Streets of Rage Redux

Posted on May 2, 2024 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

When my childhood friend, Isa Rock, read and reviewed my novel, Streets of Rage, he wanted more.  A few mornings ago, I started to think about more, and thus the process began in my head.  My process as a writer of fiction begins with the end in mind.  Where is the final destination I want to take the reader?  Then I work on the beginning.  If I can begin, with much thought and scribbling on whatever is at hand, a napkin, an envelope, a sheet of paper, then the process begins in dead earnest.

This is me teasing out the process for more: “There was something liberating about killing a white man.”

How’s that for an opening line?  Now maybe you’ll want to read Streets of Rage in preparation for the second act?

There was something liberating about killing a white man.

In this day and age, a writer simply doesn’t write; a writer also needs to help with marketing his or her work.  (I came up with the idea for the book covers for all four of my books and wrote information for the dust jacket.)  This is what would appear on the dust jacket for Streets of Rage Redux: “As a teenager, he got away with murder.  That murder changed his life.  Instead of going to prison, he went to college.  Forty years later, looking back, he tells his story after that fateful day when he became a god.”

Order Streets of Rage

In my next blog I’ll discuss the process of writing my award-winning epic poem, Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass: Remembrance of Things Past and Present.

Posted in being a teenager, crime, ezwwaters, juveniles, Murder, Nation of Islam, raising black boys, Streets of Rage | Leave a comment

Advancing Alice Walker — and Her Nonfiction

Posted on April 11, 2024 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

I have a love-hate relationship with the body of work of Alice Walker.  I love Walker’s nonfiction, and even some of her autobiographical sketches, where her prose, even when it is expressing anger, is righteous anger.  Her nonfiction is clear, logical, and hard to argue with.  I hate, although hate is too strong of a work, Walker’s fiction.  Thus, I’ll use the negative designation of hate in the love-hate equation.  I hate that most of Walker’s fiction, at best, is melodramatic; at its very worst, it is pathological.

In Walker’s first two short story collections, and her first three novels, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian,` and the famous-infamous The Color Purple, there is only one Black man, Grange Copeland – and note that both Grange and his son Brownfield are earlier manifestations or sketches of Mr. from The Color Purple – who redeems himself, who is a positive role model, but that comes so much later, in his “third” life.  From the Black father who cuts his college-attending daughter’s breasts off because she’s dating a white male to Grange Copeland who, in a premeditated fashion, murders his own son, because he knows it is the only way to save his granddaughter, Ruth, from his son’s, Ruth’s father’s, hate.  Still, it takes Grange three metaphorical lifetimes to get it right.  In his first life, he fathers Brownfield, who was literally born in a field, and abandons his son and embarks on his second life, where he is a “rolling stone.”  In his third life, Grange returns to his origins, learns that he has a granddaughter, Ruth, who he learns to absolutely adore.  In the meantime, Brownfield is soon to be released from prison, having served time for murdering Ruth’s mother.  As Brownfield prepares to be released and reenter society, he is not thinking about reintegrating into society and his family and atoning for murdering the mother of his child, but asserting some evil possessive claim on his daughter.  Grange realizes that he played an outsized role in creating the monster that Brownfield has become because of, in large part, his absence and abandonment.  Grange knows that for Ruth to live, Brownfield must die.  And thus Grange’s redemption comes in the bloody act of premeditated filicide.

After I made my way through Alice Walker’s first five books of fiction, for which I was going to write a thesis for an MFA on Alice Walker’s world after I read the rest of her works, is when I came across and found Walker’s nonfiction, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.  In this collection of essays, and especially the title essay, Walker seems to lift the veil of what appears to be hatred of all men, but especially Black men, and explains her “poetics.”  Walker’s hatred of men, and Black men in particular, if I may, and it’s not that simple, is not hatred towards the male species, but what the male has done to womankind.  And Walker could care less about white men, because she believes Black folk to be superior to white folk, in all things, but especially morally.  (Read “Advancing Luna – and Ida B. Wells.)

In “Advancing Luna – and Ida B. Wells, an autobiographical sketch, Walker writes:

I thought black people superior people.  Not simply superior to white people, because even without thinking about it much, I assumed almost everyone was superior to them; but to everyone.  Only white people, after all, would blow up a Sunday-school class and grin for television over their “victory,” i.e., the death of four small black girls.  Any atrocity, at any time, was expected from them.

