Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Saturday, August 18, 2018
NEGRO ISOLATION ATTEMPTS
Efforts to isolate us from them, by segregation, Jim crow, resulted in too many literate, prosperous homes, black churches, colleges, businesses, organizations, communities, cultural affinities, in music, dance, fashion, inventions, cooking, crafts, that they became jealous. So much so, that their hard core recalibrated their bearings. They turned to destroying black Wilmington, NC; Memphis, TN, Atlanta, GA, Springfield, IL, Springfield, MO, Tulsa, OK, East St. Louis, IL, and many more such, in and around World Wars I & I, when, it leaped to Chicago, Detroit, Omaha, and more. So, colored isolation having failed, as exemplified by the "Harlem Renaissance." where whites openly "aped" blacks in "Nigger Heaven," sterner measures were required. First, they sabotaged the Universal Negro Improvement Association; falsely prosecuted, convicted, deported, its inspirational leader, Marcus Mosiah Garvey, an acolyte of Booker T. Washington, whose self-help program, Garvey expanded domestically, and projected internationally. Then, with Garvey gone home to Jamaica, a new phase of migration from the South, to material and civil "rewards" in the North, Midwest, and far West, became the industrial model, with which came ghettos, Bantustans; and a plasma status of not free nor enslaved; not isolated nor integrated; an African American epic of "exceptionalism." This largely is where we are now restrained but not constrained riding on the "A-Train" of our ever-divine destiny to multiply and to replenish earth.