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Reflections at the Threshold of 2026
Some years pass quietly, slipping into memory without much ceremony. And then some years arrive with a kind of insistence, years that ask something of you, shape you, and ultimately reveal who you’ve become in the long arc of your own story.
This was one of those years.
At the Tubman Museum in Macon, Georgia
Yesterday, during the Juneteenth observance at the Tubman African American Museum in Macon, Georgia, I discussed the historical context of freedom in Middle Georgia. To highlight African Americans’ resilience, I drew a compelling comparison with the Juneteenth celebrations in Galveston, Texas, in 1865.
Harold Michael Harvey
This is probably my interview. Please watch through the end.
Before the Middle Georgia Regional African American History Committee
Award-winning author Harold Michael Harvey will discuss his latest book, Fantasy Five: An Unimagable History, The Election of Macon’s First Black Councilmembers, on November 20, 2024, at the Washington Memorial Library in the Genealogical and Historical Room at 4:00 pm.
“Son, you write with a wicked pen. I just wish I could get you on my side.” K. B. Young, Dean of Students at Tuskegee Institute, once said to future Award-winning author, Harold Michael Harvey.
The year was 1973. Harvey, a political science major, wrote a weekly column in the Campus Digest, the student newspaper, and defended students before the Institute’s Judicial Board.
My C. T. Vivian Story: A Powerful Flame That Burned Brightly ( Harold Michael Harvey, Cascade Publishing House, Atlanta, 2020) sparked reflections from Richard Keil, the founder of the Tubman Museum of African American Arts, History, and Culture in Macon, Georgia.
Keil’s human rights legacy began in the 1950s at the height of the civil rights movement in the United States.
Cascade Publishing House is excited to announce the publication of My C. T. Vivian Story: A Powerful Flame That Burned Brightly, by our publisher and author-in-residence, Harold Michael Harvey.
Vivian, an iconic civil rights leader and Harvey were neighbors for 27-years until Vivian’s transition in July 2020. They often shared private dinners where Vivian mentored Harvey and shared his innermost thoughts on various events that occurred during the civil rights era.
Note: This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book on the meaning of Memphis fifty years after Martin Luther King, Jr.
In Memphis, “The King” may be Elvis, but the city since April 4, 1968 has been defined by what happened to “A King” on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel outside of room 306.
Like Dallas, Texas, Memphis, Tennessee suffers from a sense of metaphysical guilt over the blood, in this instance, of a King, who came in peace and was slain in its city. No city leader wants this type of tragedy to occur in their geopolitical space. It simply is not good for business; and if not good for business, city leaders walk on eggshells to cleanse their collective guilt for a crime committed within their political subdivision; and some may argue with their acquiescence.
Have you ever thought about Tuscaloosa, Alabama without your thoughts going immediately to the powerhouse football team whose motto is “Roll Tide Roll?”
If you have, you would be one of the rare people on the planet who does not associate Tuscaloosa with the Crimson Tide of the University of Alabama. For most people Tuscaloosa is visions of Bama on any given Saturday in the fall and usually extending into the first week of January, where they dominate the college football playoffs.
I have to admit it, until a year and a half ago whenever I thought about Tuscaloosa, Alabama, two thoughts came to mind.
One, a childhood memory of the Alabama Governor George C. Wallace standing in the door of the admissions office at the University of Alabama in June 1963.
Ostensibly, Wallace sought to deny admission to James Hood and Evelyn Malone. They were the first two African Americans to seek admission after Autherine Lucy was admitted in February 1956 and was later suspended because the university alleged it could not guarantee her safety after riots broke out on campus.
The other is a childhood memory that extends through this day: visions of Paul “Bear” Bryant, Joe Willie Namath, Johnny Musso, Kenny “The Snake” Stabler and a host of other coaches and players who have defined college football in the image of Bama.
Then a year and a half ago, I received a telephone call from Dr. Charles Steele, Jr., the President and CEO of the International Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
He wanted to know if I could drop what I was doing and meet him in his office on Auburn Avenue in downtown Atlanta within the hour. Steele had a friend visiting him from his hometown of Tuscaloosa he wanted me to meet.
I do not receive calls everyday from civil rights leaders who follow the footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., so I stopped in mid-sentence of the manuscript that I was working on and drove down to “Sweet Auburn” Avenue.
When I arrived, Steele introduced me to Ruby J. Simon, a Black native of Tuscaloosa, who recently had retired from the Tuscaloosa Public Schools System.
Although, I knew that Steele, George Curry, the first Black sports writer at Sports Illustrated and the archivist James Horton were from Tuscaloosa, it had never occurred to me that Tuscaloosa had a viable Black community.
Oh my gosh!
