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September 1965, this young man and 12 others integrated Lanier Jr. High.
On Saturday, September 21, 2019, from 6-9pm at the Douglass Theatre in Macon, Georgia, the older man will read from his memoir Freaknik Lawyer about the horror he felt that day, 54 years ago.
“I grew up a lot my first day at school with white kids,” Harvey said.
Six thousand words in the books today. My best work to date in terms of style, pacing, and content. “Freaknik Lawyer,” coming soon.
Today, I salute Elaine Harvey. When she turned 18 years old, she asked her dad if he would take her into town so she could register to vote. He did not want to bring the rath of the KKK onto his family farm in Middle Georgia.
Thus, he refused her request, with a stern warning that she was not to go into town “fooling with them white folks.”
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 [email protected]
Speaking truth to power is an often used cliche when a person hits a cord of truth on behalf of the powerless. I have often been encouraged to stand up and speak truth to power. Usually, I do not have a problem articulating my opinion on the major topics of the day.
Perhaps this is because many years ago my mother taught me to hate injustice with a passion. And so at great peril to liberty and finances, I have never shied away from expressing my opinion on issues of injustice and inequality.
Other than my mother’s encouragement to look power in the eyes and tell them the truth, I have often wondered where the courage to do this emanated.
Thanks to an enterprising correspondent for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, I now know that I have the genetic disposition to speak truth to power.
In 1889, an Ohio newspaper, The Salem Daily News, ran a story about my great great grandfather Dempsey Clark and his brother Bristow Clark. As the story goes, Dempsey Clark was born in 1825 in North Carolina. About 25 years later he finds himself standing on a slave auction block in Hawkinsville, Georgia with his brother Bristow and “several thousand slaves [who] were brought in by the slave traders.”
A rumor circulated among the men and women in bondage that a particular planter in the area was mean and treated his workers poorly.
The Clark brothers stood erect, side by side, on the auction block in the full embodiment of their Africanness. The dreaded planter, a white man named Mr. Coley, prepared to bid for them. The Clark brothers, speaking truth to power, interrupted the auctioneer:
“We don’t like you Mr. Coley and you need not buy us, cause we ain’t gonna live with you.”
“Oh well,” Mr. Coley replied, “I got plenty of dogs.”
When the transaction was completed Dempsey and Bristow were sent to Mr. Coley’s plantation. On the third day, the Clark brothers headed for the woods. Mr. Coley sent his bloodhounds into the woods after them. They were captured, but on the trip back to Coley’s plantation, the Clark brothers escaped, again speaking truth to power, they swore they “would die before going back to Coley’s plantation.”
Mr. Coley was about as stubborn as the Clark brothers. He kept a team of “Negro hunters” with bloodhounds on the Clark brothers trail. Coley’s Negro hunters chased the Clarks “into the cypress jungle, and among the lagoons just below big creek near where the creek runs into the Okmulgee. The swamp was almost impenetrable, but the hunters followed their dogs and approached within fifty yards…”
Whereupon Dempsey and Bristow fired upon Coley’s Negro hunters and dogs. They gave up the chase for the evening and the Clarks descended further and further into the swamp. After three years of trying to capture them, Coley admitted that the Clark brothers had meant every word of the truth they had spoken to power from the slave auction block, and he sold them while they were still in the woods to a Mr. Brown of Houston County.
When the word got out in the county that Coley no longer had legal title to the Clark Brothers, they emerged from the swamp, walked into Hawkinsville under their own power and turned themselves into Mr. Brown.
They worked on Brown’s plantation without incident. In the early 1850s Dempsey Clark married Celia who gave him 12 children. In 1860, Celia gave birth to Lilly Clark my maternal grandmother’s mother. Eight months after Dempsey Clark died in 1893, Lilly Clark married Paul C. Coley and three years later gave birth to my grandmother Puella Coley. In 1985, my wife Cynthia gave birth to our son, and to honor Puella, we named him Coley M. Harvey.
In 1889 Dempsey Clark was considered one of the wealthiest Negroes in Georgia. He owned 600 acres of land and various livestock.
Sometime after Reconstruction, Bristow moved to Colorado where he owned “large mining interests. He never came back to the south to live.
Now you know why I am the way I am, speaking truth to power without trembling or fear, but with power, and a sound mind willing to bear witness to the truth. It’s in the genes.
