FOR THE BROTHAS: CULTURE AND INTELLECTUALISM: BLACK MEN AND AMERICANISM: THE CLASSIC STRUGGLE FOR IDENTITY

Frederick Douglass my Historic Mentor

The Author

When I was a young idyllic collegian in my twenties I was very much the disillusioned but refocused intellectual who, having grown up in a privileged utopia suddenly realized my affluence was an affront to the very foundation of the flawed but established psychology of some Black peoples and the entire foundation and structure of the aesthetic we understood to be "Americanism.” From the perspective of the non black community and from the ranks of my own peoples… there was a great sense of conflict between the image of Black men and what was considered to be classical image of an American.

Booker T. Washington, Educator, Writer, Intellectual

Hearkening to the 1960s and 1970s when my world was alight with warm and positive imagery of Black Men not only in struggle but also accomplishment I was astounded to find that the rest of America had quite a different image of my kind, “The Black Man”, and I sought to both determine the nature of this misconception and also to establish and define myself positively in spite of it!

In the 1960's the image of the Black man as a militant, insurgent, angry and violent was projected
by media rather than the intellectualism that fueled his struggle for equality in America.
Black men were portrayed as Anti-American in spite of the fact that they, like every other
ethnic group in this country, fought a hard, diligent and nonviolent battle for their freedom and equality in America.
The bias against the Black man since slavery held him back from achieving true citizenship
and civil rights and his continued battle for these rights contradicted the American tradition
that rewarded hard work, excellence and struggle.
These rights seemed to be easily awarded to everyone but the Black man, and to newly arriving
populations and ethnicities which lacked the shared history
and tradition Blacks had endured in the long centuries of their oppression here.
The faces of Black men who were intellectuals, professionals and contributors to
American culture were suppressed in leiu of the negative images of Black
men as Anti-American icons!

One might say I was a young militant as a youth; I donned the gear of struggle collecting jewelry and artifacts of African origin rejecting anything, everything of American source….

Marcus Garvey's Pan African Liberation flag

Like many Afrocentric men I harbored a romantic desire to abandon America altogether and make a magical cultural connection with the vast world I envisaged as the “Motherland”! I buried myself in studies and research of African culture, history, art and anthropology and became a walking textbook for African Architecture and art… this was a briefly sustaining but ultimately unfulfilled adventure for me. It was during this time that I also began to necessarily stumble upon a passion for Black American history especially from the beginning of the 1600’s until roughly after the civil war, up until the First World War It was my exploration of this era that fundamentally changed my whole opinion and perspective of myself both as a man and also as an American.

Anthony Burns, Writer, Lecturer and Abolitionist

I had never thought of myself as an American before… My parents would not allow me to pledge allegiance to the American flag or sing the Star Spangled Banner… I came to view the stars and stripes as a colorful noose precipitously fitted around the neck and spirit of the Black man in America… My bitterness and regret of slavery and racism further separated me from any reconciliation with that image and ideal! I did not feel American in any way at all, rather… I felt betrayed but in the end I felt betrayed equally by America as I did Africa! The more apparent it became that my African ancestors willfully sold my Black American Ancestors into slavery the further I pushed away from the gilded shores of that primordial continent! Africa to me represented the ultimate lesson in “Betrayal”!

Harrison Samuel, Writer Lecturer and Abolitionist

While I did not personally blame my African colleagues for this centuries old treachery I did remind them of the awesome debt they owed Black Americans who had not only fully extricated themselves from the very belly of oppression but also had worked diligently on both continents so that Africans could come to America and reap the benefits of the Civil Rights Movement that we engineered! We were owed immensely in my eyes… Black men were the architects of modern equality forcing America to make good on the lofty egalitarian claims of the Declaration of Independence and we lit a virtual fire of freedom that spread to every corner of the world. For this global gift to mankind the Black man has never been adequately acknowledged in history... Proponents of the old order have quietly smoldered waiting for a chance to reverse this revolutionary evolution in human history. America has been the plantation in which the seeds of the Enlightenment, the egalitarian spirit of humanity, reversing Milena of oppression and tyranny has been playing out ever since The Revolutionary War. The first formidable challenge to this miracle of human cultural development was The American Civil War, ultimately put down in disgrace, the Union restored! Central to this war was the slave question and during the brief period of reconstruction Black men took their rightful places in congress and local government; they had been rightfully gifted status as bonafide Americans!