I was in for an education. Simon told me about her interest in publishing a book about the Black community in Tuscaloosa.
Since I had edited and published a book for Dr. Steele, through my publishing house (Easier to Obtain Than to Maintain: The Globalization of Civil Rights, Charles Steele, Jr., Cascade Publishing House, Atlanta, 2016), Simon asked if I would edit her manuscript and serve as publisher.
Frankly, I had little knowledge of Black people in Tuscaloosa outside of the few that I knew personally, so I did not think that there was much there; yet I agreed to read the manuscript and get back to her.
She presented me with a manuscript titled “Ruby’s Chronicles.”
Immediately, I became fascinated with Simon’s research and her story on the legacy and history of Black Tuscaloosa which predated the creation of the University of Alabama.
Simon tells her story through the lenses of two churches founded in what is known as the “Big Bend” Community in Tuscaloosa. Both churches, one Baptist (Pleasant Grove Missionary Baptist Church) and one Methodist (Beautiful Zion African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church) were founded in 1870. They originally held services in the same “bush abhor,” splitting into the two dominations when their numbers grew too large for the bush arbor services.
I was struck by the oral histories Simon had collected, some of the oral histories had been handed down since 1865 on the very day that certain enslaved people in “Big Bend” had been notified they were now free. Had Simon not written her book, this account of the day freedom came to the enslaved in Tuscaloosa would have, in a few years, disappeared from human memory.
We went to work to fashion Ruby’s Chronicles into a volume that tells the story of the indigenous inhabitants and Africans who sustained the majority culture that has come to be known as Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
For in the beginning was the Spirit. The Spirit uttered a sound. The sound formed the Black Warrior River and caused it to bend around a land mass later to be named Tuscaloosa for the dreaded Warrior who had Native and African DNA.
The Spirit caused the river to bend around the Crimson Tide long before the first football was punted, long before the first forward pass, long before the first half-back ran around left end, long before Paul “Bear” Bryant, long before, Joe Willie Namath, much longer before Nick Saban yells “Roll Tide, Roll!”
Simon has recorded the history of the Tuscaloosa that was Tuscaloosa before football was invented. It is a look inside the Big Bend Community where on Saturdays in the fall the Crimson Tide rolls around Tuscaloosa. It is a look at the descendants of the former enslaved who sustained Tuscaloosa during the time of King Cotton when pigskin was synonymous with pork rinds and not football.
Yes, Tuscaloosa, Alabama is more than the sum total of a powerhouse college football team. In the pages of Big Bend: Where the Tide Rolls Arounds Tuscaloosa,you will meet the men and women who settled in the Big Bend Community in Tuscaloosa following the Civil War. Their stories are told by the descendants who still reside on the land their fore parents worked during the period of enslavement, then as sharecroppers and later as civic and government leaders.
Cascade Publishing House is proud to present to the world, Ruby J. Simon and her work Big Bend: Where the Tide Rolls Arounds Tuscaloosa.
Harold Michael Harvey is an American novelist and essayist. He is a Contributor at The Hill, SCLC National Magazine, Southern Changes Magazine and Black College Nines. He can be contacted at hmharvey@haroldmichaelharvey.com
Why do Blacks not feel “The Bern,” a twitter connection from my hometown of Macon, Georgia tweeted me the other day?
“Why are Blacks supporting the HRC Machine,” he tweeted. “I don’t get it. Can you explain? Is it the Jewish thing or the not electable argument?”
“Bernie is preaching the spirit of the Gospel and blacks are missing his message, ” I responded with a promise to give more thought into this political anomaly.
I’m often asked in private conversation what I think about a variety of things. People throughout the world whom I have never met, nor likely will meet, will connect with me on social media when they are looking for truthful answers without a spin on one side of an issue or the other.
I am not quite sure why I have come to have such respect among the people I meet on social media, or a few people who know me in real life, who have a similar admiration for my ability to give them a rounded answer. The twitter referenced here is a man whose hand I have shaken in the flesh, and with whom I have attempted to solve one or two of the world’s problems over a good meal and beverage or two. Although it should not matter, my friend is white, a Sanders supporter and wonders why the Sanders message is not resonating with Black folks.
Many of my Black friends have asked a similiar question. The difference is my Black friends couch this question this way: “Do you think Sanders can get the Black vote?” Imagine a black person asking what other blacks will do with a vote that is in that black person’s hand.
I have never given a definitive answer to their questions. I usually say, “I don’t know,” which is the truth; but I have left these conversations puzzled in my own mind over this conundrum of contemporary American politics and determined to gain some clarity of thought on this issue.
As I ponder the reasons Blacks are not feeling “The Bern,” Harriet Tubman keeps coming to the forefront of my mind.
