The Anatomy of Advocacy: Transforming Criminal “Justice” in New York

Posted on August 11, 2025 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Beginning this Wednesday, July 13, 2025, and the following three Wednesdays, I will publish a Four-Part Series about a successful criminal legal system advocacy movement I led with a number of formerly incarcerated individuals, entitled “The Anatomy of Advocacy.”

The series is summarized below.

Part 1 – The Landscape: How “Tough on Crime” Politics Reshaped Justice in New York


In the mid-1990s, New York was gripped by “tough on crime” politics. Headlines were filled with fear, politicians raced to outdo each other on punitive policies, and communities—especially Black and brown communities—bore the brunt. But behind the slogans and soundbites, laws were quietly reshaped in ways that would keep people incarcerated longer and under state supervision for life. One of the most consequential was Governor George Pataki’s push to eliminate parole for “violent offenders.”

Part 2 – Birth of a Movement: The Ad Hoc Committee on Lifetime Parole


Every advocacy campaign starts with a spark—an injustice so glaring it demands action. For the people sentenced to lifetime parole under Pataki’s policy changes, that spark came when their parole officers told them, plainly: you will never be discharged. That’s when the organizing began.

Part 3 – Strategy in Action: Building the Campaign and Winning the Fight


Successful advocacy is rarely about one big move—it’s about hundreds of small, strategic steps that build into unstoppable momentum. The Ad Hoc Committee on Lifetime Parole knew this, and they executed with precision.

Part 4 – Lessons Learned: The Blueprint for Effective Advocacy


Victories like the 2008 repeal of lifetime parole for Class A-1 felonies aren’t accidents—they’re the product of strategy, discipline, and persistence. The Ad Hoc Committee’s campaign offers a blueprint for anyone seeking real change in the criminal legal system.

Please tune in every Wednesday, beginning July 13, 2025, at 5 PM EST, to learn about this remarkable and successful advocacy movement led by those  “closest to the problem,” as Glenn Martin has stated.

Posted in crime, ezwwaters, Justice Chronicles, Life Sentences, Murder, Parole, Politics, race, Reentry | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Exploring the Legacy of Anti-Blackness in Poetry

Posted on August 6, 2025 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

I have been working on The Black Blood of Poetry for several years. Over the next 30 days, I will be revising the manuscript to submit to contests and publishers.

My Artist Statement about The Black Blood of Poetry:

The Black Blood of Poetry is both lament and liturgy—a poetic reckoning with the brutal legacy of anti-Blackness in America and a call to remember. My work is rooted in the rich oral and literary traditions of Black resistance. It is written in the shadow of the strange fruit that once swung from Southern trees, and in the light of those who dared to name injustice in poems, psalms, and protest. This chapbook weaves the political and the personal, the historical and the spiritual, to bear witness to what too often goes unspoken or unmarked.

My poetic voice was forged on the frontlines of lived experience. I grew up in the Marcy Housing Projects of Brooklyn, New York, and came of age in a world that taught me the language of survival. As a Credible Messenger and advocate with more than 25 years of experience in criminal law and social justice, I’ve worked alongside youth, returning citizens, and incarcerated men—mentoring, organizing, and listening. My work with the Osborne Association and now with The Fedcap Group, including mentoring programs for young adults and men at Sing Sing Prison, has only deepened my conviction that storytelling—especially poetry—is both weapon and medicine.

As an award-winning poet, playwright, and essayist, I have long used language to interrogate history and reclaim the dignity of Black life. I am the author of three books of poetry and one novel, including Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass: Remembrance of Things Past and Present (co-winner of the 1998 Edwin Mellen Poetry Prize), and Sometimes Blue Knights Wear Black Hats (a National Poetry Series Finalist in 2000). My writing is animated by the spirits of Black heroes—named and unnamed—who bled into the soil of this country and left behind a legacy of resistance. This chapbook is a tribute to them, and to the ongoing struggle for justice, identity, and truth.

I hold a master’s degree from New York Theological Seminary and bachelor’s degrees from Albany University and SUNY New Paltz. My criminal justice advocacy has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Ralph Bunche Bridge Builder Award (renamed the William Eric Waters Bridge Builder Award) and the Esther House Prison Ministry Award.