Advancing Luna — and Ida B. Wells

The above passage alone endeared me to Alice Walker’s nonfiction.  It was our meeting point, where we both could unequivocally agree about something.  Additionally, Walker had launched a charge at Black men, that we do not read Black women authors, but that Black women read almost everything written by Black men that came down the pike.  Accepting that challenge, I began to read Black women writers, including but not limited to Dorothy West, Anne Petry, Alice Childress, Margaret Walker (Jubilee), Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun), Audre Lorde, Sonia, June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou (her five autobiographical novels) – I had already read nearly everything by our Muse – Paule Marshall (Brown Girl, Brownstones) – my mother is a first generation Bajan and her family secured three brownstones — Toni Morrison (Jazz), Octavia Butler (Wild Seed and Kindred), Ntozake Shange (for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enough), Bebe Moore Campbell (Brothers and Sisters), Jamaica Kincaid, Gloria Naylor (The Women of Brewster Place), Rita Dove, Edwidge Danticat, and Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog).  I owe Alice Walker a debt, for the challenge, which I accepted, of immersing myself in the worlds and words of Black women writers.

Alice Walker is a significant writer.  She probably does not consider any of her novels “protest” literature, but in a way, they are, though they are not appealing to or directed to a white audience, as protest literature did.  In short, Walker she cares what happens to Black men in the wide world, but whatever happens there, the degradation at the hands of white folk, the psychological and sometimes physical emasculation at the hands of white folk – nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies coming home and taking their feelings of rage at the white world out on their women and children.  No Black male can argue with that logic.

Posted in ezwwaters, Fatherhood, Fathers, race, raising black boys, Reentry, Relationships, Short Stories | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

On this day, April 9, 1939, in American History…

Posted on April 9, 2024 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

…Marian Anderson Performs for 75,000 Outside Lincoln Memorial, because she was banned from indoor venues because of her race. See https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/apr/09.

My poetic tribute to Marian Anderson, in my collection, The Black Feminine Mystique:

“My Lord, What a Morning”

I am Black and proud,

O Daughters of the American Revolution,

Like the soil of Creation,

Like the land of Mother Africa.

Do not look at me with contempt because I am Black.

Your mythology says I am sun‑burnt,

That my forefathers were cursed.

My forebears sold my ancestors into slavery,

Made generations toilers of the land;

But the land I made great rejected me

When I came up from slavery.

You found other ways to keep me down,

Would not allow me to sing my song

In this land that is mine as well as yours.

My forefathers fought in the American Revolution,

My foremothers supported the Civil War,

My father fought to make the world safe for democracy,

My brother would fight to end all wars.

How dare you not allow me to sing my song!

I will lift my voice and sing,

I will sing a song of sweet liberty,

I will sing so loud the earth will be torn asunder,

I will sing so loud those war dead will rise.

Listen, and hear the angels weep,

Listen, the temple’s curtains have been rent,

Listen, and know that God speaks through me.

Hear my voice, O Daughters of the American Revolution,

Hear my voice and eat your hearts out!

Posted in Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, ezwwaters, Poetry, race | Tagged , | 1 Comment

The Assassination of Dr. King – My first “political memory”

Posted on April 4, 2024 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

My first political memory, at age 7, is the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  I was too young to remember the assassinations of JFK and Malcolm X, and although RFK would be assassinated later in the same year as MLK, I don’t have a memory of his assassination.  In my world, MLK was more important than RFK, and we were still mourning King’s killing.  And I can remember, to this very day, the sadness in the air, that weighed so heavily on the souls of Black folks – we couldn’t breathe then.  And I remember the refrain, “They killed another good [read Black] man!”  Later, I would learn that “they” were white people.  Much later, when I read The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America, by Samuel F. Yette, I learned that I was born at the very beginning of what Yette calls the Decisive Decade.

One byproduct of growing up in the Decisive Decade is that you did not, could not, see the world through rose-colored glasses.  It was in color, but only three colors: black, white, and red.

Death is the theme of the Decisive Decade.  There’s a long list of deaths, mostly of Black people, including James Chaney of Mississippi Burning (1964) infamy, but also of white people, JFK and RFK, and Chaney’s “partners,” Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.  I was too young to know that Mississippi was burning, that the world was on fire, until April 4, 1968.  Burn, Baby, Burn!  There was “rioting” in the streets.  MLK, prior to his assassination, had said: “A riot is the language of the unheard.”

