks have been down before, so far down we had to crane our necks to see the butt end of low. But we never let this “thing” come into us before, this heaviness and despair, where children speak with the coldness of the streets and you don’t dare correct them on pain of death.

I am told by my elders that once we were a village of clasped hands and consecrated goals, where the children dared not get out of line because if Mama didn’t get ‘em, Miss Johnson would. More to the point, we always had an idea percolating, a plan laid in expectation of a better day. Get the ballot, go back to Africa, get a good education … do “something.”

Now, too many of us do nothing, expecting and accepting defeat. But we are the oldest tribe on Earth. We are tougher than leather, with souls grown deep like rivers, as Langston Hughes once said.

“Up, you mighty race!” roared Marcus Garvey in the early years of this century. It came as a blast of arctic air into a room grown stifling and still. It fired the imagination with dreams of what it must be like to be free.

We need to stir that imagining within us again. Because, underclass or overclass, child of the tenement or lord of the manse, all of us as Africans stand together now in a too-familiar place, surrounded by an indifferent government, unfriendly courts and hostile people, as the horizon roils with dark clouds backlit by lightning.

The conditions of the day demand a gut check and a question: What do we believe in?

And I have to smile, because I already know my answer.

I believe in us.

xxxx