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 [email protected]
EDITOR’S NOTE: I have been asked to write a brief bio of Frank Jones Johnson for a plaque which will be displayed in the Tubman Museum honoring Johnson and Eugene Mosley, two Maronites who were among the first Blacks to serve in the United States Marine Corp. Here is my inscription.
Editor’s Note: This piece was written in 2009 on the 40th anniversary of the integration of Lanier Junior High School in Macon, Georgia.
I read with interest Tom Johnson’s (former head of CNN) plans for the Miller-Lanier 50th class reunion. Mr. Johnson invited the 1959 class at Ballard-Hudson to lunch. Fifty years ago this group could not sit together at the soda fountain in the old Davidson’s Department store in downtown Macon, Georgia.
It was such an unthinkable notion; no one would have bothered to daydream about it. The law prevented Negroes from sitting with white people in public. If the kids had such a thought, surely their parents would have rushed in and pointed out the social mores prohibiting it.
Thus Tom Johnson and his classmates left their youth behind and went off to college, family, and careers without knowing much about Negroes their age; save perhaps, kids of domestics, who worked in their homes or in some other menial jobs relegated to Negroes in 1959 Middle Georgia.
Johnson’s class reunion got me thinking about my own date with destiny. This past June marks the 40th anniversary of the Lanier class of 1969. This class was the first to see white boys and black boys go to school together for four consecutive years.
This experiment began in 1964, when Winifred Anderson and Vernon Pitts enrolled in Willingham and Lanier senior high schools respectively. Anderson, now a doctor and Pitts currently an attorney integrated the senior high schools as seniors. I watched them navigate their senior year with their heads held high. Little did I know I would be in their shoes a year later?
Yet, the 1969 classes at the formerly old white high schools validated the efficacy of integration. My class culminated the “freedom of choice” plan that permitted Negroes to attend Lanier-Miller, McEvoy-Willingham and later Smith-Lassiter high schools. In the good old days, the white high schools were segregated by sex, while the Negro schools were co-educational.
It was the first class that had been together for four years. It ended with several Negroes walking across the stage at the City Auditorium, in my case, with fist raised in the Black Power sign. Why not pump the right fist in the air? I had done what many said at my birth could not be done; I had just kicked Jim Crow in the seat of his pants.
During the spring of 1965, while completing my foray into the maze that 8th grade can be over at Ballard-Hudson Jr. High School, the principal, Robert Williams made an announcement. It came during last period science class.
“Judge Boottle,” he said, “had just ruled any Negro student could elect under a ‘freedom of choice’ plan to attend an all white high school.”
A light went off inside my head. I had day dreamed about wearing the blue and white colors of the Willingham Rams. These day dreams begin when my family moved to Bibb County in 1960 and I begin to read in the old Macon Telegraph about the football team at Willingham. I did not think it was possible. Yet I daydreamed about it. I held onto this doubt even after learning that Winifred Anderson had enrolled in Willingham and graduated with his class.
When the bell sounded announcing the close of another school day, I ran the half mile trek to my house, rushed into the house to see my mom. She was not inside the house. I found her in the back yard hanging cloths on the cloth line. Haplessly out of breathe, I blurted out Mr. Williams’ announcement and asked her if I could enroll in Willingham Jr. High School. Without blinking or pausing to think about it, mom said yes! I was on cloud nine.
Before I could shout for joy at a chance to attend Willingham, my brother Gerald found us in the back yard. He had the look of excitement on his face and asked if he could enroll in Lanier Sr. High School. Mom said yes to integration, but we had to attend the same school. Gerald, a rising junior at Ballard-Hudson Sr. High School, had stayed behind at school a little longer and he and a group of friends had selected Lanier Sr. High. Thus, a Lanier Poet, I became.
That summer was the last summer my teammates on the Westside Braves coached by Rev. James Jackson, made me feel like a part of the team. It was perhaps one of my best summers at the bat. I have always kept stats and the record records a .411 batting average with no homers but double digit doubles. Something happen after I stepped foot on the Lanier campus. It was as if my childhood friends thought I was better than them or something weird like that. I felt isolated at school by the white students and isolated in the community when I returned home from school.