Ottubah Cugano AKA Gustav Vassa, Writer, Lecturer and Abolitionist

It was not until one night when I was writing a mournful poem about the forgotten legacy of my forefathers who had dies as slaves that I realized the absolute gravity of my birthright and heritage as an American. Well, my ancestors built this country on their backs, a free slave labor system enabled America to rise to global dominance less than 100 years after it had declared independence from England. For a small, struggling agrarian community this was quite an accomplishment but one owed in totality to the physical effort of the African American slave. My peoples were buried all over this country, unmarked, forgotten… their sweat and tears and blood fertilized the bread basket of this nation and in repayment they were demonized as lazy, shiftless and ignorant, incapable of contributing to the great tradition that we call America… But we now know this is far from truth! America was built upon the backbone of Black men! The history of their contributions remains largely buried and history texts educating Americans continue to ignore the extensive legacy of the Black man in America but the news media is all too quick to project a negative image as if Black men are the only ones committing crimes in These United States! America is all to quick to forget the horrors of slavery but slow to forgive the tenacious effort of Black men to rescue themselves from a hellacious system of racial oppression in this country. Africa became a romantic but far removed place for me. I did not speak the language nor was I raised as a citizen of the ancient cosmology of that place. In my opinion, the term "African American" referred to native Africans who became Americans and also to loosely include American born but African socialized citizens who spoke African languages and were thoroughly indoctrinated in the traditions of their ancestors. I was not African at all... I was thoroughly American, Black-American.

In the 1960's and 1970's The image of the Black man was largely communicated in product advertisements
designed to market his patronage. Many of these products such as Afro Sheen
aimed their ads at creating positive and wholesome images of Black men in America.

It was at this time that I wrote one of my favorite poems entitled, “A Piece of Africa” and it goes…

Everybody wants a piece of Africa,

Like a Fragment of the great Earth-Mother,

Knowing that, to put the pieces together… is to discover,

That Her Power…. Is Power!

I had just completed an architectural design for a sacred space while studying in The School of Architecture and Urban Planning at Hampton University based on my research of traditional African Architecture, religion and spirituality and it had been published in the American Institute of Architects Journal. The principal structure was domed, based on the mud structures of Cameroon, The Sudan and Tunisia, this was around 1986. A river was diverted onto the site, symbolically dividing the it into sacred and secular halves. But the river was further diverted to flow into the structure where a great square pit similar to the structures at Lalibella opened up with the water flowing down over the walls to a pool with a small island in the middle. A small door 50ft below led to a bridge connecting with the island. Like many African village compounds the complex was contained within a protective wall along which the ancillary buildings were organized leaving the sanctuary as the main focal point within the center of the campus. I chose the form of the dome, a hyperbolic parabola, because it was one of the most ancient architectural forms to be found in Africa. Ironically the Egyptians never built round or domed structures save for the granaries, a trad ition which had always intrigued and baffled me until I began to study sub-Saharan architecture realizing that the Egyptian culture moved from the south to the north Mediterranean accounting for the preservation of this common architectural form in the granaries of old, middle and new kingdom in Necropolises and Palace complexes. I was pleased that I had inaugurated a hybrid Afrocentrically styled architecture and commented on what I felt about the genre of Afrocentric Architecture in several published articles at the time. I battled my idealised Afrocentric theories with a European critic at Hampton University who could not wrap his head around the use of traditional African architectural forms in contemporary architecture, he clearly failed to realise that Borromini's design for the dome of the Cathedral of Milan was ultimately not his innovation at all but was a common form of structure to be found in contemporary African villages of the day. Nevertheless, the history books have erroneously credited him with this invention, and to this we attest the dome of St Paul's in London and even the dome of The Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.

Harpers Weekly often portrayed Black men as absurd carricatures in their series of engravings created during
the reconstruction period known as "Blackville" These images such as this one
portraying Black Congressmen and Legislators elected to offices during Reconstruction
show Black Officials as lazy and unkempt, unruly and riotous.
Publications such as this one which could have been largely instrumental in uplifting the image and status of
Black men by portraying them as sensible and credible intellectuals
have continued to ignore the large and growing population of Black intellectual men in America.

