Topic: Calling the Family Back to the Cookout at the Church Entry 5

Title: There is Movement Against one of Our Own Part 2

Video Inspired By: (Episode #012) Conversation with Dr. Akinyede Umoja author We Will Shoot Back Part 1

(LINK) https://youtu.be/3cYQOEIyzbQ

There is an image from my very young childhood years, stilled and frozen in time; an image I captured at the last truly Black cookout I attended with my family and their friendly connections back to the Old land where just 30 years earlier they had been firmly rooted (the Southland, for those who aren’t familiar with the Great Migration). The image contained my father, a dare friend who he both worked with at his job and worked with in community organizing (Mr. Cogwell), and a number of other men roughly the same age including one my father would remain close to until his death; they were all seated around a table playing cards, laughing happily one moment – when I passed them to get a drink. Then my ears caught something odd, I heard a new voice enter the table and when I turned round to see the group, a seriousness appeared to overtake them. The image came soon after when I heard one of the men say “well we ain’t gon’ definitely let that happen”; several men stood, and my mind froze the looks on their faces right before they departed the table. They were not worried, they were not angry, they were resolved and prepared for something I couldn’t and wouldn’t comprehend till later when I would learn there had been movement against one of their community organizers. What it was I would never find out, but I knew it wasn’t a positive occurrence.

My father told me stories from his younger days when he learned to fight the Klan. He told me how he had learned to shoot at 3 years old and how he was a natural at firing guns because his father, grandfather, great grandfather, great great grandfather and their partners had all been great shooters. He told me about his first posting and the advice that had been given to him in case he had to use his weapon, which on a few occasions he did. He told me about understanding what made white people tick and why terrorism was so easy for many of them. He did all this in his black motive though abrasive manner wherein his frustration steeped over his compassion but never overshadowed nor eclipsed it. When I was 13 and his health was clearly experiencing some decline, he told me “one day you’ll have to fight the Klan again; you’ll have to face them because they never went away”; he told me this in response to my statement upon watching Mississippi Burning that “I was glad that period of history was over with”. He said, “Boy, things ain’t really changed that much and that history ain’t over”, he then uttered the above statement before stunning me with the following revelation; “don’t they teach y’all anything in school? The Klan has changed shape so it still exists today but you don’t recognize it; then again the Klan itself is just a reshaping of older confederate groups”. Recently I have found myself thinking about this last statement, in deed I have been thinking about this conversation for some time, especially during this last 10 years during this political era where race has been so blatantly used to strip poor and middle class whites from their wealth.

Ten years after my father and I had this conversation I had learned that the Klan had rebranded itself during the 1960s. Some members formed the White Citizen’s Council while others formed the John Birch Society and many more still formed various other regional groups that were not specifically aligned with racist rhetoric but did practice race politics and economics. A decade henceforth, I had learned how the Mr. Hyde that was the Klan helped to hide the transformation many upper class Klan organs had undergone to hide their racist past it was clear the Civil Rights Movement would not only be successful in its integrationist aims but also the proceeding educational movement would in some part be successful in challenging the squeaky clean myth of American progress. The Book, The Republican Noise Machine, documented the evolution from racist to neocon reactionary so many people undertook during the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s; hiding from the public’s view just how integrative white-first ideology was to this new political ideology.

I had further learned just how successful this anti-black countermovement had been in reshaping the gains wrought through social mobilization by Negroes turned Black turned African-Americans in the minds of white people unfamiliar with the movements, their aims and their accomplishments. With the first Black president in the white house, I had begun to see so many things I had never noticed before including how easy rebranding amongst the reactionaries was having witnessed Bush’s strongest supporters suddenly become rebranded as new thought leaders who had always been opposed to Bush in some form or fashion after Obama’s overwhelming victory. I had watched the memes floating around the internet showing the white house limo decked out like a Compton low rider, those depicting the rose garden being replaced by a water melon patch and lampooning Obama as a Kenyan usurper muslin with disdain and disgust, remembering something else my father had told me years prior to the aforementioned conversation. When I asked him how Jim Crow lasted so long he told me point blink, “because people wanted it to”, he would elaborate on that thought weeks later when I asked him for more information; “it lasted because, no matter what people now say today, most white people [actively] supported it and prevented us from taking it down”. From this fact, he would later tell me, my father learned to “not wait for no body” when moving ahead to protect his people. That was what I saw that day at the cookout. Somebody moved against one of their own and they sprang into action to prevent that move from doing harm.

Dr. Amos Wilson, when speaking on the plight of Black-on-Black Violent before or after giving a more thorough response, he would say that “Blacks had not been trained not to commit self-genocide and that if they were, then they’d begin to target their true enemy”. Now he also said that violence is not always the force required to counter violence but a people must be ready to utilize it for protective means. We currently live in a time when protective formations within the Black community are sorely needed to counter the offensive being executed against our community by forces hostile to our maturity, growth and soul-authentication.

In the next entry in this series I will further expand on my father’s statement “one day you’ll have to fight the Klan again; you’ll have to face them because they never went away”, contextualizing it with the militia movement and 2pac’s call for us to protect one another. I will likely add more the Title (I’m thinking I’ll name it something like this: There is Movement Against our Own, Remember What my Pops Told Me, Blasphemy).