Long before the chants of “No Justice, No Peace,” I heard the language of the unheard; there was the language of the unheard, in their music, in their slogans and songs, and in their poetry – poetry for my people.

The title poem of my most recent collection of poetry, which I am shopping around, is The Black Blood of Poetry, which eulogizes so many of these individuals’ deaths, including MLK:

The King is dead, his Black blood spilt on a Southern Motel Balcony!

This Black Prince of Peace, dead from white violence at thirty-nine;

His autopsy reveals a heart of 60 years, from the stress of fighting Ole Jim Crow.

“Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” for “I’ve seen the Mountaintop.”

This Black Prince of Peace, a victim of white violence at thirty-nine.

Nonviolence begat violence: Southern hate, water hoses and police batons.

“Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” for “I’ve seen the Mountaintop.”

He still dreams in Technicolor, in a deeply demarcated black-and-white world.

Nonviolence begat violence: Southern hate, water hoses and police batons.

But he still had dreams, dreams of that Oneness that’s part of Christians’ creed.

He still dreams in Technicolor, in a deeply demarcated black-and-white-world.

This Native Southern Son waged a peaceful campaign across the South.

His dreams are of that Oneness that’s part of Christians’ creed –

May his Lord safekeep his soul till the Second Coming, or the fire next time.

This Native Southern Son waged a peaceful campaign across the South,

But a misguided white brother spilt the Prince of Peace’s Black Blood on a Balcony.

On this day, the anniversary of the assassination of MLK, let us remember what happened on that Balcony.  Let us not look at the monumental murder of MLK through rose-colored glasses.  And hard as it may seem, I’ve seen, in smaller communities, such as Communities for Healing and Justice, the beloved community. 

Amen, I say to you, Dr. King.  Amen.

Posted in Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, crime, ezwwaters, Growing Up, John F. Kennedy, Lest We Forget, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Murder, Poetry, Politics, race, raising black boys, Revolution, Sometimes Blue Knights Wear Black Hats, urban decay, Urban Impact | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Poetry Matters

Posted on April 1, 2024 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

April is National Poetry Month. It was launched by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996. It is a month to celebrate poets’ integral role in our culture. #poetrymatters.

This National Poetry Month, read one of my books of poetry. All are available on Amazon:

Posted in Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, ezwwaters, NYPD, Poetry, police involved shooting, police-involved killing, Sometimes Blue Knights Wear Black Hats | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Daddy Dearest

Posted on February 22, 2024 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

My father, a Native Southern Son, was born in the same month and year Negro History Week was established. Then, we were Negroes. Thirty-four years later, when I was born, we were still Negroes. When my father died at the age of 56, in the same month he was born — today being the anniversary of his death — we were no longer Negroes.

When I think of Negro History Week, I think of my father. As a native New Yorker, born at the very beginning of the Decisive Decade, at the very beginning of the Black Arts Era, I cannot imagine growing up in the segregated South, or being drafted into the segregated U.S. Army as a teenager during World War II, as my father.

My father never talked about growing up in the segregated South, or why he left. When I was growing up, every year around the Fourth of July my father would get in his Cadillac and go down South to visit his family, many whom never left the South. Then, I didn’t understand why my father never took me, his first-born son, or any of his children, down South. I didn’t know Jim Crow, that even little Black boys were not safe from his psychopathic wrath. When 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally murdered by agents of Jim Crow, my father had already left the South. I often wonder if my father thought about Emmett Till on his trips down South as he drove across the Mason-Dixon line. When I learned about Emmett Till, I thought that perhaps that was one of many reasons my father never took me South. As an adult, when I visited the South on my own, I was struck dumb by Confederate pride more than 100 years after the Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War, framed in the Southland as the War of Northern Aggression. We have the stubborn legacy of the segregated South — actually, a segregated nation, one Black, one white, separate and ostensibly equal.

The Black artist has made the same point in the context of aesthetics. The two movements [Black Power and Black Arts] postulate that there are in fact and in spirit two Americas — one black, one white.

Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement”

The closest I’ve come to understanding the segregated South of my father’s era was reading Richard Wright’s “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow, An Autobiographical Sketch” (1937). Although Wright was born in the generation just before my father’s — my father was 11 years of age when Wright wrote this Sketch — they shared growing up in the segregated South and not just living the ethics of Jim Crow but also navigating its many perils.