The Black Blood of Poetry is my offering to the archive of Black witness—a testimony written in fire and blood, in memory and defiance.

Posted in Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, ezwwaters, Growing Up, Lest We Forget, Osborne Association, Poetry, Politics, race, raising black boys, Sometimes Blue Knights Wear Black Hats, Streets of Rage | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Toni Morrison Slays Moby Dick

Posted on April 28, 2025 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Toni Morrison writes that Moby Dick is “[a] complex, heaving, disorderly, profound text.” In my attempt, in my teens and twenties, to read as many “classics” as possible, I set out, like Ahab, to conquer the great white whale of a book. Moby Dick, along with Uncle Tom’s Cabin (because so much of the story is written in a vernacular that is not true to my understanding of Blackspeak), were my most difficult reads. Morrison, though, in slaying Moby Dick in her 1988 Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of Michigan, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” makes me want to, again, go after the great white whale. In 1988, Morrison brought an analysis and literary critique to Moby Dick that had not been seen or considered by other critics.

When we critique the current state of politics in the “United States of America,” specifically the banning of or proposed banning of books written by people of color, including Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the “unspeakable things” are being spoken out loud by some white people. Again, America is whitewashing her history, right before our very eyes, and attempting to erase the Afro-American presence in history and literature.

When we assess the American literary canon, which Morrison refers to as “canon fodder” – so many shades of meaning, and Morrison throws some shade in using this term – we see the intentional disregard if not erasure of “The Afro-American Presence in Literature.”

In the classic that is Moby Dick, Morrison writes:

Ahab loses sight of the commercial value of his ship’s voyage, its point, and pursues an idea in order to destroy it…. The trauma of racism is, for the racist and the victim, the severe fragmentation of the self and has always seemed to me a cause (not a symptom) of psychosis – strangely of no interest to psychiatry. Ahab, then, is navigating between an idea of civilization that he renounces and an idea of savagery he must annihilate, because the two cannot coexist. The former is based on the latter. What is terrible in its complexity is that the idea of savagery is not the missionary one: it is white racial ideology that is savage and if, indeed a white, nineteenth-century, American male took on, not abolition, not the amelioration of racist institutions or their laws, but the very concept of whiteness as an inhuman idea, he would be very alone, very desperate, and very doomed. Madness would be the only appropriate description of such audacity, and “he heaves me,” the most succinct and appropriate description of that obsession. (emphasis supplied)

            I would not like to be understood to argue that Melville was engaged in some simple and simpleminded black/white didacticism, or that he was satanizing white people. Nothing like that. What I am suggesting is that he was overwhelmed by the philosophical and metaphysical inconsistencies of an extraordinary and unprecedented idea that had its fullest manifestation in his own time in his own country, and that that idea was the successful assertion of whiteness as ideology. [Think the White Man’s Burden, and Manifest Destiny.]

In the last presidential election, the Democrats unsuccessfully posited a position that circumnavigated speaking about whiteness as a political ideology. When the Democrats were trying to slay the great white whale that Trump had become, they dealt in “philosophical and metaphysical” attacks that were beyond the ken of the people they were trying to win over, who would ultimately support and vote for Trump and return him to the Oval Office. For what exactly was this “existential threat” that the Democrats claimed that Trump posed to Democracy? And I don’t think that had the Democrats attacked Trump on something less philosophical and metaphysical, such as whiteness as political ideology – in simpler language – in his appeal to white nationalists and white supremacists, to take our country back in time, that they would have been any more successful, especially because Ahab was personified in a woman of color.

“The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line,” W.E.B. DuBois wrote in 1903 in the opening paragraph of The Souls of Black Folk. Already a quarter of a century into the Twenty-first Century, we see evidence that the “problem” continues to be the color-line. Despite an attempted coup (January 6th) and 35 felony convictions, Americans put Trump back in the Oval Office. In his first 100 days back in office, carrying out the Agenda of Project 2025, Trump is seeking to “Make America Great Again,” redux. (Whatever is meant by that!) Large segments of the white population eat this rhetoric up, and even some people of color, perhaps forgetting 246 years of slavery (1619-1865), fifty-eight years of legal segregation (1896-1954), fourteen years (1954-1968) of de facto segregation, and thirty-two years (1968-2000) of “mass incarceration” (better described as hyperincarceration because of the disproportionate imprisonment of people of color).

