In recognition that The Black Community (hereafter known as “T. Black”) was never given a proper funeral and burial, here is its final obit, dated May 6, 2014, @ Midnight.
Obituary for “T. Black” Community
Born January 1, 1863, shortly after 2 p.m.
Died April 4, 1968; 6:01 p.m.
For 105 years T. Black Community, once blessed with beauty, sophistication, culture, charm, and an outstanding education which exceeded and surpassed all expectations, seemed born to provide a background and landscape for the future generations of Black Americans.
Through the Unionized victory of the U.S. Civil War, around 4 million former slaves gained nominal freedom. Then, over time, T. Black was issued three different birth certificates, the 13th , 14th and 15th Amendments (the “Big Three”), all issued to grant equal protection under constitutional law to the former slaves and their families.
Black Codes, designed and enacted in the south to restrict the activities and freedoms of Black Americans as given by the Big Three, were brought to the table by many white rights organizations, the most visible of which was the Ku Klux Klan (‘KKK’) of the early 1900s. The KKK became the largest of organizations of its type to work willfully and maliciously to disenfranchise Black Americans by the use of voter intimidation, fraud, and freakish stateside terrorism and violence.
During this period of post-war American Reconstruction, northern unionists (aka ‘carpetbaggers’) were sent southward by the federal government to enforce these new rights by martial law, and to protect the rights of its Black citizens. The southerners then decided to revise the Black Codes into segregationist ‘state’s rights’ laws, calling them “Jim Crow” (Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care) while holding tightly to the white supremacist flag of the southern Confederacy.
A romantic era came about for T. Black and his citizens during this time, a time when it was feeling its way around trying to figure out where to go and what to do with these new “freedoms.”
The Harlem Renaissance, as she was called, stated that education, mostly through the arts and literature, as well as industry, was the single most important way to gain a foothold in the land of T. Black’s birth. The community’s inhabitants were supposed to co-mingle and escape the indignities of supremacist harassment and marginalization.
The names of a few of T. Black’s oldest friends were Booker T. Washington, president of Alabama’s Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute; George Washington Carver, head of Tuskegee’s agricultural department; and Harvard-trained historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois. On the more radical end, T. Black was also seen “pal-ing around” with Marcus Mosiah Garvey, a leading voice in the black protest movements of the first half of the 20th century.
Jamaican-born Black nationalist leader Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914. He made several attempts to appeal to the fledgling and waning pride of T. Black’s African American citizens by exalting blackness as strong and beautiful. Garvey, with T. Black mostly in resistant opposition, made several attempts to nationalize and colonize Black Americans in Liberia, Africa. Failing that, Garvey then attempted to form the “Empire of Africa” in 1921. He named himself interim President of the Empire, but after being convicted of mail fraud charges, he served two years in prison. He was pardoned by President Calvin Coolidge, but was also deported from the United States in exchange for his freedom. He died in London, England in 1940.
Du Bois, in strong opposition to Garvey, had tried to move T. Black along the long and lonely trail to civilized rights by presenting the idea of a “Talented Ten Percent” of the Black Community. He led a group of industrious citizens to Niagara Falls, Canada, which sparked a hot political protest and debate that demanded civil rights for blacks.
However, due to increased unemployment and housing shortages brought on by a Republican president (Herbert Hoover) violence against Black America’s citizens increased rather than diminishing.
Race riots and the pilfering of T. Black’s internal substance led to the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (‘NAACP’) in 1909. The NAACP began as T. Black’s answer to the KKK.
It advocated for the elimination of segregation, the enforcement of the aforementioned “Big Three” Amendments; and it also headed up crusades against lynching and other forms of lawlessness consistently invoked by angrier and more violent whites. During this time, Du Bois published an official NAACP magazine named “The Crisis” (1910 to 1934). This magazine helped to fuel the Harlem Renaissance named above, by calling upon those who were supposed to take a Talented Tenth leadership role in the progress of Black America from slavery to wealth accumulation, and an equality-driven ‘seat at the table’. According to Harold Cruse, author of “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,” it failed on those initiatives.
Black citizens had seen little to no improvement in their economic and social status through the Harlem Renaissance, or the NAACP, or its sister effort, the National Urban League. Most of its political and moral gains were wiped away by the vigorous reactive efforts of prevailing white supremacist forces.
If the Civil Rights Movement was a man, the Harlem Renaissance was his bride-and they were destined to be the proud parents of a bouncing baby girl named the “Village,” as in “It takes A Village to Raise a Child.”
