Freedom Days (excerpts)

January 1

January 1, the day of Faith, Imani. The day of beginnings and endings. The first day of the new year; the seventh and final day of Kwanzaa: a day to believe with all our hearts in our people, our teachers, the righteousness and victory of our struggle. And so it has been on this Freedom Day, in the tradition of our African-American ancestors, along each leg of our sojourn to resurrected pride. In the United States and in international law, January 1, 1808, marked the end of the “legal” slave trade, the first fruits of justice over the most powerful and profitable international cartel of its day.   From that tangible victory, the beginnings of a viable African liberation, or emancipation, movement grew. That January 1 became our first Thanksgiving Day, so proclaimed by ex-slave and cofounder of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, Absalom Jones. Fifty-five years later, ex-slave, Underground Railroad conductor, and civil war strategist, Frederick Douglass, would achieve confirmation on paper of what was true by nature: the Emancipation Proclamation. January 1, 1863 marked the legal end of slavery, the beginning of making freedom reality. On January 1, 1956, Sudan became the first African nation to retake its independence and it was not naïve, as Malcolm X said, to think “the same hand that has been writing on the wall in Africa… is also writing on the wall right here in America.” Freedom Now! African-Americans reasserted on January 1, 1963, as the post-Emancipation century drew to a close at the height of the Civil Rights era. James Baldwin put the period and its objective into perspective: “You know and I know,” he wrote to his nephew, “that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon…. [But you come from] men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets.” And so we had come this far by faith. 1936-1976: the age of Civil Rights, the age of liberation in the African Diaspora. These were our Freedom Days. . . . Date: Sunday, January 1, 1956 Place: Sudan, North Africa

Topic: Kwanzaa/Imani

Theme: Faith

February 1

In Selma, Alabama, each volunteer had a story to tell, like this one about an elderly man: We went up to the registrar, and as he began to write in a very unsteady way… the registrar said, “Now, you’re going across the line, old man. You failed already, you can’t register, you can’t vote, you just as well get out of line.” The old man looked at him and said, “I own a hundred and forty acres of land. I’ve got ten children who are grown and many of them are in a field where they can help other people. I’ve got a man who’s a preacher and a man who’s a teacher… and I took these hands that I have and made crops to put them through school. If I am not worthy of being a registered voter, then God have mercy on this city.” That man, like most, was never registered. Added to registrars, another deterrent was Sheriff James Clark. A photo of his arrest of Amelia Boynton (see January 19) was national news. Now Clark was news again. Asked why so few Blacks were allowed to register, Clark boasted to the press that it was “largely because of their mental IQ.” But when a similar question was posed to the judge who issued an order banning meetings of more than three Blacks at a time, it was the judge’s intelligence that came into question. Judge James Hare explained that Blacks couldn’t vote because, “You see, most of your Selma Negroes are descended from the Ebo and Angola tribes of Africa. You could never teach or trust an Ebo back in slave days, and even today I can spot their tribal characteristics. They have protruding heels, for instance.” Knowing the power of nonviolence to bring out a segregationist’s true nature, one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s goals was to expose Clark and company. “In the name of decency,” he counted on “Americans of conscience” to call for federal aid. On February 1, 1965, Clark arrested Dr. King as per King’s strategy. In 1963, his inspired “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (see April 16) had proven so effective that he wrote “Letter from a Selma Jail” before his planned arrest. Its publication as a New York Times ad on February 5, 1965 coincided with his release from jail.

Date: Monday, February 1, 1965

Place: Alabama, USA

Topic: Voter Registration

Theme: Determination

March 1

It seemed the end of the Civil Rights-era “second Reconstruction” had come even before it had fully begun. On March 1, 1967, by a vote of 307 to 116, the House of Representatives expelled Harlem’s Adams Clayton Powell Jr. Charged with high absenteeism and defaming the character of a known “bag woman” (numbers runner), the fiery Powell had long been a thorn in the Establishment’s Achilles’ heel, and the House seized upon the opportunity afforded by his mishaps. Powell just wouldn’t be “a Negro.” Well-educated, he was uppity and unapologetic, handsome and charismatic. He loved the nightlife almost as much as his day job as an activist/reformer. A man of privilege, he led the Depression-era “Buy-Where-You-Can-Work” Boycott on segregated stores in Harlem. His celebrity marriage to jazz singer/pianist Hazel Scott caused a stir, so did his sermons as one of the most riveting Baptist preacher/orators of his day. As the first northern Black congressman, he refused to demure in the face of segregation; rejecting racial bans on House facilities, he encouraged his staff to do the same. Best of all, his Committee on Education and Labor passed more legislation than any other committee in the House. Desegregating the military, ending Jim Crow travel, a new child welfare law, upgrading the minimum wage, Manpower: all these were credited to Powell. Born forty-three years after Emancipation, he was the grandson of a slave. At the age of ten, he saw his grandfather’s slave brand. That memory had motivated him for life. Six weeks after Powell’s expulsion, Harlem returned him to Congress. The special election established the right of a district – and of a people, given the fact that there were only five African-Americans in this pre-Voting Rights-era Congress – to choose its own leaders. By 1969, the Supreme Court concurred. But the damage had been done. Powell (and a nation of under-represented Blacks) had lost his seniority, his committee chairmanship, and his place in line of succession to the presidency. A twenty-four-year veteran and the ranking majority leader, he had been third in line.

Date: Wednesday, March 1, 1967

Place: New York, USA

Topic: Politics

Theme: Character