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!”