After the conclusion of the Civil War, Mrs. Tubman once said, ” I could have freed more slaves, if more people knew they were slaves.”
This statement is shared in a perfunctory manner on social media. Oftentimes, Blacks sharing it and reading it think how sad that more Blacks enslaved in that day did not realize that they were not free. Who needs a “Black Moses,” as Tubman was called, when you know with a degree of certainty how to navigate your way around the plantation?
As Malcolm X would point out a hundred years after Tubman’s exploits on the “Underground Railroad,” in his analysis of the “House Negro and the Field Negro:”
“Where can you find a better house than this? Where can you find better food than this? Where can you find a better master than this?”
Black folks share these quotes of Tubman and Malcolm, especially in February during Black History Month, without taking into account that these words have application to the situation of Black Americans today.
On the campaign trail, Secretary Hillary Clinton in essence says to Black folks:
Hey don’t worry about anything. I’ll be the first white lady in the big White House, that your ancestors built and I’ll take care of you. I apologize for calling young Black men ‘serious predators’ and for encouraging congress to pass tough sentencing guidelines that have taken Black men out of the community and placed them in prison for most of their lives, if they were lucky to survive after 30 or 40 years. I apologize for supporting the expansion of private prisons which has led to more Black men being behind bars than those attending college. You know, it’s a tough world, and I have had to make the tough decisions. We were all scared of those Black men and had to do something about them. You don’t need to go anywhere else, stay right here with me. Where can you find a better Whitehouse than this? Where can you find better food on your table than what Bill and I can provide for you? Where can you find better caretakers than Bill and I?
As Harriet Tubman found out, the “House Negroes” had a compelling argument for staying on the plantation; this is no less true for Clinton’s sales pitch to descendants of enslaved Africans. Many feel more comfortable with the reality they know rather than in venturing out to seek an alternative to the status quo.
This gets me to that spirit thing and that Jewish thing.
Bernie Sanders is a Jew. You would hardly know it because he does not make his cultural and religious upbringing a litmus test for seeking votes, unlike Clinton who oftens mentions that if elected, she would be the first woman president. A powerful Clinton supporter, Madelyn Albright, said there is a special place reserved in Hades for women who do not vote for Hillary Clinton, because she is a women.
If elected Bernie Sanders will become the first Jew elected president. However, he is not running on his Jewishness, but on ideas conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that All Americans should share in the wealth and prosperity of this bountiful land.
What is confusing about Sanders lack of support among Black folks is that the Black community is still largely a very religious community. Sanders platform comes straight out of the “Sermon on the Mount,” that was preached by an itinerant Jewish Rabbi.
Sanders believes that it is not okay that only ninety percent of Americans have health insurance. Many of those in the ten percent category without health insurance are Black Americans who live in southern states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures. These southern states chose not to expand their state run medicaid programs to insure their citizens. “The Bern” believes that the government should provide health insurance to all Americans.
Sanders believes that it is shameful that the unemployment rate among Black folks is at least fifty percent. He wants to create a jobs program to repair the country’s infrastructure that will eliminate unemployment in the Black community. The crux of Sanders work program is to raise the minimum wage to $15.00 an hour.
This will directly benefit the working “Black poor,” who will have sufficient income to take care of their families. Most sociologist agree that the absence of jobs in a community creates a pathway to crime for young people in those communities.
This measure will have enormous impact in improving the quality of life in the Black community and in eliminating the rising rate of crime and drive by shootings.
The centerpiece of the Sanders platform, and probably the thing that does not resonate with Black folk is his notion that the rich should be taxed more to provide for health insurance for all Americans and college tuition for all Americans, including Black people, who qualify for college.
In short, Sanders’ platform is the specifics “of the things hoped for” in the Obama campaign of 2008.
Which brings me to the electability argument.
Black folks lack the faith “of the evidence of things not seen” in order to give birth to a reality that ultimately will empower their community. Since, it is not apparent that Sanders can take on the giant corporations and win, like it was not apparent that the shepherd boy David could defeat Goliath, Black folks are skeptical about joining the Sanders political revolution.
When the dust clears in Philadelphia this summer, I will break bread with my friend in Macon, and, perhaps lament, that Bernie Sanders could have moved Black folks off the plantation, if only more of them knew they were still on the plantation.
SOURCES:
45Elliott Dunwody, VI@edunwody
@hmichaelharvey Why are Blks supporting the HRC machine. I don’t get it. Can U explain? Is it the Jewish thing or the not electable argument
Harold Michael Harvey is an American novelist and essayist, the author of Paper puzzle and Justice in the Round. He can be contacted at haroldmichaelharvey.com.