Last summer I was in Virginia. (My father lived there after he left North Carolina, where generations of my folk have lived and still live, going back to 1805, where the genealogical trail goes cold.) Something keeps drawing me back to that state. I think it’s the spirit of my father, calling me home. Although I am a native New Yorker, 200 years of my family’s history is part of the fabric of the South. My family’s blood, sweat and tears has fertilized Southern fields, not to mention my family fought in the two Great Wars, the Korean War, and Vietnam. How dare anyone tell me to “Go back to Africa!”

Posted in Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, ezwwaters, Family, Fatherhood, Fathers, Lest We Forget, race, raising black boys, Relationships, Slavery | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

From the American Revolution to the Black Arts Cultural Revolution

Posted on February 21, 2024 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

After the American Revolution, most of the defining moments in American history involve or revolve around Black people.  Black folk were even involved in the American Revolution, fighting on both sides – the British promised Africans and the descendants of Africans their freedom if they fought with the British, and those who fought with the British were in fact granted their freedom and relocated to Canada.  Crispus Attucks, a Black man, is traditionally regarded as the first person killed in the Boston Massacre, and thus the first American killed in the American Revolution.  In part, this is why I have written that Black history is American history, and that there is no American history without Black history.

Black history in America begins long before the American Revolution, when in 1619 Africans were forcibly brought to what we now call the United States of America.  The African presence in America would come to define America in ways that we need to acknowledge, unto this present age.

No age defined America more than the 1960s, called the Decisive Decade by Samuel Yette, the first Black Washington correspondent for Newsweek (1968).  The Decisive Decade brings us to the Black Arts Era (1960-1975).  This era moves me in ways unlike the Harlem Renaissance (1919-1940), perhaps because I was born at the very beginning of the 1960s.

The 1960s was unlike any period in American history: the Reconstruction Years (1865-1877); the Roaring Twenties (1920-1929); the Harlem Renaissance; and the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968).  Although all of the above-mentioned eras held promise, the 1960s held the greatest promise and possibility for changing the warp and woof of America.  Note that leaders, both white (JFK and RFK), but mostly Black (MLK, Malcolm X and many others), were assassinated in the 1960s.  In no other Decade were more American leaders assassinated.  Without going down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole, it seems clear that reactionary white forces in America did not appreciate the possibilities of Camelot and made it myth with JFK’s assassination, and if there were any thoughts that his brother would take up Excalibur, he, too, was assassinated.  In this, the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and JFK and RFK are connected.  Lincoln, the “Great Friend of the Negro,” was assassinated during America’s Civil War, which revolved around the issue of slavery.  JFK and RFK, not necessarily “great friends of the Negro,” found themselves in a Decade in which America could not ignore her Black citizens, because they took to the streets (in the Civil Rights War) while the world watched live in black-and-white on their TVs the heights of American hypocrisy, proclaiming herself the citadel of democracy and freedom to the world when democracy and freedom did not exist for Black citizens in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”  During Camelot, affirmative steps were taken toward the illusive “perfect Union.”  With the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, LBJ tried to make America great, with the Great Society, long before Trump could even imagine occupying the Oval Office.  Trump, the quintessential Ugly American, has revealed how morally bankrupt American politics have become.  And there are lessons here if we would just pause and take a timeout.

…the political values inherent in the Black Power concept are now finding concrete expression in the aesthetics of Afro-American dramatists, poets, choreographers, musicians, and novelists.  A main tenet of Black Power is the necessity for Black people to define the world in their own terms.

Larry Neal

There was a time when America could boast that her leaders were among “the best and the brightest” – operating within the Decisive Decade – that they were looking to rise to meet the moment, to be better, to live up to her ideals.  This is especially true of JFK, the youngest president in American history.

This Black History Month, embrace Black history, that is, American history.  Read the literature of the Black Arts Movement to see how Black artists forged an aesthetics that spoke to Black people, that put Black people at the center of the universe.  This aesthetics, though, was not meant to put white people down, only to uplift Black people.  There is something absolutely empowering for all Americans in both of these revolutions, the American Revolution, and the Black Arts Cultural Revolution.

Posted in Black patriotism, Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, ezwwaters, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Growing Up, John F. Kennedy, Lest We Forget, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Nation of Islam, Patriotism, Poetry, Politics, race, Revolution, Slavery, Streets of Rage, urban decay, Urban Impact | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Happy Valentine’s Day to African American Literature!

