Category: Black History

Across the Miles, Across the Ages

Across the miles

Across the ages

Parchments

Scrolls

and ancient pages

 

Tell of Beauty

Dark and Sweet

from palace royal

to city street

 

Our daughters

Mothers of the earth

The queens of men

of noble birth

 

Protect them

Love them

Make them strong

while death yet tarries,

but not long

 

Instill in her

a sense of self

that no man

places on a shelf

 

And father,

when you’ve gone away

with her inheritance

she’ll say

 

I want a man just like my dad

who saw the worth in what he had

in me and mother with his love

that he now shares in skies above

 

Across the miles

Across the ages

Parchments

Scrolls

and ancient pages

 

Tell of Beauty

Dark and Sweet

from palace royal

to city street

 

 

 

 

I Had Nothing to Atone For

There were Black men all over

the Mall in Washington DC that day, praying, bonding

laughing, crying,

Strangers coming together in unison

for their race, their families, and

themselves

 

The phone rang, and I heard the voice

of my father, with an undercurrent of

excitement in it.

 

“Do you want to go?” he finally asked.

 

“He said it was a day of atonement, and I have nothing

to atone for; I married the mother of the my children, and

my kids see me every day.”

 

 

My self-righteousness came through,

My judgmental attitude against

my brothers who weren’t doing what I was doing

came through

 

We didn’t go.

 

And after it was over,

I began to think about all

the love and knowledge

my father imparted to me

 

I thought about his contribution

to my love of art and music

and literature,

and racial pride.

 

I never got the chance to apologize.

He’d grown up in a different

time, and saw himself circumscribed

by others as a threat because of his

keen and vast intelligence,

 

And I thought: What would it have cost

me to see his heart soar, to see the

Pride of his people in his eyes, to hear

the wisdom of other elders who were

there that day?

 

What young man could I have ministered

to about the rewards of being a

family man, an involved father?

 

I called myself a teacher, and on that day

no one learned from me, and I learned nothing

about myself.

 

I called myself an artist, and on that day I

there was no input of experience to relay

in words or music

 

There are no pictures of me and my father

on that day

because I was a self-righteous hypocrite

who only thought of myself,

and not of my dad

 

I know he forgave me,

but I should have done that

for him

 

I most likely would have found

it was for both of us.

 

I didn’t get the chance to say it then,

but I will say it now, in words,

for posterity, for all who read

to see:

 

I apologize,

Dad,

for breaking your heart.

 

I thought

I had nothing to atone for…

 

Our Children from a Distance See

Our children from a distance see

We only say that we are free

 

If we were pharaohs, queens and kings

what good was it to be those things

 

if we are not united here

and walk in self-hate, terror, fear,

 

when those that came before us fought

and those who learned were those who taught

 

and passed on knowledge, trade and thought

that cost the flesh the whip had wrought?

 

I think if we are truly free

We can’t keep blaming slavery

 

For our condition in this land

It’s time to take another stand

 

For Martin’s gone, and Malcolm too

It’s up to us now what to do

 

Together it takes you and me

To change the things our children see

 

 

 

 

Black Magi

Black Magi

your strength is wasted,

killing over slabs of

cracked, crumbling concrete

that will outlast

the return

of your bones

to dust

 

Black Magi

your lives are wasted

when the blood

of your

slain brother

soaks your soul,

and the wails

of his mother

are your lullaby

as you look at the same

Moonlight

through the bars of your cell,

and she does the same

through her gone baby’s eyes.

 

Black Magi

your knowledge is wasted

in kilos of grams,

hidden in luxury cars,

poisoning our future,

your neighborhood,

chipping at foundations

you desperately need.

But you got yours, right?

 

Black Magi

your wealth is wasted

on basketball shoes that are

Free

to the person they’re named after,

made by slaves in other foreign lands

(you know you’re not home, right?)

 

Black Magi

Gather your belongings

Now

 

Call your loved ones to your side

Today

 

Black Magi

the stars bid you

travel far,

and one of them falls

when one of you

turns back to die

 

Black Magi

Your son has questions

only you

can answer

 

Black Magi

Your daughter

has smiles

only you

can share

 

Black Magi

Your woman

cries tears

only you

can dry

 

Black Magi

The years of

your harvest

are spent in rehab,

then just spent,

And poisoned seeds

again take root

through the husk

of what used to be

Fertile and Wise and Strong,

the shell of what used to be

You

 

Black Magi

Stop

Think

Repent

But mostly,

Stop.

