The ancestors knew…The struggles continue
22nd March 2021 · 0 Comments
Long before Donald J. Trump occupied the Oval Office, we knew he was setting the stage to turn back the clock on our civil rights. We just didn’t know how far. Trump’s birtherism lie and criticism of America’s first Black president, Barack H. Obama, and his disdain for people of color, catapulted him into the presidency.
Trump slapped down consent decrees, attacked Black and brown lawmakers, and turned his back when police killed George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Blacks in 2020. Trump not only reinstated the federal death penalty, after 16 years, but nearly half of the 13 prisoners executed were Black.
When Trump’s Jan. 6 insurrection was carried out by white supremacists, Nazis and anti-government militias, he took his place in history next to Andrew Johnson, as one of the worst bigots to ever hold the presidency.
Johnson, the17th president of the United States and former vice president, stepped into the Oval Office in April 1865, after Lincoln’s assassination.
He ended Reconstruction, the promise of 40 acres and a mule, and supported states’ rights. Like Trump, Johnson was a racist who didn’t think Blacks should have the right to vote or have protection from violent racists. Johnson gave 7,000 pardons to Confederates, who had to swear an oath of loyalty. Sounds familiar?
Our ancestors knew the struggle, felt it, endured it and waged war against their racist oppressors and white supremacy.
They also knew that the struggle would continue beyond their existence.
Frederick Douglass knew.
When slavery was still legal and the country was four years away from the American Civil War, Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist and former slave who escaped bondage, made a prescient speech that rings true today.
In his “West India Emancipation” speech at Canandaigua, New York, on August 3, 1857, Douglas explained how Caribbean slaves won their freedom from Britain. He also issued a warning to the soon to be freedmen:
“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform…. If there is no struggle there is no progress. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will…”
Traveling down the decades, we hear and see the civil rights struggle led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, He realized that Blacks couldn’t wait to be treated equally. “For years now, I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”
Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) knew.
The leader of the Black Nationalist Movement and former president of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Carmichael told Berkeley students, “Seems to me that the institutions that function in this country are clearly racist, and that they’re built upon racism… We’ve been saying ‘freedom’ for six years. What we are going to start saying now is Black Power.”
Our beloved poet laureate Maya Angelou knew. She left us a treasure trove of wisdom about surviving the struggle: “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.”
Zenzile Miriam Makeba knew. Makeba was a world-renowned singer, songwriter, actress, civil rights activist and the wife of Stokely Carmichael. Makeba’s song, “A luta continua” (the struggle continues), was a call to action. “My people, my people open your eyes and answer the call of the drum… a luta continua….”
Tupac Shakur knew. He learned about the struggle from his mother, Afeni, a member of the Black Panther Party. Tupac rapped about it in “The Struggle Continues.”
Today’s Black activists know. They’re carrying on Dr. King’s non-violent revolution with 21st century tools. They are on social media, writing books, blogging, podcasting, broadcasting over YouTube, publishing hard copy and digital newspapers, hosting cable news shows and analyzing acts of racial injustices on traditional news outlets. The revolution is being televised and broadcasted on talk radio.
As activists continue the fight against the “new” Jim Crow, who wears a suit and tie, they are following the ancestors’ lead. They are protesting and marching and hitting the oppressors where it hurts: in their wallets. They are boycotting companies that donate to elected officials who support white supremacists to get reelected and corporate owners and executives who make racist comments. They are fighting voter suppression tactics and exerting political pressure on those who their votes have elected.
And for that, the ancestors are smiling down on those who fight the powers that be and the structural racism that denies us the American Dream.
A luta continua….
This article originally published in the March 22, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
