Of course this is not directed at all the younger activists…of whom I as an “old soldier” of the movement am very proud. But to the people that I keep running into who say that the people of the old civil rights movement did “nothing” ..or that we quit and didn’t do enough…one guy told me last night that if we meant anything back then cops wouldn’t still be shooting us , and we wouldn’t still be getting lynched…Well while we all know that racism continues …I humbly submit that the people who say that have no f**king idea what they are talking about. That they don’t know their history and have no idea just how bad things were. They don’t know what we have seen, they don’t have a clue about how many comrades we lost. And most of all don’t seem to understand how many of the things that are possible for them…were TOTALLY out of reach for us and the people who came before us. When I was a child one of the first things my uncles taught me was how to walk around town….”when a white person walks toward you on the sidewalk , you keep your head down”…”before you learn to read, learn the letter C and the letter W…cause if you don’t know what they mean you may not make it home that night” No matter how well educated you were unless you got a job teaching school you still could end up mopping someones floors..or that most sought after job of Blacks with a masters degree …being a mailman…One of the things that I didn’t even know was “new” was to see a sign outside that said ” a man was lynched yesterday” …and we saw that everyday….in NYC they even flew flags outside NAACP offices..That was something I at the time did not know was apart of a major victory of the generation that came before us…what me and my generation didn’t know is that just a few years before that ..anybody that put up a sign like that or flew a flag like that would have been burned out on the first day. I remember when you NEVER saw a Black person on a jury, the term “jury of your peers” meant nothing. I remember when the rednecks who sometimes were just as poor as us would play a game called “nigger baseball”…they could drive down the street and when they saw a black man walking down the street they would lean out of the car and smack him in the head with a baseball bat…..if you hit him you got to take a drink out of a bottle..nobody EVER went to jail for doing this. Oh yeah can we talk about where we had to sit on the bus, can we talk about how many stores had signs saying “WHITE ONLY”…or how if you were in many downtown parts of cities there was no place you could go to the bathroom…And we can talk all day about voting..And as far as cops still shooting us….when I think of how much myself and the sisters and brothers of the Black Panther Party had to go through…where the government openly declared war on us and tried to wipe us out HOW DARE YOU SAY WE DID NOTHING.I have to say at this point that one of the things I heard most from my comrades all the time ..was that our main goal was to make sure we were the last generation that had to learn to put up with this shit..Now it was not until I got older that I truly understood that my generation could only change the things we changed because of the things the the generation that came before us had done…the “anti-lynching” movement, and the people like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters …yeah, none of you know who that was.look them up…but in many ways you younger people as well as my generation owe those guys SO MUCH..because we would not have dared to have a civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s if those men and women had not taken a stand and risked their lives in the 20s and 30s…Younger activists …know that we love you all but know that my generation did not start this thing…and your generation won’t end it..and maybe your children’s generation won’t end it either ….but don’t be stupid…the “civil rights” generation..because we were the largest in number made more change for our people in a shorter time than any generation before us…we didn’t change everything….and you won’t either….but when we were out there….and I still am. I learned that we stood on the shoulders of giants…….you do too.
FILE – In this March 7, 1965 file photo, state troopers use clubs against participants of a civil rights voting march in Selma, Ala. At foreground right, John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, is beaten by a state trooper. The day, which became known as “Bloody Sunday,” is widely credited for galvanizing the nation’s leaders and ultimately yielded passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. (AP Photo/File)
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