When Grandfather Stood Up

Grandfather,

they made you

bow your head

and not

look at them

because, they said,

you were unworthy

 

they made you

bend your back

to place burdens on it

no man should have to carry

and told you

to carry it

 

they made you

quiet the warrior

within you

and told you

to swallow

your pride

and bite

your tongue

And be a

‘good nigger’

 

And you did

because

you

were standing up

for

me

Black History Month

A proud people,
A nation of farmers
warriors
families
royalty
nomads
scholars
keepers of tradition
stewards of the world’s
most varied wildlife
sitting on a wealth
of gems and minerals

Captured, netted, chained
transported, thrown overboard,
sold,
whipped, stripped, beaten,
broken, lynched
castrated
burned
raped
thrown in jail
segregated
attacked
stereotyped
blackface

caretakers
workers
artists
singers
musicians
athletes
speakers
teachers
actors
dancers
astronauts
scientists
inventors
architects
soldiers

writers
poets
rappers of
Black
consciousness

feared
copied
lied about
blocked
redlined
discriminated against
hated

stay silent
keep humble
pray and wait
don’t protest
get out
go away
go back

rise
strive
break free
survive
think
live
be

We
Still
Here

Black
Right
Here.

 

Justice = Just Us

So as a cop, you don’t even have to engage the tween with the TOY gun in the department store. No criminal record, no threat to you, himself, or anyone in the store, but he never even got a ‘drop your weapon.’

Just pull up, and bang.

When we’re innocent, cops plant evidence.  Alabama ‘police’ did it for 10 years. Where’s the outrage from #ALLLIVESMATTER?

Make up your mind:

Don’t want us ‘thuggin,’ but won’t hire us.
Don’t want us on welfare, but don’t want us educated.
Don’t want us holding political office, but it’s okay if it’s a ball or a microphone we sing and rap into, as long as we’re not decrying supremacist / oligarchal bullshit disguised as ‘policy.’

Then redline the districts to remove black representatives, and put them in districts where prisoners can’t vote.

Then talk about ‘reverse discrimination’ when it used to be called ‘hiring on merit’ before.

Worried about terrorism? Guess it takes one to know one.

Time to segregate, on our own terms, for our own reasons, to rebuild ourselves, our youth, and our communities. Stop celebrating Kwanzaa for a week when we’re not living out the principles 24/7/365.

We weren’t brought over here to live, but to work, and as long as we’re not turning a profit for anyone else, we can ‘go back to Africa.’

But let’s get back to Black Wall Street instead. Let’s build schools where our youth will excel and begin to invade the halls of power: science, law (and its enforcement),  finance, technology, and trade, in the same numbers we seek to invade the NFL and NBA.

We’ll be talking about a different country then; help is not coming from the outside, and for damn sure reparations are not coming for slavery. You’re paid less for the work you actually do, as opposed to the work you didn’t, where no one was paid at all.

Stop rapping about money and hoes and guns and drugs, and pull your pants up so you can stand up and man up. You do know by now that showing your ass means anyone can screw you, and screw you over?

If you ‘love your hood,’ stop poisoning its people with drugs imported from countries that don’t like you either, and shooting your brothers, and impregnating your sisters with babies you can’t take care of from behind bars. You leave them vulnerable, like Tamir was vulnerable.

Stop riding around in expensive cars through neighborhoods that look no better than bombed out Syria, talking about ‘I got mine’ before the cops add it to the Criminal Forfeiture fund to pay for their bodycams, which they’ll turn off the next time they aim for your heart.

Poverty is a mindset; it just manifests as an economic factor.

Wake up. Strap up (your mind first, your home second).

The revolution has started, and it’s not only televised, it’s being broadcast all over the world.

Resolve in your spirit, now, to answer this question:

How long are you willing to remain a target?

In the Mean Time

In the Mean Time

We count for nothing

We are prone to anyone’s impulse to violence

Whether they wear a badge or watch the community….

In the Mean Time

We are hated for things that have nothing to do with

who

we are (not just a skin color)

In the Mean Time

We are shot like rabid dogs

regardless of guilt or innocence

In the Mean Time

Are our prayers even heard?