In his 1951 essay, “Many Thousands Gone,” James Baldwin declared, “Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom are dead.” As prophetic as Baldwin was, he could not foresee a Candace Owens or Supreme Clarence Thomas on the “Negro stage” in 2025, or the Black and Latino men who voted for an individual (Trump) who catered to white supremacists and white nationalists instead of a Black woman (Kamala Harris), who just might have brought some “joy” to our political process, but joy is not a political strategy..

Moby Dick endures as a classic. One thing that makes a classic is the lessons we can extract in our own time in our own country. Beyond the whaling industry, Moby Dick is a call to action that we cannot let the savages of white racial ideology consume or destroy us. In fact, we must slay it, by any means necessary!

Posted in Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, Education, ezwwaters, James Baldwin, Politics, race | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Exploring Book Bans: The Impact on Black Literature

Posted on February 3, 2025 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

On a recent summer trip to Virgina, where one could argue that it all began in 1619, that is, the enslavement of Africans in what would become the United States of America, I stopped at a Barnes & Noble.  During vacation, I get to read a couple of books for pure pleasure!  At this Barnes & Noble in “Colonial” Virginia, as there was at a Barnes & Noble in Brooklyn, NY, there was a “banned book” section.  I get that this is a way to sell books, but there is also something insidious at play.  According to PEN America, a nonprofit organization that aims to support freedom surrounding literature, since July 2021, book bans have been reported in 26 states.  Five states have reported the most book bans: Texas (713); Pennsylvania (456); Florida (204); Oklahoma (43); and Kansas (30).  Note that New York has also made the list!  The list of banned books total 1,145 titles by 874 different authors.  Banned books, mostly fiction, with protagonists of color, comprised 467 titles – talk about “cancel culture!”  Books covering historical topics on the likes of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cesar Chavez make up 111 banned titles!  Note that The Clansman, the 1905 novel and play that was the inspiration for “The Birth of a Nation,” by Thomas Dixon Jr., is not on the banned list, as it probably should not be!

Banned and

We look to history to help us understand who we are today. Yet history is also an imperfect, often inadequate record of events. Depending on who is depicting the past, certain truths go untold. That is indeed the lesson of 1619, a year that few people understood as significant in American and African American history until nearly two years ago.

https://mashable.com/article/1619-why-does-it-matter

There was a time, not too long ago, when we burned Black bodies, not books.  We also burned books, but the burning of Black bodies is more recent than the burning of books.  In any event, the spines of books and pages crackling on a bonfire cannot compete with the stench of smoking bodies charred by fire!

Black singers and authors have used fire, as metaphor, and some white folk, as a manifestation of white hate, think the burning of Black Churches, and the burning of the Black Wall Street (1921), in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the Rosewood Massacre (1923), in Rosewood, Florida!  (Note that in 2021, Florida and Oklahoma, not so respectively, are third and fourth in the nation in banning, which could very well be burning, books.)  As far as singers and authors go, I immediately think of Chaka Khan’s “Through the Fire,” and James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time.”

The fire next time is right here, right now – the past is never past.  Embers of white hate smolders, and it just takes a little fuel to ignite it.

When we look at book banning as symbolic book burning, and when we look at the Black authors that are being banned (burned), it speaks volumes about the degree of civilization in our society, and the degree of resistance to Black thought and brilliance, which flies in the face of pseudo-theories of white supremacy.  On this list of banned Black authors we have Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker, New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award winner Lorraine Hansberry, and Ibram X., Kendi.

The gift of story and song of Black folk resonates throughout American history.

Posted in Black History Month, Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, ezwwaters, Lest We Forget, Martin Luther King, Politics, race, Religion, Slavery | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Happy Black History Week!

Posted on February 2, 2025 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Dear Black People, My People (although I suspect some enlightened white people, and some who are the enemies of Black people, will read this)!

Preamble: This should be a self-evident truth. We do not have to prove ANYTHING to white people, least of all our humanity. In fact, the burden of proof is on white people, to prove that they can at the very least act humanely towards Black people.

