An Essay On What They Call Us Read online

entrenched, though in 1941, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, caving to pressure from A. Philip Randolph and other Colored leaders, signed Executive Order 8802, desegregating the military and the Department of Defense.

  Many of the New Deal programs enacted by the Roosevelt administration did little to benefit the Colored, or the Negroes, as the appellations were used interchangeably during the 1940s. For example, the Social Security Act, signed by the President, did not cover two-thirds of Negroes in the work force, causing the NAACP to protest, likening it to “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.” Notwithstanding, it was in the wake of Roosevelt’s New Deals and his recognition of Negro leaders that the majority of Coloreds switched over from the Republican party to the Democrat Party, where most have remained since that time.

  Until that time, most of the Colored population lived in the South. But a Great Negro Migration began in the 1940s, with in upwards of five million Negroes leaving farming and sharecropping in the Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana for industrial jobs in the big cities of the North, the East and the West. They abandoned the segregation, Jim Crow, poverty and lynching for the promise of better opportunities, jobs and the fulfillment of their American Dream.

  However, some Negroes remained in the South for the very reason that so many left. “I am in Birmingham,” cited young Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “because injustice is here,” because “what affects one directly affects all indirectly,” and “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” And so the battle against segregation and the struggle for civil rights was waged by those who remained.

  In the 1950s the battle lines were drawn at schools, lunch counters, department stores, water fountains, street cars and bus lines. In 1954, NAACP Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that racial segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, paving the way for integration victories.

  During the Jim Crow era, the term “Colored” began to take on a pejorative sense, as it was used to designate the inferior facilities and other connotations associated with segregation. The “Colored-only” signs at inferior public services and accommodations were meant to enforce the inference that Colored people themselves were inferior. Because it was an appellation used by whites to implement de jure segregation, many Negroes began to resent being called “Colored,” one of the vestiges of segregation. To people in my parents’ generation, white people used the term “Colored” to remind Negroes of their proper places.

  Civil Rights, Black and Afro American

  After integration, Negroes set their sights on voting rights, which would not be easily won. Of course, the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified during the Reconstruction Era in 1870, provided that

  The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

  While this amendment to the Constitution guaranteed Negroes the unrestricted right to vote, in the South, where the majority of Negroes in the United States still resided, Democratic legislators undermined the intent of the amendment, rewriting their state constitutions to include additional voting requirements, including poll taxes, literacy requirements and grandfather clauses (illiterate Whites, whose grandfathers had voted, were still eligible to vote). The goal was to limit, or nullify altogether if possible, the Negro vote.

  In 2011, Republican legislators in state constitutions sought similar measures to disenfranchise voters (the requirement of a state-issued ID to be eligible to vote) in order to accomplish their unified goal, a stated goal: to make President Obama a one-term president. These new laws also sought to narrow the voting window and restrict absentee ballots, which if enforced would make ineligible more than five million voters who cast ballots in the 2008 election.

  Beyond the states’ challenge to the Fifteenth Amendment guarantee, during the 1950s southern Democrats used threats, intimidation and violence to dissuade Negros from exercising voting rights. The Ku Klux Klan was born in the 1860s-70s as a result of White frustration during the Reconstruction Era. The organization, which reached its peak with 100,000 members in 1924 (ironically the same year that Virginia passed its Racial Purity Act), opposed Niggers, Catholics, Jews... dope, bootlegging, graft, night clubs and road houses, violation of the Sabbath, unfair business dealings, sex and scandalous behavior. Yet by the end of World War II, their numbers had diminished to the Klan’s virtual irrelevance.

  During the fight for voting rights of the 1950s-60s, the Ku Klux Klan reemerged to become the de facto enforcement arm of state and local governments, who sought to deny basic civil rights to Negroes. In one such instance, Birmingham police commissioner Bull Conner and his officers turned their heads, allowing the Klan to attack Freedom Riders for more than fifteen minutes before intervening. State governments, local governments and law enforcement were reluctant to react when the homes of determined voters were burned or bombed, when Negroes and civil rights activists were murdered or lynched by Ku Klux Klan members.

  However, public sentiment began to turn against the Klan in the early 1960s, largely owing to Dr. King’s campaign of non-violent resistance in pursuit of justice and equality. In the meantime, support for a Voting Rights Act continued to grow so that in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent Congress the draft of a bill purposed to better enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments and to eliminate state sponsored restrictions and encumbrances that prevented Negroes and others from voting.

  In the activist and militant environment of the 1960s, Negro youth began to embrace a new culture that they defined as “Blackness,” a culture that included music, language, food, lifestyle and politics. They rejected “Negro” and “Colored,” and for the first time since Africans came to North America, their descendants controlled the appellation. They called themselves “Black.” They took pride in their blackness and recognized the emerging political and economic power of the Black populace in America.

  My grandfather from Mississippi once told me “if you called a man ‘black’ in my time, he’d most likely punch you dead-off in the nose.” During the 1960s however, “Blackness” became a source of cultural pride rather than a source of shame or a depiction of inferiority. Negro youth embraced their shared African heritage and sought to renew ties to the continent their ancestors had been ripped away from so many generations ago.

  While the appellation “Afro American” was first used in 1890 in the Negro publication, Advance, it reemerged in the 1960s, as blacks sought a connection to their ethnic African roots. Blackness was the culture, but Afro American became the racial identity, though there were many who maintained they were simply “Black,” because “in our racist culture, Americans see all aspects of society in terms of “Black and White.” Throughout the 1970s and most of the 1980s, “Black” was generally preferred to “Afro-American.”

  What is “Black?”

  The appellation “Black” endured during the 1960s,70s and 80s, but the effects of integration and the final repeal of miscegenation laws in 1967 resulted in a reevaluation of identity as it related to mixed heritage. Many blacks from that generation still held to the One-Drop-Rule – “if you had any black in you, you were Black, period. Not half-Black or part-Black, but Black.” Notwithstanding, the prevalence of interracial dating and marriage resulted in an increasing number of families and individuals who were “racially-mixed.” Because “Black” indicates a culture rather than a racial identity, it became an awkward and sometimes inappropriate way to identify and define the race of an individual.

  If a young white woman had a single child by a mulatto black man and later married a white man and had children by her husband, would the first child in the family be called “Black” and all the others “White?” And what if the mulatto father and his family were never involved in the child’s life? What if the experiences and the values the child inheri
ted were “culturally White?” Would the child be “Black,” just because there was a single black ancestor, perhaps two or three generations earlier?

  In an interracial marriage involving a black person and a Mexican person or an Asian person, would the children automatically be considered “Black” because Black blood just somehow trumps other blood, because Black culture dominates all other cultures? Should the racially-mixed children be then forced to choose or to abandon or deny their non-Black heritage?

  There are many families in America who have African ancestry and do not consider themselves “Black.” The Creoles in Louisiana are a mixed race people who proudly embrace their African ancestry as well as their French and Spanish heritage, but they consider their culture “Creole” rather than “Black.” By the same reasoning, there are millions of so-called “Hispanics” who openly acknowledge and celebrate their African roots, but they consider themselves “culturally Hispanic,” and “not Black.”

  “African American” – A Tangled Web

  During the late 1980s, black leaders searched for a defining term that would serve to