Is our suffering even

moving the hearts

of

anyone,

anywhere?

In the Mean Time,

we must go on

and strive to exist,

and fight to survive

and struggle to live

in hostile territory

surrounded by

enemies

shouting

curses and untruths

behind their walls

of

hate and fear.

 

In the Mean Time

We must continue to

Love

one another

and

our enemy,

even as we

contend with his ignorance.

In the Mean Time

Life for us here is hard,

but it can and will

get worse

if we

give up

in the

Mean Time.

© Alfred W. Smith Jr.

2015

Open Season

It was always Open Season.

It started in Africa, and spread across the world.

The Middle Passage was Open Season, as was the slave auction block, the noose, the burning crosses, the beatings, the framings, the looking away, the destruction of prosperous black towns.

It’s been Open Season.

It was Open Season on Dr. King. Dogs, hoses, jailing, beatings, and finally, a bullet.

It was Open Season on Malcolm X (well, his was ‘friendly’ fire, but he scared ya’ll for awhile, didn’t he?).

It was Open Season on the Black Panthers, but not on the Klan.

It was Open Season on Jackie Robinson, and Hank Aaron.

It’s been Open Season on our daughters and sisters and mothers and wives, bearing up under the indignity of laying in beds that weren’t their husbands’, and watching their children destroyed before their eyes.

Some walked to the edges of cliffs and rivers voluntarily, and some dropped in the master’s child; some dropped in themselves, and still others made it a package deal.

Black girls with white dolls, black women with bleached skin.

It’s been Open Season on the first black President: met a wave of incredible backlash and resistance. Desires for his death requested, hinted at, and plainly stated. His wife, just another angry black bitch with a big booty. His daughters called classless by a white reporter who boozed it up in her own ‘heyday.’ Oh wait. His daughters don’t drink.  His crimes: Tan suits, Marines holding umbrellas, coffee cups. his feet on the desk…Oh, wait, there are pictures of other Presidents doing the same thing.

So what’s different this time? No, really. What?

Oh yeah, it’s Open Season.

It’s been Open Season on black neighborhoods: ‘gentrification’. A gentle sounding word to describe the economic herding of poor people out of established neighborhoods so the demographics can be more ‘attractive’ to tourists and businesses, and former suburbanites  can save on property taxes by moving back into the city they abandoned decades ago to get away from ‘those people.’

It’s been Open Season on the streets:  the police began shooting young black men and women like dogs, regardless of the severity of the crime, regardless of guilt or innocence. Yet white guys with multiple guns shooting children in movie theaters and schools get apprehended alive, unless they shoot themselves.

Obey and Respect the law? Let’s see…

Black men are just now getting out of prison because of DNA evidence overturning wrongful convictions, after losing decades of their lives. “We just need someone to take the fall. We don’t care who, as long as it’s a black guy.”

“You fit the description…”

“Why are you driving that kind of car, and what are you doing in this neighborhood?”

“A black man did it,” and a community gets rousted, but it’s the mother who drove the car into the water after all, it’s the husband, it’s the….well, it’s not a black guy (this time…)

All white juries. Peers?

Mobs breaking into jail cells while sheriffs and officers look the other way.

Those same officers and sheriffs taking pictures in Klan robes, smiling….

Heck, these days even community watchmen get a free pass after being told by the real cops to let them deal with the little Skittle-eatin’ n*r. (How many times did that community watchman, pillar of the community, get arrested since then? But you see, the kid was a criminal, an unarmed, walking home having a snack criminal… ok)

Cops and citizens who kill black thugs (which covers crimes from robberies to unpaid parking fines, and whether they reached for the gun or ran away, or knocked on a door at 3 in the morning, or played their music loud at a gas station) become network tv spokesmen and motivational speakers, overnight millionaires.

Whistle blowers are, let’s say, discouraged….

It’s been Open Season in the military: Black soldiers segregated, denied medals of honor for brave deeds done, now gathered posthumously, if at all.

It’s been Open Season on generational wealth building: Towns of black prosperity burned, their citizens murdered: men, women, children, to rise again from the ashes, until a new generation came.

The apartment is taken. Someone came by in the half hour since we spoke and gave a deposit.

The position is filled.

Keisha’s a ghetto name. How’d she attend Harvard with a name like Keisha? Toss it…

Code the applications with the letter N….Why do you people abuse food stamps? Why can’t you do better for yourselves?