Happy Black History Week, formerly Negro History Week, created by one of our Black scholars, Carter G. Woodson, in 1926! (It was observed during the second week of February, a symbolic nod to Abe Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, born in the second week of February). Forty-four years later, we celebrated and declared the whole month of February, albeit the shortest month of the year, Black History Month. The goal is to have every single month Black History Month! I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again and again: Black history is American history, and there is NO American History without Black History!

This Black History Week, I want to draw attention to the “White Privilege Playbook.” (I believe I coined this phrased, so if you use it, then please give me credit!)

Most if not all Black people are familiar with the terms from the White Privilege Playbook, because it has been weaponized against us, although I believe they have not yet been catalogued. The below list is NOT exhaustive, just the tip of the White Privilege Iceberg. I’ll begin with two that have been added within the last four years:

cancel culture;

FAKE News;

reverse discrimination;

affirmative action;

unconscious racism;

white fragility;

the race card;

political correctness;

“Go back to Africa!) (Often exclaimed by whites who do not have a longer history in America than Black people).

Note that all these terms have a connotation clearly understood by white people, even when they find it hard to articulate. And Black people know that all of these terms are false flags. If you don’t, Black People, My People, then my book recommendation for you this Black History Week is from our very own Black scholar, Carter G. Woodson, who created Black History Week, “The Miseducation of the Negro.

The Racial Divide in America is due in large part because most Americans are indoctrinated and miseducated. We should all be lifelong learners, although there’s a lot of stuff we have to unlearn!

Posted in Black History Month | Tagged | Leave a comment

Significance of Black History Month: A Deep Exploration

Posted on February 2, 2025 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

This Black History Month is the most important one since its inception on February 7, 1926, when it was called Negro History Week.  Not until 1976 did this Week become a Month.

Carter G. Woodson, historian, author and journalist, launched Negro History Week.  Woodson was the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.  He was one of the first scholars to study the history of the African diaspora, and is rightly called the “father of Black History.”

Woodson placed people of African descent at the center of the study of history and the human experience.  I remember, during  my early explorations of Black history on my own, that it dawned on me that something was missing from my formal education.  As a descendant of Africans in the Americas, my roots are deeply planted in Southern soil, where my father (and his father, and his father and his father) was born, in the same year Woodson launched Negro History Week.  I have traced and dug up those roots from Southern soil tilled with the sweat and brawn of Black folk, and fertilized with black bodies and blood, landing in North Carolina in 1805, where my oldest known ancestor is recorded on the 1880 Census as being born.

Digging up and discovering my “roots” was a revelation, although there are still truths to unearth, e.g., beyond the European geographical areas where 11% of my DNA is situated.  In other words, who are these white people missing from my family tree?

In my educational exploration, though “excavation” is a better way to frame it, I learned that I had purposely been miseducated, contrary to the fundamental purpose of education.  The first lesson of the Humanities is to “know thyself.”  Education begins with self-knowledge, learning about your people, putting that experience at the center of your studies.  The second lesson is to learn about others, and how you and your descendants have lived and interacted with those “others.”

Black folk, or the descendants of Africans in America, have been looked at as “the other,” despite the fact that, if we look at 1619 as a starting point of the Black experience in what would be called the Americas by Europeans, have a history in the Americas as long as Europeans, and much longer than the later waves of Europeans fleeing their home countries and coming to America.

“America, America!  God shed his grace on thee…”

America has tried but been unable to deny Black folk their grace, but she has denied Black folk the blessings of liberty.  Perhaps a greater crime is denying Black folk their history, mythologizing (whitewashing) American history and excluding Black folk and their contributions, and packaging the education of Black folk in what can mildly be called miseducation.

Woodson published The Miseducation of the Negro in 1933, the year my mother was born, a first generation American.  (Note that both my maternal grandparents are classified as “Africans” when they arrived at Ellis Island, though they both were born in Barbados.  Classifying them as “Africans” is straight from white folks’ Divide and Conquer Playbook.  My maternal grandparents were part of the African Diaspora, but they were categorized as Africans, when they came to America to distinguish them from America‘s homegrown Negros).  To my knowledge, no one has, but a book could be written and entitled, The Miseducation of White Folk, which continues to this day, evidenced in attacks on Critical Race Theory, and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts, and the laughable accusations of some white people of “cancel culture” because they can no longer say and do anything, including killing Black people, without being held accountable.  The idea of the melting pot was more about making the “other” conform to aspects of “whiteness,” in mind, body, and soul, than it was stirring up the pot, including the ingredients of all the cultures that have contributed to making America what she is, and no group is more important in making America what she is than the descendants of Africans and their gifts of the spirit, of sweat and brawn, and of story and song.

