Easy Waters

My earliest political memory is of Dr. King’s assassination. I was 7 years old. I didn’t understand the enormity or impact of his death. All I knew, as a child, using the adults’ sentiments as a barometer, was that the world we knew had changed, forever, and in some ways had remained the same; and that there were some in society who wanted the world to stay the same or not be too far removed from slavery and segregation.

As the son of a father born in the segregated South in 1926, a father who, despite his very young age, enlisted and served in the segregated U.S. Army during World War II, this history and struggle was alive in the life of my father who ended up in New York to escape the legacy of slavery, segregation, and to live a better life, that pursuit of a better life as proclaimed by the forefathers of this nation.

Dr. King’s assassination was one more death in a long line of deaths, even more evidence that the pursuit of those American ideals came with a price, that one simply couldn’t walk into a store with this promissory note and think that it would be honored; that the pursuit of liberty might even cost one his or her life.

As we remember and honor the life and legacy of Dr. King, we should not forget his enormous courage and steadfastness to the principles of nonviolence, that is, he was a man that proclaimed how he would fight this struggle, that it would be fought through the principles of non-violence, and he never wavered from those principles.

Today, with the upcoming presidential election in November, candidates proclaiming this and that should look at the life and legacy of Dr. King, his courage, his steadfastness, his belief that America could be better if everyone lived up to her ideals.

At the Halsey Street train station in Brooklyn, four teenagers are shackled and seated on the hard wooden bench. Two police officers in plainclothes, who do not look like cops, stand near the youth. One is on his walkie-talkie. The other stands watch. I look at the teenagers, not knowing why they are shackled and seated on the bench, but they are smiling, saying something that evokes laughter. I want to tell the plainclothes officers to tighten the cuffs, to bring some pain if not gravity to the situation. I hate seeing youth shackled. I hate seeing that being shackled is not taken seriously, and even evokes laughter from those in shackles.

The sun is shining brightly. Sitting in Dunkin Donuts this morning on a high stool, looking out the window where the sun is shining in onto Halsey Street, right off Broadway, in Brooklyn, USA, eating an everything bagel, slightly toasted, with cream cheese. Brought my own drink, green tea. There are no Starbucks in this neighborhood so Dunkin Donuts will have to do, to sit and jot down notes.

A cop cruiser, carrying two of New York’s Finest, pulls into a No Standing Anytime zone. One of the policemen exits the cruiser and enters Dunkin Donuts. He has on sunglasses and enters with a swagger, stands in a line of about ten people waiting for their Dunkin Donuts fix.

Shortly, the cop gets his order and exits Dunkin Donuts with his coffee and donuts, gets into the cruiser and speeds away. To fight crime or to find a nice safe street to eat their donuts? What is it with cops and donuts? The sugar rush? I always thought it was about the thrill of the chase in crime-fighting that they got their rush.

Today is the 40th Anniversary of the Attica Rebellion. For far too many, it is an event not remembered, and is overshadowed by 9-11, the 10th Anniversary of 9-11. But when it happened, in September of 1971, the repercussions of it reverberated not only in New York but across the country as well as the world. At that point and time in history, it was the bloodiest rebellion in American prison history, and it forced America to take a hard look at its prison systems and institute some fundamental reforms.

Attica symbolized many things, but I want to write briefly about something that existed in 1971 that does not exist in 2011. Then, there was this inside/outside connection, that is, political movements on the outside were connected to political movements on the inside. Now, prisons are for the most part apolitical, though there is the politics of crime and punishment. The NAACP, the Black Panther Party, Workers groups, etc., were involved in some shape, form or fashion in prison, in a political context, because it was a political era and people saw the connection between the inside and the outside. And there was a degree of solidarity between those on the inside and those on the outside. The insiders had not yet become the hated “other.” It was somewhat more obvious then that the criminal justice system was being used as a tool of social control. When Richard Nixon stated that Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was lawless, and declared a “war on crime,” it was so obviously connected to the uprisings in our urban areas, most notably after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Prisons were political. If you were in prison then, you got a political education, a political education that went beyond basic civics.

I remember reading Tom Wicker’s account of the Attica Rebellion, “A Time to Die,” and was deeply disappointed when Wicker wrote about a quote from one of the banners of the Attica Brothers in the yard and didn’t know it was from a famous poem. Maybe it’s because I’m a poet, but I automatically recognized the famous words from Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die,” which was written after the Black Summer of 1919, when Whites stormed into Black neighborhoods and killed innocent Black people. McKay wrote, “If we must die let it not be like hogs, hunted and penned in an inglorious spot….”

Today, let us remember, and hope that not one life was taken in vein.

Let us remember…