But that is getting ahead of the story. At summer’s end a local civic group sponsored a tutorial session in English and Math at Mercer University. I came under the tutelage of Mary Wilder who ran the tutorial program. I would later, as a journalist, cover Ms. Wilder’s exploits as a member of the Macon City Council and as Macon’s first female candidate for Macon Mayor.
Two days before the start of school in 1965 I visited with my grandmother at her cloth line. She gave me a sage piece of advice that I carry in my heart today: “No matter what they say about you, no matter what they do to you, get your education son; because once you got your education baby, no one can take that away from you.”
Though rebuke, scorned and stripped no man has ever been able to take away the things I have learned in school or life.
Yet neither Ms. Wilder nor granny could have possibly prepared me for the first day at Lanier Jr. High School.
Gerald and I dressed in silence that first day of school in 1965. If he was afraid, he hid it. His seeming courage emboldens me.
Mom labored in silence to serve a breakfast of bacon, grits, eggs and toast. She saw us off and quickly closed the door. She had just sent her only progenitors off to integrate the public school system in Bibb County. I have never asked her but I am sure she must have fallen on her knees and prayed.
Gerald and I walked up to Frank Everest’s house on Pio Nono Avenue, where the site of the Frank Johnson Recreation Center now stands. Frank had a car and when Mrs. Everest had blessed our journey Gerald, Frank, and I believe Tommy Miller and I piled into Frank’s car. We headed to school. Frank kept the group loose by telling jokes. We were laughing and unaware the history we were embarked upon.
Then we came to Henley Avenue and Napier. They let me out of the car as I was the only one going to the junior high campus. I walked down the street towards the horseshoe parking lot in front of the building. I saw from a distance what I perceived at first blush to be a welcoming committee. Boy was I wrong.
As I drew closer to the entrance, I discovered to my horror, they did not come out to welcome me on my first day at a new school. I began to discern the shouts of “two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate.” I turned my sight away from the rage and anger emanating from this sea of white faces. My eyes looked away from the crowd, my mind blocking out the words of their shout.
A man came through the crowd. To this day I do not know who he was. I do not recall seeing him again. He greeted me and took me through this gullet and into the principal’s office. My first day at a new school and already I am being escorted to the principal’s office. I sat and waited.
No one spoke to me other than to initially ask for my name. “Harold Harvey,” I trembled and said. About five minutes later one by one the other black boys began to arrive and were brought into the room. In came Ernest “Sonny” Lester, Kenneth Nixon, Sylvester Royal, James Thomas, Larry Carson, Alvin Russell, Hamp Davis, James Mason and Carlton Haywood.
When the officials were able to clear the kids from the front of the school, we were each escorted to our respective home rooms. I was assigned to Mrs. Chapman.
Thus begin this social experiment to see if blacks and whites could en mass attend school together. After umpteenth racial slurs, a few fist fights, and a burned school building; we emerged 40 years ago from the turbulent 60’s and set our course for the advancement of race relations.
Tom Johnson’s journey has almost come full circle. It’s high time we get to know each other. Sitting down at lunch and enjoying a glass of sweet southern ice tea is an excellent way to let the good times roll.
Harold Michael Harvey is an American novelist and essayist, the author of Paper puzzle and Justice in the Round, Easier to obtain Than to Maintain: The Globalization of Civil Rights by Charles Steele, Jr.; and the host of Beyond the Law with Harold Michael Harvey. He can be contacted at haroldmichaelharvey.com.
Black History Month 2016 has run its course this year. However, Black History is more than a month. Black History is an event that has significance three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and in leap years like this one, three hundred and sixty-six days a year.
I was honored during Black History Month 2016 by two museums which document and maintain the rich cultural history of the Black community in America.
First on Saturday, February 27, 2016, the Sights & Sounds Black Cultural Expo Museum presented me with a “Distinguished Honoree” award for service to humanity over the course of my lifetime. For a young man, such as myself, this was a humbling experience, especially as I believe that my greatest work is ahead of me.
Then, on Sunday, February 28, 2016, I spoke at The Official Noble Hill-Wheeler Memorial Center in Cartersville, Georgia the first school for “colored children” built in Northwest Georgia by the Rosenwald Foundation.
The goal of these museums is a noble one. Their importance is underscored given the fact that many entertainers who have reached a modicum of success in America argue for the proposition that it is no longer important, nor necessary to remember Black History in the larger context of the American experience. Miss Stacy Dash is the latest affluent Black person to denigrate the observance of Black History. She is joined by Whoopi Goldberg, Raven Symone, Charles Barclay and Morgan Freeman, just to list a few.
