On the 4th of July, I woke up (at 8 a.m.) thinking about Jeffrey Osborne L.T.D., not sure why, but I immediately played “Love to the World” and “Love Ballad.” Seemed like a day for love, like the lyrics of Earth, Wind & Fire’s single “Beauty”: “It troubles my mind/These troubled times we need love.”
Suddenly, though, the painful reality of America’s 250th anniversary celebrating freedom hit home, prompting a spin of Miles Davis’s album “Jack Johnson” (Columbia, 1971). Miles was inspired by the heavyweight champion’s rambunctious demeanor that defied the fiery flames of Jim Crow. However, it’s the hard-hittin’ monologue at the end of this combustive, genre-breaking two-track recording by actor Brock Peters that delivers the knock-out blow: “I’m Black/They never let me forget it/I’m Black all right/I never let them forget it.”
Just being Black, the melanin alone, without uttering one sound, acknowledges a Black person is present. The 21st-century colonial patriarchy is reminded that they forcibly brought thousands of Africans to these shores understanding that their being free was never meant to be. However, the native-African-born Phyllis Wheatley, who was sold into slavery at age seven, later became the first Black published poet at a time when laws prevented enslaved people from learning to read or write — doing so could very well cost their life. Many still dispute the documentation by Ivan Van Sertima in his book “They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America” (1976).
Trump’s usual script of untruths on July 4 of the 250th anniversary can best be described by orator, writer, and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who was an actual witness to that first celebration in 1776. He stood before a crowded room of abolitionists and spoke with urgency, eloquence, and heated compassion that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would later express in his memorable speech “I Have A Dream.”
On that occasion, Douglass began, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim … I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism a sham, your humanity a base pretense, and your Christianity a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a bye-word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union.”
More than a century later, in 1900, the author, scholar, and Pan Africanist W.E.B. DuBois first articulated his concept that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line.” He later expanded on the concept in his 1903 book, “The Souls of Black Folk.” DuBois, Alain Locke, and Langston Hughes’s words roared in the face of Jim Crow during the Harlem Renaissance, as the Great Migration moved North, opening doors for such defiant novelists as Chester Himes, who wrote, “If He Hollers, Let Him Go” (1945).
The question is who speaks for my brothers and sisters who resided in Edenwald Projects (the East Bronx) — my early introduction to America, where we drank cheap wine in the stairwell and kissed girls, all of us still shy. Where my next-door neighbor James died of a heroin overdose at 17, it was laced with rat poison, so I heard. Another neighbor, Sonny (age 16), was killed in a drive-by shooting late one night; the shots woke me up.
At age 13, I came home late, missing dinner, and my father was pissed: “Where the hell you been?” I explained: at the local police precinct, with my boys Ted and Smit, accused of robbing a white boy; he looked directly in our faces and told the white detective we did it. My dad asked if I was all right and said he would stop by the precinct on his way to work. I never told him that they called us n**rs and slapped us around.
J. Kessler, my best friend since the fifth grade, killed in Vietnam at 18, while I was a sophomore in college. During this 250th celebration of freedom, who celebrates his service to this country? I do: I stand and celebrate my friends, heroin or not, I represent them during this 250th, as Roberta Flack sings “Business Goes on as Usual.” I can hear their laughter, remember our dreams, running through the projects like we didn’t have good sense. Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers had it right, “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent,” though; no, we were just trying to figure it out in our young America.
Just think: They missed H. Rap Brown, the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, Fannie Lou Hamer, and — 250 years later — Sly Stone singing his single “Life”: “You don’t have to die before you live.” Listen to this Curtis Mayfield hit single “(Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below We’re All Going to Go”: “People running from their worries/ while the judge and the juries dictate the law that’s partly flawed/top billing is killing/ for peace no one is willing.”
Celebrating 250 years, ssshhhh! Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son”: “life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.” James Brown shouted, “Say it Loud, I’m Black and Proud.” When Ray Charles dropped his spirited gospel soul into “America the Beautiful” (1972), it easily became recognized as the definitive version. That is the power of Black American Music — gospel, soul, jazz Negro hymns, R&B; it mesmerizes, inspires, and speaks truth — the American soundtrack for more than 250 years.
Hughes wrote “Note on Commercial Theater” — “You’ve taken my blues and gone” — but we keep writing more blues, hip hop, bebop, soul, all that jazz, concertos, operas — James Reese Europe foxtrot; John Coltrane out of this world; Pulitzer Prize in Music to Ornette Coleman, Henry Threadgill, Tyshawn Sorey, and Wynton Marsalis.
Rodney Kendrick’s “We don’t Die, We Multiply” … can you hear the rock group Chicago singing “Better End Soon”: “Can’t stand it anymore/people dying for help/for so many years but nobody hears,” and that was in 1970. “People hatin’ and hurtin’ their brothers/better end soon/ just think about it.” America the land of corruptive disguises — ask why Blacks wear so many masks; ask Frantz Fanon (“Black Skins, White Masks, 1952).
Barack Obama for president was just insane — a Black man in this country running for its highest office. My father said, “Hell no, never happen.” I met Henry L. Scott just after he had cast his vote. He tried not to show his tears of joy — a Black man president. This WW II veteran looked at me with a smile and said, “Maybe my joining the service was worth it after all.” President Obama terrified the American establishment. No, it wasn’t his legislation, human compassion, or dynamic bebop stroll to and from Air Force; very simple: He was a Black man, that melanin, again.
Historian, author, and professor Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz noted, “When extreme white nationalists make themselves visible — as they have for the past decade, and now more than ever with a vocal white nationalist president — they are dismissed as marginal, rather than being understood as the spiritual descendants of the settlers.”
In celebrating his 250 years of freedom, this president is following his descendants’ traditions with a vengeance: civil rights policies dismantled, affirmative action and DEI initiatives revoked, and segregation bans rolled back for federal contractors. Executive orders weakening protections against police bias, hate crimes, and discriminatory housing practices.
America, we are in a fight for our freedoms. We have to stand up, remain diligent, speak out, strategize, and use every democratic tool available to win the fight for Freedom. We Insist! (See Max Roach’s “Freedom Now Suite” (1960).