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,

Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us…

Lyrics from “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often referred to as the Black National Anthem.

As we reflect on the lyrics of this song of hope, lest we forget, the importance of Black History Month, every month, and how current political winds have stirred up the tempest of theories of white supremacy and violence and putting everything at stake, even the soul of America, embodied in Black folk!

Black history is American history! Lift every voice and sing this!

Posted in Black History Month, Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, Lest We Forget | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Understanding MLK’s Legacy and America’s Complicated Past

Posted on January 19, 2025 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

My first “political memory” is the assassination of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. when I was 7 years of age. I did not know exactly what had happened, and why this “good man” was assassinated, but I knew that the world had moved and shifted like tectonic plates during an earthquake, and that the aftershocks would be cataclysmic if not apocalyptic. That day, I remember the sad and somber mood of the adults, like they had lost a relative and, in a sense, they had, a brother, a father, a Native Southern Son. I remember their refrain: “They [later I would learn that ‘they’ were white folk] killed another good [Black] man.”

            On that day, when MLK Jr. was assassinated, I became a poet. I learned the value and power of refrains. Since then, I have returned to that fateful day, in my writings, in my mind, and in my life, trying to make sense of it, hearing that refrain repeatedly, “They killed another good man.”  My love of history was also born on that day.

            American history is like a William Faulkner novel, complicated and convoluted, like The Sound and the Fury, with various points of view, with no true source of truth, only points of view. For example, some white Southerners have, till this very day, called the American Civil War “the War of Northern Aggression.”  The point of view of slavers and segregationists have dominated most of American history, from 1776 until 1968, and beyond.

            In today’s political conversations, we hear echoes of these points of view.

            MLK Day became a national holiday under President Reagan in 1983. During Reagan’s administration, lowly white bureaucrats in the White House “joked” and…

…called the King

Martin Lucifer Coon.”
These devils demonizing
The Late Prince of Peace,
Part of the backlash,
Against Reconstruction,
Against Civil Rights,
Against Affirmative Action,
Against Black Power

Angry white men
Rule world!

From my award-winning epic poem, Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass: Remembrance of Things Past and Present.

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Shadows-Through-White-Looking/dp/1481722883

MLK Day was not recognized in all 50 states until 2000. Not surprisingly, a Southern State, South Carolina, was the last state to recognize MLK Day as a paid holiday for all state employees.

            Recently, just the other day, in thinking about this upcoming MLK Day, I returned to 1968. I already knew that that year was the most important year in my life. In thinking about 1968, I mused about what had happened. In my world, the most significant and traumatic event was the assassination of MLK. On that day, the Civil Rights Era abruptly ended. In 1968, RFK was also assassinated. And Richard Nixon became president of the United States of America.

            In musing about 1968, I did various Google searches. Not surprisingly, although this was the first time I had come across this idea, 1968 is considered the most traumatic year in American history.

            Samuel Yette, the first Black national correspondent at Newsweek, wrote The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America (1982). In the book, Yette describes the 1960s as the Decisive Decade. It was the decade that broke the fabric of America forever, that it was self-evident that she would not live up to her founding principles, that “all men are created equal, and are equal before the law.” Not even the election of President Barack Obama fixed this fatal broken thread in the patchwork quilt of America, which is still frayed.

            White Americans can talk about the “greatness” of America all they want, and not give Black folk any credit for America’s greatness, but if white folk, and all Americans, even those “crossing the borders” because they have heard the mythology America has propagated about her greatness throughout the land and they, too, want a piece of the American pie – if they want to understand the complicated and convoluted history of America, then they need only look at 1968, where the Great Society was upended by assassinations, and the inauguration of Richard Nixon as the 37th U.S. President.

            We know that the stars have not aligned for America when we remember MLK Jr on the same day that Trump is installed to occupy the Oval Office once again.