Posted on February 14, 2024 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Since it is Valentine’s Day, I dare to say that I have an ongoing love affair with African American literature.  And, once again, I am teaching African American Literature in the 20th Century for another college.  (I previously taught it at Bennington College.)  The primary texts are The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 3d edition, volumes 1 and 2, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A. Smith.  The other primary text is Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America – An Anthology, edited by Herb Boyd and Robert L. Allen.

I normally begin this course with someone reading James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” known as the Black National Anthem.  Indeed, just this past Superbowl Sunday, Andra Day beautifully sang it to the millions of people tuned in.  Of course, some MAGAites (pronounced maggots) pushed back, because anything that uplifts Black folk and Black voices is anathema to white supremacists.  This is not surprising, in light of the attacks on Critical Race Theory (only taught in law schools), and what some white folk like to scream and shout, “cancel culture!” when they can’t sound off, mostly on people of color, in the most disrespectful ways, and not be held accountable.  Ironically, the pushback on singing the Black National Anthem to the world is a pernicious form of cancel culture.  Note that I attended a Superbowl party, and during the singing of both the Black National Anthem and the National Anthem that the majority of the Black audience was on their feet with their hands on their hearts.  (Eat your hearts out, MAGAites!)

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:

To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Countee Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel” (1925)

I enjoy teaching this course, because it has me revisit Black classics – Three Negro Classics, with an introduction by James Weldon Johnson, one of the other assigned texts — including Up From Slavery, by Booker T. Washington, The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois, and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson.

The first in-class assignment during the first class was having students reflect on and write about the theme of Black History Month – I utilize the Amherst method.  I also asked students to share their favorite Black author and their favorite book by a Black author.  I was surprised that one of the students said that his favorite Black author is Alexander Dumas, and that his favorite book by a Black author is The Count of Monte Cristo, which was my favorite book as a teenager!  I keep saying that one of these days I’ll watch one of the movies made about the book!

The reading assignment for the following class included various authors articulating what I call “Black Poetics.”  My talk – I prefer “talk” to “lecture” – preceding the assignment was a brief description of Aristotle’s Poetics, counterbalanced by an excerpt from Larry Neal’s “The Black Arts Movement,” and “Some Reflections on the Black Aesthetic.”  Neal rejects the Eurocentric approach in Black Art, that Black Art must be created from the Black experience.

The next reading assignment will include Toni Morrison’s essay, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The African American Presence in American Literature.” In this essay, Morrison’s brilliance shines. One of my takeaways from Morrison is, why should only dead white men be on the bookshelves when we talk about American literature?  As I’ve stated elsewhere, we cannot talk anything American without talking about Black America. Whether white folk like it or not, the reality is that there is no America as we know it without Black folk.

Posted in Black patriotism, Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, ezwwaters, Lest We Forget, Politics, race, Slavery | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Black Arts Movement

Posted on February 8, 2024 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

The theme for this Black History Month is African Americans and the Arts.  For purposes of this blog, I’ll highlight the “Black Arts Era” (1960-1975).  The Black Arts Era began at the very beginning of what Samuel F. Yette, influential newsman and the first Black Washington correspondent for Newsweek, and the author of The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America, called the Decisive Decade, for obvious reasons if we look at that era and the political assassinations, of JFK and RFK, of MLK and Malcolm X, and so many others – a long list of stolen lives.

All those stolen lives, all those political assassinations, took from us the best and the brightest.  The decade was indeed decisive, in that the struggle for Civil Rights in America was becoming a struggle for human rights within the international context.  MLK seemed to be offering America the easy way out, and it wasn’t simply about integration.  It was about America making good on that promissory note, doing more than simply spouting the ideals of Democracy!  The world was watching America.  She could not talk about democracy abroad when it was denied at home.  She could not talk about freedom when America was becoming a prison state.  She could not send someone like Muhammad Ali overseas to fight a war against people of color, people who never called him the N word – those are fighting words!  If there was fighting to be done, it could be done on the homeland.

This political landscape would profoundly inform the Black Arts Movement.  Larry Neal, notable scholar, writer, poet, and critic, in “The Black Arts Movement,” wrote:

The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community.  Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.  As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America.  In order to perform this task, the Black Arts Movement proposes a radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic.  It proposes a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology.  The Black Arts and the Black Power concept both relate broadly to the Afro-American’s desire for self-determination and nationhood.  Both concepts are nationalistic.  One is concerned with the relationship between art and politics; the other with the art of politics.