It’s been Open Season in education: until Black history month, our history in the US began and ended with slavery. We learned nothing of the kings of Africa, of its wealth, of its culture. We did learn of it’s colonization, but not what it cost.

We learned nothing of black patriots who helped build this country; (not entirely true: we learned nothing of Crispus Attucks except he was the first to die)  Did YOU know? Paul Revere did not ride alone…

Hallway conversation in an inner city middle school: “We pass the kids because they’re not going to be successful anyway…”

Open Season?

Keep. Moving. Forward.

One of us has gotta make it through

because

Open Season

is

never closed.

On Black History Month

“They did not take slaves from Africa; they took people from Africa, and made them slaves.”

For years, they brought them out like Christmas decorations, only it was February: Frederick Douglass, Benjamin Banneker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and the ever-ubiquitous Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry, Mahalia Jackson and Louis Armstrong.

No one but my father ever spoke of those with more militant stances, more edgy, prickly points of view: Eldridge Cleaver (Iceberg Slim) Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale (founders of the Black Panthers) Malcolm X before his renouncing of the Nation of Islam under Elijah Muhammad, and Imiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones).

I did not know of the brilliant, biting edge of James Baldwin, the struggles of Josephine Baker, the strength and vulnerability of the tragic, plaintive-voiced Billie Holiday, the towering courage of Paul Robeson and the fiery Vernon Jordan.

These figures made people ‘afraid’ and ‘uncomfortable.’

We learned that 6 million Jews died and saw films on the horrors of the Holocaust, but as black children we were not taught about the 9 million Africans who died on the journey across the Atlantic Ocean on a sailing lane called the Middle Passage, where slaves still chained together were tossed overboard, either deliberately to lighten cargo, or jumped willingly in order to die free, or just because they didn’t survive, but neither did we learn about Nat Turner (except that he led a rebellion and died, as if that was all there was to know) or the legal victory of the black men of the HMS Amistad.

And over the years, we learned the stories of our annual decorations. We saw films on the Civil Rights movement taking place in the south, having no idea those attitudes existed in the north, and given no awareness through our history textbooks that it was a global truth, if not universal:

Dark skin is evil.

It didn’t matter what form of evil, because all sorts of stories were concocted based generally around these two principals: Black was unclean, White was pure. Black was inferior, White was superior.

Yet, I was taught in science class that in the spectrum, black is the absence of color, and white contained them all. Why were we being persecuted for something we were not?

When I sang, My Country ‘Tis of Thee, until fourth grade I did not know my fathers died differently, I believed that Pilgrims and Indians lived in harmony. When I sang America the Beautiful, I did not know that its Natives had been stripped of their dignity, slaughtered like sheep, ravaged like Sabine virgins, and tossed aside as rubble.

I didn’t even know that as low as they were, they still owned Black men and women.

I was taught that the Quakers helped slaves escape to Canada to freedom. I have learned, only recently, that it was not so. There were slaves in Canada, too, and some who were free, were sold back.

Long buried in the archives of old libraries lay the story of my people, the mixing of my own ancestry, not just here in America, but across the world, doomed to die dusty deaths in the recessed shadows of long abandoned archives, unless one truly took the time to unearth them.

And then the Internet came, and grew, and evolved, and the archives were dredged and lovingly sorted, restored, and made available. And I learned that far more Black people achieved great things in the face of impossible odds and incredible oppression: denied admission, having no transportation, being ripped off, gutting of project financing, threats of death, and they kept going and became pilots and doctors, nurses and teachers, judges and lawmen, cowboys and business owners, so many, many names bubbling out of the soil after so much blood soaked in…

Their vision was clear and focused, their drive to succeed unstoppable, unshakable, and unswerving.

And all, all, having one common thread: ancestors brought here not to live, but to work, as commodities, not people, as beasts, and not men.

And they survived.

And I do indeed live here now, a free man in America, because of their sacrifice and vision, not limited to twenty-eight days in a government building. The storehouse is mine to visit, whenever I choose:

blackpast.org

blackhistorypages

blackhistory.com

These are just a few of the storerooms available online these days, rich with information. If you would gain some perspective, I invite you to celebrate with us, and not just for the month.

There are no ‘colored only’ signs on these doors….

%d bloggers like this: