February 2016
Let us take a lesson from the Mardi Gras Indians in New
Orleans. They spend an entire year
creating new suits for Carnival Time. We
should spend twelve months in research, debating, action and writing in order
to have something important to say when we engage the themes announced by the
Association for the Study of African American Life and History for Black
History Month. "Hallowed Grounds:
Sites of African American Memories" is the theme for 2016. The best site for memory is the mind.
Elder minds might remember The Institute of the Black World
was once located at 87 Chestnut Street, S. W., Atlanta, Georgia 30314. In January 1983, Vincent Harding sent out
"IBW Thirteenth Anniversary Update and Fund Appeal" along with an
unforgettable quotation from Lerone Bennett's The Challenge of Blackness:
"….we believe in
the community of the black dead and the black living and the black unborn. We believe that that community has a prior
claim on our time and our talents and our resources, and that we must respond
when it calls."
Elder minds continue to share Bennett's beliefs in greater and lesser degrees. Times have changed. Let us ask minds that are
twenty and younger if Bennett's words still have mad juice, even if we don't
know what mad juice is. Let us be still and wait for silence or a hip hop word
of four letters or an answer in Twitter syllables. Times have changed, but the need to cultivate
minds has remained constant.
In 2016, elderly farmers can plant old seeds from Vincent
Harding's The Other American Revolution
(1981) in the soil of Michelle Alexander's The
New Jim Crow (2010):
"At the edge of
history, how shall we move? Do we continue to trail behind the most
revolutionary insights that our struggle has already achieved; do we turn away
from the radical directions that Malcolm, Martin, and Fannie Lou had already
approached in the 1960s? Or do we stand
with them, move with them, move beyond them, move on for them and for ourselves
and our children to remake this nation?" (231)
The seeds might produce talking plants that will care to
say:
Teach the unborn what
law is and law is not as citizens, with or without benefit of uniform, kill
young minds contained in young bodies.
Teach the unborn that they are expected to excel in mathematics and
STEM. Teach the unborn to be conversant
with how global economies function inside and outside the United States of
America. Teach the unborn that the arts
and the humanities are not useless; they are limited. Teach the unborn that ACTUALITY dominates
REALITY. Teach the unborn that natural
law does not baptize, ordain, and canonize STUPIDITY and that WISDOM is a
terrible thing to waste.
It is not beneath the dignity of elder minds to do a bit of
sharecropping.
In another part of the upper forty, the talking plants will
repeat words from Harding that will upset the minds of the black living. He asserted "that just as many of the energies of the middle-class black
freedom movement leadership have now been absorbed into the middle level
structure of the American nation, so, too, the phenomenon that we called Black
Studies ---and many of its similarly
middle-class proponents ---has been absorbed into the structures , ethos, and
aspirations of the American university system" and " that
Black Studies was absorbed (with a few important partial exceptions) for many
of the same reasons that we experienced in the larger area of national struggle. Essentially, it happened because the Black
Studies movement failed to carry to their logical, radical ends many of the
challenges to the assumptions, ideology, and structures of American higher
education, failed to continue to press the critical issue of the relationship
between black people inside the universities and those who will never make it"
(227).
In February 2016, the elder minds will be silent and listen
for sounds from the young and middle-aged minds inside and outside of the
Trilateral Commission, the Association
for the Study of African American Life and History, the United Negro College Fund, the BK Nation, the
various #Whatever Matters phenomena, the IMF and the World Bank, the
National Council of Black Studies, the CDC and the NSF, the College Language
Association, the Urban League , the United Nations and the NAACP. Should the elder minds hear nothing more than
white noise, they will continue serene conversations in the community of the
black dead.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
January 26, 2016