Neal, L.  (2014).  The Black Arts Movement.  In H. Gates and V. Smith (Eds), The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 3d Edition, Vol. 2.  (pp. 784-791).  W.W. Norton & Company.  (Original work published 1972).

One can make the argument that most, if not all Art, is political, including the protest novel, which the aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement rejects, because it appeals to “white mortality.” As Neal stated in the above quoted piece, the Black Arts Movement separates itself from the western cultural aesthetic. It is tied to concepts of Black Power. It operated from the fact that there were two Americas, Black, and white, and white America had no claim to moral superiority given the racial terror it perpetrated against Black people throughout the Decisive Decade. If this was the road of white morality, then why follow it in any shape, form or fashion? Why not create something that spoke directly to and evolved from your lived experience as Black people in America. A case on point, Frederick Douglass deconstructed the Fourth of July, what it meant to the Negro? Black aesthetics will see things differently, because Black folk have experienced America differently from white folk.

The Black Arts Era is full of revolutionary works of music, story, and song, that came from the Black experience of America. In the Black Arts Era, Black artists found a voice that divorced itself from that duality that W.E.B. DuBois wrote about. It wagged that symbolic Black fist at the white world. Read any of the works of artists from that generation, beginning with LeRoi Jones.

I often wonder what kind of land America would be without that long list of political assassinations in the Decisive Decade, by far the most important decade in American history, one more important than the Reconstruction years (1865-1877). In a sense, those political assassinations forged the Black Arts Era in Black blood.

Posted in Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, Education, ezwwaters, John F. Kennedy, Lest We Forget, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Murder, Nation of Islam, Politics, race | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Happy Birthday to Black History Month!

Posted on February 7, 2024 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Black History Month is nearly 100 years old!  Granted, it began as Black History Week, on February 7, 1926, and didn’t become Black History Month until February 10, 1976.  My father, a Native Southern Son, was born in the same month and year, eight days later.

President Ford called upon the public to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.” 

Presidential Message of Gerald Ford on Black History Month

My father grew up in the segregated South.  As a teenager, he was drafted into the segregated U.S. Army to serve during World War II.  A couple of years after his discharge from the segregated U.S. Army in 1946, my father would make his way to Brooklyn, New York. During his lifetime, there were basically two reasons why Black folk left the South.  One, they were fleeing white violence or the threat of it, or two, they were seeking a better life.  Most times, it was a combination of the two.

My father never talked about his life growing up in the segregated South.  He was born in North Carolina and later would move to Virginia.  (I imagine he saw his share of disrespect and violence perpetrated by white folk against Black folk.)  Once he moved North, every year he would get in his Cadillac and travel down South around the Fourth of July weekend.  And although Frederick Douglass eloquently articulated what the Fourth of July meant to the Negro – not the glory of the stars and stripes, for which Black people fought without hesitation, from the very beginning of the founding of the nation, during the Revolutionary War – there was always hope that the nation would live up to her ideals.  Even W.E.B. DuBois believed that white folk would have to give Black folk their due because they put skin in the game, that is, fought with brave distinction in the Great Wars, but he was soon disillusioned and “went back to Africa.”

Africa was probably always calling DuBois to come home.  America has miserably failed in respecting Black humanity.  Given this white mindset, and the miseducation of the Negro, it was astonishing that Carter G. Woodson had the vision to celebrate the history and contributions of Black people in America, a mere 61 years after the end of the Civil War.  And what Black people accomplished was astonishing in light of all the forces mustered by white supremacists and segregationists to hold on to the way of life of the “Lost Cause,” and to keep Black people subjugated and “in their place.”

I often wonder if America will ever be a safe place for Black people.  I know it’s impossible for the divestiture of Black people’s gifts to America, the gift of sweat and brawn, the gift of story and song, and the gift of the spirit.  As Martin Luther King Jr. once dreamed, maybe one day the majority of white people will see that not only are Black folk the conscience of the nation, but Black folk are also the heart and soul of America.  These are among the many reasons to celebrate Black History Month, every month.

Happy Birthday to Black History Month!

Posted in Black patriotism, Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, Education, ezwwaters, Fatherhood, Fathers, Growing Up, Lest We Forget, Patriotism, Politics, race, raising black boys, Revolution | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments