Opinion

Opinion: Urgent Need to Build African American Political Power in Perilous Times

Published

9 years ago

February 23, 2017

By Carl Anthony

Under the new federal administration, we wake to growing attacks against marginalized communities, vulnerable bodies and an already unstable planet.

To resist the current administration, we must historicize our local and regional contexts. Currently, the Bay Area is undergoing its own resegregation.

Urban Habitat’s recent publication Race, Inequality, and the Resegregation of the Bay Area shows that one of the impacts of racialized regional policies governing transportation, land use, community development, and housing is the displacement of African American populations from our central cities.

Between 2000-2014, the region lost 22,000 African American residents and poverty in African American communities increased most dramatically in the outer parts of the region. This shift in race and class demographics points to a critical need to invest in, build and sustain African American political leadership throughout the region.

To historicize the current moment, we must understand the legacy of discriminatory policies that politically disenfranchised African Americans. There was a great migration of African Americans from the South to the Bay Area during the Second World War.

Many families moved into housing and neighborhoods previously occupied by Japanese Americans who were carted off to internment camps and later received a formal apology and compensation by the US government.

Yet, 400 years after slavery and the aftermath of Jim Crow segregation, African Americans have not yet achieved reparations.

From the 1940s on, African Americans faced new patterns of segregation that included redlining, block busting, housing covenants, and were restricted from moving into newly created suburbs as they began to grow in the 1950s.

These suburbs offered many opportunities that enabled poor whites to enter the mainstream of American prosperity. After passage of the national Civil Rights Act in 1965, some African Americans received some benefits. but the weight and legacy of structural racism still remained.

During the past 30 years, whites began moving back to central cities, taking with them the opportunities to build social capital associated with the suburbs and displacing African Americans and other communities of color to the outer areas of the region.

Today, this forced African American migration to the suburbs has profoundly affected the access of African Americans to jobs, housing, transportation and a healthy environment.

As we enter a new era of repression, we face new challenges and opportunities to correct the patterns of structural racism.

Creating a region wide initiative to build African American political power would allow us to meaningfully participate in the political process and systematically repair the damage of this brutal history.

Bringing the collective energies of African Americans to reinforce progressive politics across the region will provide benefits not only to African Americans but to Asian Americans, Latinos, Indigenous peoples and low-income whites as well.

We must historicize how we got to this specific moment, and examine which strategies – specifically those from African American communities – we must carry forward to resist the times ahead.

Our planet, our spirits, and our bodies are on the line.

Carl Anthony’s book, “The Earth, The City and the Hidden Narrative of Race: Discovering New Foundations for the Great Work of Our Time” is forthcoming in September 2017. He is a founder and director of the Breakthrough Communities Center for Climate Justice and a founder and first executive director of the Urban Habitat Program.

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Arts and Culture

COMMENTARY: Black Music is the Sound of Black Freedom: Let Us Reclaim Both This Juneteenth

Black Music Month started when Black Music Association members Ed Wright, Kenny Gamble and his wife, journalist and radio host Dyanna Williams were able to persuade President Jimmy Carter to establish the observation on June 7, 1979.

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Robert Johnson (1911-1938) is thought of as the godfather of blues music, especially Delta blues. The 29 songs recorded by him during his short life have been of massive inspiration to guitarists and musicians over the last 80 years. Public domain photo.

By Wanda Ravernell

Black Music Month and Juneteenth are inextricably linked – Black music is the sound of our freedom.

From the plaintive moans of the enslaved Africans’ ‘sorrow songs,’ to the fields of Civil War battle where Black soldiers picked up abandoned bugles, to the upright piano played in juke joints on Saturday night and churches come Sunday morning, our ancestors’ innovation in the face of want, fear, degradation, and hopelessness has yielded genres of music imitated ’round the world.

In 2000, Congress made it official. In 2009, Pres. Barack Obama changed the name to African American Music Heritage Month and in 2023, Pres. Joe Biden changed it back to Black Music Month, two years after he declared Juneteenth a national holiday, the result of a movement led by Opal Lee.

Our ancestors battle for freedom over these last 400 years and the music that allowed them expression of their humanity deserved to be honored.

But we may be losing sight of the value of their sacrifices.

‘Sing a Song Full of the Faith That the Dark past Has Taught Us…’

Along with the long-known exploitation of Black musicians whose recordings were stolen by record companies, the commercialization of Juneteenth feels like another kind of theft.

I had never heard of Juneteenth until I moved to the Bay Area from my hometown of Philadelphia. I didn’t know it was one of many freedom festivals celebrated by descendants of enslaved people in the United States.

Emancipation Day was Jan. 1 in Pennsylvania, April 16 in Wash., D.C., May 20 in Florida, and Aug. 8 in Kentucky. But Juneteenth, June 19, has the most renown, known in Texas as the ‘colored peoples’ Fourth of July.’

It was marked by parades, beauty pageants, rodeos, backyard barbecues and church picnics.

Yes, church.

The formerly enslaved began the day praying in thanks for their freedom just as they had prayed for Jubilee – the day of freedom – when they had chains on their feet and hands. They ‘testified’ about their past suffering and how they had managed to overcome.

And they sang.

Although, we will not hold it this year, Omnira Institute’s Juneteenth Ritual of Remembrance recalled this part of Juneteenth with prayers in the languages of the African captives. In the middle of the ceremony, a soloist would lead us in singing “Many Thousand Gone” while we took turns reciting portions of the Emancipation Proclamation, the news of freedom that took more than two years to reach Texas – two months after the Civil War ended.

“Many Thousand Gone” was famously recorded by Black luminary Paul Robeson in 1947:

“No more auction block for me,

No more, no more

No more auction black for me

Many thousand gone.”

Other verses refer to the ‘pint of salt’ and the ‘driver’s lash,’ the realities of enslavement that they had survived.

‘Sing a Song Full of the Hope That the Present has Brought Us’

All of the genres of African American music have at their root songs like that, the essence being, as Stevie Wonder, wrote, “the joy inside our pain.” So Black music is not just music. It is our story, our history, our very strength.

During the Civil Rights Movement, which peaked 100 years after slavery ended, the people testified that it was the freedom songs – based on spirituals – that gave them the heart to march, face attack dogs, fire hoses, beatings, and shootouts with vigilantes.

The music reminded them that power was in the people. That music, our music, can do so again. We don’t have to accept the commodification of the products of our culture.

The power of those songs is showing a resurgence across the South as we battle again for the right to self-determination through the ballot box.

Those songs are the voices of our ancestors, voices forged in their blood, their sweat, their tears, joy and, above all, faith. Those songs, those prayers live in our blood and our very breath.

This Juneteenth, let us reclaim those holy voices expressed in Black music for ourselves. It is our birthright. It can neither be bought nor sold. No more. Never again.

Wanda Ravernell is the executive director of Omnira Institute, sponsor for 18 years of the Juneteenth Ritual of Remembrance and Oakland’s 11^th Annual Black-Eyed Pea Festival, which will take place on Sept. 12.