At this time I had moved to The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. School of Architecture and Urban Planning and having produced several interesting projects based on Neo-Egyptian, Beaux Arts design. There I resisted a critic who was less than enamored of my romantic stylistic and mannerist lotus and papyrus reed columns, propylon gates and such. I took my lead from the marvelous tradition of Beaux Arts Architecture on The National Mall designing a beautiful museum on the site of Hains Point across from one of my favorite McKim Meade and White structures on the campus of Fort McNair. For one of my final projects I made a departure to Olduvai Gorge exploring the simple and elegant style of the Masai of Tanzania. There, perched on the edge of The Great Rift Valley, in full view of the very site where Dr. and Ms. Leaky discovered the oldest fossil humanoid remains…. Australopithecus, Zinjanthropus… etc., etc., etc., I had finally closed the gap between America and Africa. This was America circa “Rodney King” and “O.J. Simpson”, so the racial fires were burning high across these United States… American had been hurtled into a right wing republican cultural regression ever since Ronald Reagan came into office in 1980. The image of the Black man in America was at an all-time low and the racist media of America unrelentingly pounded the image of the most ignorant, destitute and depraved Black men into the consciousness of the world in order to justify its racist attack on the social advances of The Civil Rights Movement the same as it had done in order to justify slavery and Jim Crow and the Klu Klux Klan and Neo Nazi movements in America. This was a time when young black intellectuals could be detained anywhere any time on the street, at the airport, at the train depot in our own neighborhoods. This was a time when other Black male intellectuals such as myself shared countless stories of encounters with racist and aggressive police who profiled us only to discover that not only were we better educated, and socially connected than they but that we also would not tolerate their ignorance and met it head on and won! For those who remember, moving back to the 1980's the presidency of Ronald Reagan gave inspiration to a great number of White Supremest, Neo Nazi, Evangelical and other extremist groups. During this time I personally attended several Anti-Klan Rallies chanting, "Reagan and the Klan go hand and Hand! Being an enlightened, intellectual Black man in America has been a difficult task to sustain… but I have persevered if not only because I fully understand the full weight of responsibility that lay upon my head, to rectify the suffering and inhumanity endured by centuries of noble and intelligent Black men who died not ever knowing the taste of freedom and equality!

Pamphlets such as these were sold and circulated during Abolitionist Lecture Tours

I remember the very first sentence I spoke to my classes in the fall, my introduction speech and it went something like this:

“I am here because I have to be here, because of a debt I owe to my ancestors who were not as fortunate as me. I have a torch to pass on to you and a gift and that gift is knowledge. Do not doubt the power of my conviction or it will be your undoing in this class, know that while I am here to enlighten you and help you that any of you who come between me and my mission will be dealt with by any means necessary! Now you have heard this expression used before in reference to the honorable Malcolm X. but you have no comprehension of how swiftly I will remove you from my path should you become an obstacle to my mission. Know that my mission is to fill every mind in this class that is open, with knowledge regardless of race or sex or any other variable! If I should discover that your mind is not open and that you interfere in the enrichment of other minds you will be removed!. Know also that whenever such time comes that your mind is become open again to the wisdom and knowledge I have to give you, you may join this class again!”

The Offices of Frederick Douglass' newspaper, "The North Star"
Businesses such as this one kept Black intellectuals, writers and
technicians working and they popularized the positive image of the Black man
as an intellectual.

One of the most difficult tasks in my life was teaching young Black males, males who had not had any positive and strong male role model in their life. The urban classroom is a battlefield and the Black male is always the one with the most casualties. Their notions of manhood are half-baked and corrupt, absent of the full body of wisdom handed down from generations of men and gentlemen… it is truly sad. As a young Black male intellectual I represented the antithesis of everything they had imagined a Black man to be! I challenged their status quo for evaluating the very nature of manhood. I represented a powerful man, shaped and molded my father who was born into a poor family but entered college at the age of 16 as did my mother and became a powerful and respected pillar of his community professionally and socially. He groomed me into that same man, strong, wise, tenacious and humane… an intellectual in my own right! Committed to the furtherance of justice, equality and to the preservation and celebration of the great tradition of Black American men!

Images of Black men during the 1960's riots always pitted against the
arm of law enforcement which was always seen as
holding him back from his self determination in America by the use
of brute force.
The misconception of Black men as naturally violent and rioutous stems
from the Black Codes, Jim Crow and other operant conditioning tactics set into
the law to suppress and subdue Black men.

It was not until my late thirties that I truly began to fully appreciate that I was a bonafide American. Suddenly my interest in all things African, though still there shifted to my American legacy. I dove into every history book and visited every historic site that directly or indirectly involved the shaping of the image and intellectual legacy of Black men in America, I searched the lyrics of Blues and Jazz songs as a wellspring of commentary of the Black man on his condition in America. My search for the meaning of manhood and Americanism were parallel paths…

Today, without any reservation at all I fully acknowledge that I am in fact an American, dyed in the wool, bonafide, vested by the suffering and contribution of my ancestors who received nothing but hatred and oppression for their gifts to this country. I begrudge no one these gifts, though they were taken from them with pure malice but hold in me an assurance so deep, and so inspiring so as to transcend the deeds of another day that history has rectified or is in the continual process of rectifying… This is my country, when I walk over its fields I feel the spirit of my ancestors underfoot… When I walk along its shores I feel the anguish of men and women who died yearning to return to homes from which they were stolen… they linger upon these shores bending their will to the motherland… the sea is a powerful grave for countless millions of my peoples… nothing but a sigh is left… the seas have forgotten them the waves carry new messages of hopefulness now that the carnage is done. I will never forget the way my people have been treated in America, my home, my country… it is a bittersweet partnership but history has healed these wounds in a miraculous way, it has bought black and white peoples together in one common struggle in spite of the odds as Robert Frost said… “And that has made all the difference”!

Today I tell you that I am a Black man and I am also an American Man…