During the Republican-instigated Great Depression of the 1920s, the NAACP and the Urban League switched focus from literary excellence to the political and economic problems facing Black America.
With the onset of World War II in 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt carried about “Four Distinct Freedoms“, along with a pretty big stick. He named them as freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want/lack/poverty, and freedom from fear.
Millions of African-Americans fought for those four freedoms, but did not receive that which they purchased with their own blood.
While fighting other world powers outside, they also had to combat hardcore racism within. Many Black war heroes surfaced during this time, from Pearl Harbor to the Tuskegee Airmen, who fought against German and Italian troops on more than 3,000 missions.
In July of 1948, President Harry S. Truman integrated the U.S. Armed Forces under an Executive Order that mandated “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.”
In 1954, racial segregation, though legally ended by Plessy v. Ferguson in the late 1800s, culminated in Brown v. Board. In 1955, a series of staged bus boycotts down south ended segregation in most of the business arenas of T. Black’s community. In the 1960s, many silent and peaceful protests were instigated all over the nation as Black Americans and friends staged “sit-ins” at white-owned lunch counters.
It was during this time that the catch-phrase “Black Power” (sometimes more softly known as Soul Power) became the most highly-recognized symbol of justice for the many battles that were supposed to end a nearly 100-year old war for Black America in the pursuit of happiness, justice, and liberty. Black/Soul Power was supposed to be inclusive of those who were not originally part of the then-184-year old United States Constitution.
The years from 1960 to 1968 gave T. Black many significant events in his short lifetime of achievements.
As well as sit-ins, there were freedom rides, freedom summers, integration of the nation’s oldest institutions, church bombings, marches, and those culminated in the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. T. also came through the fire with the most visible assassinations in the history of Black America, the subsequent deaths of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., T. Black’s last viable leaders.
Since April of 1968, many high-profile Black American citizens have achieved national prominence, ending with the election of President Barack H. Obama Jr. in November of 2008, just a tad more than 40 years after the death of Dr. King.
By then, however, T. Black was subjectively and objectively dismissed and evicted by his own family.
His citizenry had already made a decision to integrate and assimilate rather than to demand sovereign justice and reparations from the fray of its earlier years. His people chose to ride on the front of white America’s ‘buses’ instead of purchasing their own. In so doing, the factors leading to the demise of T. Black were then solidly in place.
The choice to ride on the buses of others takes away the right, and the necessity, of choosing the design of the bus, its driver, or which direction it turns; and with that token act, that one choice, T. Black was dealt a mortal wound.
He was taken to the newly-elected President Obama in 2009 in an unrecognizable, and nearly-dead propped up format. It was demanded of the “second” Black President (Bill Clinton the laughable “first” Black President) by a few of the remainders of Civil Rights, that he ‘do something’ to fix T. Black, but there was nothing he could do to tender its repair except by the use of another token phrase of an action. To be sure, T. Black was no longer recognizable in any way, shape, form, fashion, or protocol. He had no True Leaders when presented by those who brought with them only a hand full of downtrodden “front of the bus” tokens.
He was certainly nothing close to what was left behind in the first quarter of 1968.
Those who dragged T’s nearly-dead body to Washington, DC in 2010 could come to no solid agreement about what to do with him, or how to handle his remains; or even an answer as to why they were trying to keep him alive in that strange and elusive condition.
By then, T. Black was under the power of the newly-reformed Jim Crow’s business ventures by the choices of the earlier constituents. Jim was now educated and wearing suits, ties, police uniforms, judge’s robes, and carrying badges and law books in place of gasoline cans, matches, and crosses. Instead of horses, he now sat upon courtroom benches.
Presenting himself to the ‘at-large’ republic as “James Crowe, III, Esq.”, the outspoken nephew, representative and reigning voice of the earlier choice of assimilation, James then proceeded to reward T. Black with school-to-prison pipelines, poisonous foods, filthy neighborhoods, drugs, guns, alcohol, a diminishing of material gains in industry and technology, and all the while simultaneously holding steadfast to the meager and unflinchingly small “slave” wages of entitlement spending through their own taxpayer-subsidized corporate welfare checks. James also brought with him a newly baptized conservative ilk called the Tea Party. They were a substandard faction of the Republican Party [the GOP], that would help them to withdraw needful jobs, medical services, and still much-needed public assistance to those who had never come from under his backwoods country Uncle Jim.