Marcus Garvey said, “A people without a knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.” The great historian W. E. B. Dubois said it thusly, “The past is the present, that without what was nothing is, but for the infinite dead, the living are but unimportant bits.” It is easy, therefore, to see how an absence of history in the context of the American melting pot can lead to an out of sight, “outta” mind reality for any ethnic group.
Young people should realize that the proselytizing glamour and athletic stars have found their money pipeline. These stars are fearful that they could lose their gravy train if, in the vernacular of the the 1960’s, “The Man” gets upset with the thrust of Black people for justice and equality under the color of American law.
Seemingly, they are saying to the brothers and sisters who are not performing on the field or stage to “go slow, tone it down, don’t embarrass a politician who needs your vote. Be polite, we gonna get all of the gravy and you can relish in the fact that a brother or sister made it, skinning and grinning in front of “The Man.”
During my speech to the group in Cartersville, I centered my opening remarks with an overview of why Black History Month started as a single week of Negro History and expanded to a month long celebration in 1970 that wraps up today for 2016. God forbid that the more wealthy Black people among us do not get their wish and this becomes our last observance of the role and scope of Black people in the American scheme of things. I then moved into the topic that will consume us as a society for the remainder of this decade, the need for “Reparatory Justice.”
Kindly enjoy my opening remarks by clicking on the link below.
Black History Month Observance at Noble Hill-Wheeler Memorial …Harold Michael Harvey’s opening remarks during Black History program at The Official Noble Hill-Wheeler Memorial Center, February 28, 2016.
Posted by Harold Michael Harvey on Monday, February 29, 2016
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.
CASCADE PRESS, ATLANTA, GEORGIA The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan and Attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. are unlikely allies, but a confluence of history finds them on the same side of a raging war against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta.
Farrakhan, representative of the Nation of Islam emerged as a leader in his Muslim sect following the assassination of Kennedy’s uncle, President John F. Kennedy nearly 52 years ago. He became a vocal opponent against Malcolm X after Malcolm made disparaging comments about the death of President Kennedy.
Five years later Attorney Kennedy’s father, Bobby Kennedy, was killed by an assassin. The entire nation grieved the deaths of both men.
Kennedy recently published a book detailing the emotional trauma his entire family has suffered because of the stoic manner his uncle Teddy Kennedy dealt with the family’s grief.
On Saturday, Kennedy was sitting on a grassy knoll in Grant Park on the east side of Atlanta, Georgia. He was guarded by the Fruit of Islam (the security force of the Nation of Islam) as he awaited his time to speak to a rally demanding truth, transparency and freedom from the CDC. He pulled out his phone, checked his messages and took a couple of pictures of the crowd. He was seated comfortably, looking handsome like his famous dad back in the day when personal freedom was within the grasp of the common citizen. It seems more illusive now in the closing months of the first African American president’s term than it did in the days of Camelot.
Kennedy decided to leave the perch atop the protruding grass mound. He strolled up the hill to a Filipino Taco stand, placed his order and was suddenly surrounded by two Atlanta Police Officers. The FOI quickly asserted their responsibility for the safety of Kennedy, discreetly moving between the officers and Kennedy.
As he walked back to the grassy knoll, we shook hands, looked each other in the eye and chatted.
“What do you hope to achieve,” I asked?
“I hope to get the Attorney General to investigate the CDC. I want the government to prosecute the people who destroyed evidence that proves there is an increased risk of Autism in children who are given the MMR vaccine,” he averred.
“Have you seen the entire report,” I quickly got to the point.
“Yes,” he retorted.
“Do these reports show that the vaccines are harmful to children,” I queried.
“Yes. These are very dangerous vaccines.”
In a previous speech, Kennedy described the effects of these vaccines in this manner: “They get the shot, that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone. This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”
“Why did you reach out to the Nation of Islam,” I asked?
“We reached out to a number of people and they were willing to talk with us,” he replied.
“Locally,” Kennedy advised, “I reached out to Durley [Rev. Gerald Durley].”
Kennedy sauntered back to the grassy knoll, sat legs open, while surrounded by the FOI, he unwrapped his lunch and enjoyed his Filipino Tacos.
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.