Posted in Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, ezwwaters, Growing Up, Lest We Forget, Martin Luther King, Politics, race, raising black boys, Relationships, Religion, Revolution, Streets of Rage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Sausage, Cabbage, and Black Bread

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

During my seven-hour flight to Frankfort, Germany, I watched “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.”  Based on the book, Churchill’s Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII by Damien Lewis, the movie is a fictionalized version of “Operation Postmaster.” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill used a “black ops” team, “a motley crew of rogues and mavericks,” to neutralize Hitler’s fleet of German U-boats, which were not only constantly sinking supply and aid ships earmarked for the United Kingdom, but also resupplying the Nazi war effort.

I wasn’t on this plane!

One scene in particular struck me.  Two of the operatives, agents Marjorie Stewart and Richard Heron, are taking a train.  (In real life, Marjorie is a British actress and a member of the Special Operations Executive.  A Black man portrays Richard Heron.  The final destination is to the Spanish-controlled island Fernando Po.)  They are set to order dinner.  They discuss cuisine in the context of the major players in the war, the Germans, the British, and the French.  A Black male waiter is patiently waiting for them to order dinner.  If the Germans win the war, Marjorie says, then we’ll be eating sausage, cabbage, and black bread.  Marjorie then names some French cuisine, which is superior to German food.  Richard comments that if the British win the War, then it’ll be fish and chips.  They end up ordering sausage, cabbage, and black break.

Next year will be 80 years since V-Day, since the end of WWII.  Watching “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” conjured up many things.  Had the Nazis won WWII, I could very well be writing this blog in German while eating sausage, cabbage and black break. Had Hitler won WWII and established a 1000-year Reign, I am certain that there would not be any Black Nazis!

When we look at the Great Wars, there was a rising tide of nationalism.  (In America, in the last ten years, there’s been a rising tide of white nationalism, and white nationalists are hinting at a second American Civil War, though it’s framed as a Racial Holy War, or RAHOW.)  White nationalism is the twin brother of white supremacy.  It has given us pseudo-theories such as “manifest destiny” and “the white man’s burden,” though people of color have shouldered the burdens and the building of America as we know it.

With Oktoberfest right around the corner, I will revisit this issue over sausage, cabbage and black bread, and wash it down with das Bier.

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Rereading Richard Wright’s Black Boy

Posted on July 12, 2024 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

When I first read Richard Wright’s Black Boy more than 40 years ago when I was a teenager, little that I knew about literature,  I thought the writing was superb.  I was doing a little writing then and thought Wright was a good writer to study to learn the craft.  I aspired to be Wright reincarnated, since I was born a month before he died!  Of course, then I didn’t appreciate or understand that Wright’s story gave me a peek into the life of my father as a Black boy growing up in the segregated South a generation after Wright was born.

My father was a Native Southern Son.  He was born in North Carolina and as a teenager, because of conflict with his father, left home and moved to Virginia.  At 18 years of age, he was drafted into the segregated U.S. Army to serve during World War II.  A couple of years after his discharge from the Army in 1946, my father made his way up North to New York City, to the borough of Brooklyn.  My father probably left the South for the same reasons as Wright.  I don’t know.  My father never talked about growing up in the segregated South, at least not to his children.  In fact, although my father was always present in our lives until his death, I can’t recall him saying three consecutive sentences.  You could say that he was the strong silent type.  Today we would probably ascribe his silence to trauma, the trauma of being born and growing up in the segregated South 61 years after the supposed end of the Civil War, 49 years after the end of Reconstruction, when Jim Crow, the quintessential American racist terrorist, haunted the lives of Black folk with unspeakable violence.  Nonetheless, every year, around the Fourth of July, from the early 1960s until his death in 1982, my father would get in his Cadillac and head down South to visit his family.  He never took any of his children South.  I resented him for this.  I didn’t understand that this was his way to protect me.  But as a tween and a teen I didn’t know about the lynching of Emmett Till a few short years after my father left the South, a few short years before I was born.  My father probably had images of “Strange Fruit” dancing in his head if he even entertained bringing his headstrong first-born son South.  (I didn’t grow up with a fear of white people.)  I often wonder why my father left the South.  I imagine him in his Army uniform and being threatened by white men, probably called “boy” or “nigger.”  And how he had to act in the face of this.  As Wright describes his dealings with white men, how he had to fall “quickly into that nigger-being-a-good-natured-boy-in-the-presence-of-a-white-man-pattern.”  Wright’s descriptions of his and Black folk’s dealings with white folk is haunting.  He describes “the dark fears” he had known all his life navigating the segregated South.