Ultimately, T. Black was also rewarded by the Supreme Court of the United States, in recognition of all of his hard work, achievements, accomplishments, and his many valiant and just efforts to prove himself worthy, with the removal, retraction, and withdrawal of the overarching benchmark acts and laws, mainly the heart of Voting Rights and Affirmative Action.
The earlier eviction of T. Black Community by his own constituents left to his memory several historical events which still serve as a staunch reminder to Black Americans of what it could have become, and of what is no longer possible.
Through T. Black’s many attempts to “prove” his worthiness and undying devotion to white America, even if that meant needless begging like a woman who cannot leave the home of her abusive lover, white America responded in ‘like-and-kind of exchange’ with even more lynchings, including the lynching of Michael Donald of Mobile, Alabama during the presidency of Ronald Reagan; and that of James Byrd of Paris, Texas, during the presidency of Bill Clinton.
White America also summarily responded to these begging qualities in T. Black’s community with boardroom and media representations of Black Americans as prevailing in stubborn ignorance and paranoia. As slovenly, spiritually unkempt and undeserving…even crazy enough to turn itself back over to them, eternally willing to put himself back in their clutches, as if they had any intention whatsoever of changing their low-ball demeaning ways.
In the end, it was the election of this “second” Black President, Obama, that lent credence to the fact that no true ‘post-racial’ society had ever been achieved, in spite of his appearance as the duly-elected Chief Executive of this national republic corporation.
Integration, assimilation, begging, whining, marching, boycotting, crying, even the withholding of affection to the deeply desired “White Supremacist Lover” had not impacted those whose ancestors were taught that white supremacy had to remain in place no matter what. T. Black then also permanently affixed this hatred of and in himself by the vice of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
In 2012, T. Black was so gravely and terminally ill that Trayvon Benjamin Martin, late of Sanford (Seminole County), Florida, made national headlines as the most visible lynching victim of Obama’s presidency, killed by one George Zimmerman for no other reason than “walking home from the store while Black.”
Zimmerman, upon blatant and flagrant admission of the murder, was never convicted of his crime like so many others inside and outside of the Community. This was done with the gross underlying permission of T. Black, who -though he did not pull the actual trigger himself- had situationally given Zimmerman and his kind the bullets and the walking papers of that Second Amendment, which spiritually replaced the “Big Three.”
The descendants of those who now rode on the fronts of buses owned by others could do nothing to fix T. Black themselves.
Truth told, even if T. Black Community could be repaired, he would still have no place to go except back to the children of his original masters and owners. His assimilated rescue, at this juncture in his storied history, would still leave him eternally homeless and without sovereign justice and reparations. It remains that he had never received a true home of his own–not even the much touted “40 acres of land“, or the mule with which to plow it.
T. Black was once most famously known for the African proverb “It takes A. Village to raise a Child.”
In the early 1980s, however, A. Village claimed death behind its parents, Mr. Civil Rights and Mrs. Harlem Renaissance.
The baby Village fell victim to the icy crystals of the snowy whitewashed American landscape. Without parents and now with the child itself gone, T. Black found himself, ‘by design’, in the cold grip of the descendants of those who had sought to kill him since the late 1500’s.
He limped, broken, busted, and profusely bleeding out the bright crimson stains of a mortal head wound. He then landed, face down, into the blinding blueish-white snowdrifts, having never been resuscitated. Or was he a ‘she’ who was lynched by her own people; those who had internally immortalized, and then turned against her?
The Black Community, “T. Black”, through the death of Civil Rights, the Harlem Renaissance, and their child, A. Village, leaves to mourn his loss the very promises once made to ensure Black America’s happiness and its future progress.
Rest in Power, T. Black. We know you tried.
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This was beautifully written, rest in peace T.Black, we will one day care enough to revive you.
You are very talented, as you probably know. I want to thank you multiple times for condensing all of the issues that have plagued our community. You demonstrated how they ultimately destroyed our efforts to maintain some semblance of an African American community. Let me add to it, if you please.
Another version of Sambo and Sambetta has been reconstructed and redesigned for the “new negroes” to emulate. This time the weapons of mass destruction, WMD, are far superior than in the past.
We are constantly being subjected subliminally and covertly to messages that we are inferior, complicit, and deserve to fail in school and serve time in jail. We deserve inferior food, housing, and services.
Further, our people are constantly getting cues that the enemy is your people not “us.” Kill “them” not “us.”
I would like to insert several more evil descriptors, drugs, guns and diseases. Whenever we assert ourselves, the oligarchs kill our leaders physically or spiritually and drug the masses.
This time we need a group of leaders to come forth.
Absolutely! Thanks for the input, you are so very right.