If you take the time out sometimes to talk to the older people in your neighborhood, you may discover that they are often a wealth of walking talking living breathing history books and resourceful information.

This isn’t about the past, or about Black people in America “finding something to hurt over,” this is all about using the past as LEVERAGE to guide us to a divine light into the future.

I am about to do, soon, a series of stories that are going to tie in what our older generations did “in the past” to where we dropped the ball – a whole generation dropped the ball of civil rights, this is true – and how we can pick it up and move it forward from here.

Faith without works is dead, and so is talking without actions.

I am no less than amazed at all of the Black folk who are older than me than who can tell me the history of situations of racist activity in America that caused things to be the way they are now.

A neighbor who has lived in an integrated community for 30 years now tells me of the struggle that she and others like her had to go through in order to catch a city bus to get to work.

They had nearly all found work for the government — the city, the federal levels, the county, the state – in places where there were no private jobs available for them; and it was then, she says, that the city bus drivers took it upon themselves NOT to pick these Black folks up and carry them to work. Very often, they would have to put their money in the fare box and get off and walk through the back doors, and many of those times, the bus drivers would take their money and then pull off and leave before they got to the back door to get on.

Having come out of the post-civil war radical reconstruction, a time in which reparations were demanded of the Freedman’s Bureau that have not yet been paid, the majority of these Black people could not afford cars and had to ride the city buses to work. It was their only way there, and their only way home in the evenings.

Keep in mind that Black folks, even though they paid full fares, could not sit up front even if there were no whites on the bus to ride in the front.

This Alpha generation lady, I won’t call her name, because there is a lot more good stuff coming from that direction that I will be interviewing her about, made it her business to let me know that there was this particular route to Fort Benning, where many of them were cooks and housekeepers and sanitation and maintenance workers, and one white female who took the bus to work as a ‘secretary’ — however, the bus driver would park in front of her house and wait five full minutes for her to dress and come out the house while he would simultaneously skip the route that the Black workers were on and not pick them up at all. He had five minutes to wait for her because he would bypass the Black stop and be ahead of schedule.

When they found out about it and had cause to complain, she said, the driver told them “I been working this job for 20 years and I’ll be damned if YOU NIGGERS are going to tell me how to run my job.”

They were often late to work, or didn’t make it there at all because of this bus driver who refused to even go the route to the stop where they were waiting, but preferred to park in front of this one white woman’s house and wait for her to come out.

It took them nearly four years to have him taken off the route, and eventually he was fired. But how much of this was going on, especially in the south, and where Black folks were even afraid to say anything and just quit in order to not have to bother with these racist mentalities. He should have been fired immediately, and there was no excuse whatsoever for his behaviors toward these black workers.

However, after listening to her bring back to memory a past that I can only remember as a slighted child, all I could see was those ” poor and lazy” Black people -adults who had to care for and feed us, our generation– who had no transportation to work who were being told they were lazy and would NOT work. It wasn’t incredulous that so many of them eventually became disheartened and gave up and refused to even bother. Who could blame them?

The walk to Fort Benning would have taken so long that by the time they got there and walked home, that there was no time left for family, school, church, or anything else they would have wanted to do with their lives …. and for what? Pennies on the dollar? It wasn’t worth it then, it still isn’t worth it now.

It is true, as Louis Farrakhan and Malcolm X and Dr. John Henrik Clarke and James Baldwin and Gil Scott Heron and so many hundreds of thousands of our beloved Black scholars -radical and militant or not radical at all- said,  that God created Man, Man created white man, and the white man created “the nigger” — plus a lot of other lazy and mentally skewed ones to do his bidding and his will. Black people, for the most part, are not lazy – they are working for lazy whites. Most are simply tired of fighting it all and are more willing to throw in the towel before going through any more of that.

That is white America’s own doing, and it should be their undoing, whether on this side or the other.

 

REFERENCE

“You Are The Problem” – Irvine Speaks

Paraphrased: “Bump the chief-and-indian narrative,” says Irvine, “at least a chief knows how to act when it’s time to act. What we have are too many talkers and not enough doers.”

THE DOING: Sign the Petition for a National Class Action Lawsuit for Black America Stemming from Slavery Through White Nationalist Terrorism to Continuing Disenfranchisement and Devastation to Black and African-Americans.