As an adult, visiting and navigating the “New South” long after my father had died, I marveled at the temerity of white folk to memorialize and celebrate its “lost cause” with monuments and statues of Confederate Rebels, of men who had engaged in treason.  The descendants of these treasonous Confederates dared to attack Black American soldiers in uniform who had fought in two world wars to make the world safe for democracy and to end all wars!  On the other hand, in this New South, white people appeared to be different, unlike their parents and grandparents.  When I was in Nashville, TN for a week, more white people smiled at me and greeted me more so than white people in New York City in a year.  Perhaps the new lynching was to kill with kindness.  But I knew that that atavistic violence of white men towards Black people could be triggered at any moment, for an insult, real or imagined, especially towards their womenfolk.

Many lynchings of Black men was because of an accusation, real or imagined, of a Black man assaulting, even “sassing,” a white woman.  What was it about them that brought white men’s temperature to boil and explode in violence?  Today we speak of Karens, and we know that they know that they have the power to conjure up violence against Black men seemingly out of thin air.  What was it about white women?

I recall rifling through a drawer of my father’s.  I came across a box of bullets, and a gun.  I held the gun in my hand and felt its power, giving me the power to take life.  I quickly put it back, not wanting to be corrupted by its power.  That was the only time I held a gun. Was it even legal?  Why would my father need a gun?  Was he haunted by white men who had run him out of the South?  Did they populate his dreams, chasing him until they caught and lynched him and riddled his dead body with bullets?  Were their womenfolk succubae?  With a little more rifling through my father’s drawer, I came across a photo viewer.  I put it up to my eye and saw a naked white woman.  There wasn’t anything special or spectacular about her.  How could she incite and inspire such violence against Black men?  Was this why my father had fled the South?  Did he hold secret fantasies about white women?  Had he wrongly approached one and had signed his own death warrant?

*************

Before I left Nashville, I stopped at a gift store and the smiling white woman clerk wearing clinging daisy dukes and decked out in a sleeveless blouse with the Confederate flag tried to sell me a Confederate flag.  There were all kinds of Confederate paraphernalia in the store.  Had I walked back in time?  There ought to be a law against selling this crap. But this is what it means to live in a “free country.”  You can celebrate and flaunt treason.  Not everything was Confederate. There were salt and pepper shakers of stereotypical Sambo and Mamie.  At least they were not dressed in Confederate garb, just a slave slip for Mamie, and short pants overalls for Sambo, their oversized lips looking like they had collagen injections.  I shook my head and bought a set to give to a coworker.  Because I am a storyteller, and my coworker would think I made this story up, I had to have evidence of this find.  As I left the Confederate gift shop, the white woman seductively smiled at me, even though I hadn’t bought a Confederate flag.  My purchase of the Mamie and Sambo salt and pepper shakers were enough.  I hadn’t left the gift store emptyhanded.  It was then the insidiousness of it all struck me.  For some white people, Black people existed for their sport or entertainment.  And the coup de grace, lynchings, were not only public spectacles, but they were also festivals and orgies of hate.

Looking back on that day in the Confederate gift store, it was even harder for me to imagine how Wright and my father navigated their way out of the segregated South.

Posted in being a teenager, Black patriotism, crime, Family, Fatherhood, Fathers, Growing Up, raising black boys, Relationships, Slavery | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

A Fourth of July Day Lynching

Posted on July 5, 2024 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

For Norris Dendy

07.04.1933

(Clinton, South Carolina)

To the Negro, what is the Fourth of July?

A picnic celebration with family and friends

Not a day to be beaten, not a day to die!

On this celebration of Independence,  still something to dread!

A picnic celebration with family and friends.

A Negro struck a white man, and thus he must die!

On this day of Independence,  still something to dread.

By the whims of white supremacy, all Negroes must abide!

A Negro struck a white man, and thus he must die;

Though not a day to be beaten, not a day to die.

By the whims of white supremacy, all Negros must abide.

To the Negro, what is the Fourth of July?

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