It’s the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and I’m visiting my sister and brother-in-law in Durham, NC. They both, but my sister particularly, have been involved in the civil rights movement, which continues to this day. When will our fear of the “Other” subside? Because it is fear that provides the foundation of prejudice.
I understand there are some prehistorical reasons for this, but Homo sapiens are supposed to be the ones with brains able to perform expanded mental capacities including extensive language, reasoning and planning, and ability to recognize and remember sequential data. Other animals have some of those skills too, such as chimpanzees, elephants, and ravens, but not to the extent that humans do. By now, you’d think we could figure out that we don’t need to be afraid of every “Other.”
In June 1966, several black civil rights movement leaders organized a peaceful “March Against Fear” from the Tennessee/Mississippi border to Jackson, capital of Mississippi; and blacks had much to fear then, especially in the south and particularly in Mississippi. Both economic and violent reprisals and assassination were widespread and common for any black trying to register to vote. In the process of organizing this, James Meredith was shot and wounded and Stokely Carmichael was jailed. When Carmichael was released from jail he angrily addressed a crowd of marchers in Greenwood, MS. He cried out to the crowd, “We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we got to start saying now is Black Power! We want Black Power.” He defined Black Power this way: “It is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations.” It was never a “war” against whites, it was a means of giving blacks the sense of self-esteem every human deserves.
The media loved that phrase and milked it for all the white fear they could. And that fear is still there, much to our shame and the detriment of this country. Now, of course, it continues to be fed by a clearly racist president, but apparently the racism that was so obvious during the Jim Crow years and the active period of civil rights work in the 1960s continued to fester. Only a logical, rational mind can put such biased fears to bed. Time to wake up!
Stokely Carmichael