- I have read the first twenty-five pages of this 100 pages this pamphlet and it still speaks with pertinency to issues we still confront today. The one constant of the African American experience in America has been our unenviable position wherein revolution, our natural moral right, means suicide, repatriation is practically impossible, and economic independence is also impossible. From the efforts of Paul Cuffie in 1815 to return us to Africa, the settlement of Liberia, with American government support in 1820, to the Black Star Line of Marcus Garvey a century later repatriation failed.
- David Walker tried to spark revolt with his Appeal in 1829 and Martin Delaney with his Pan African revolutionary novel Blake in 1854. These efforts in America came to life but failed with the hanging of Nat Turner in 1831 and Denmark Vesey in 1822 after unsuccessful slave rebellions. The Nation of Islam tried economic independence with their conservative mix of religion and Black capitalism. I still miss their Steak and Take cheese steak sandwiches, their Shabbaz bean pies and spicy beef sausages.
- They ultimately were crushed by government infiltration, an unsustainable mythology and organizational corruption. What are we left with, a society that loves what we create but hates us. As Derrick Bell wrote in the 1980s America is a leaky boat that may be heading towards a waterfall. It does not make sense for us to get in the water no matter how pessimistic our future looks. James Weldon Johnson could look forward, as did Martin Luther King, to a dream of integration. Like Derrick Bell, Thurgood Marshall and that generation who struggled to tear down de jure segregation we know that the dream of an integrated America was an illusion, a phantom that led us forward. Johnson understood clearly the choices we face but like us, seventy-five years later we have no real answer or clearly attainable strategy for our salvation in the belly of America.
John H. Armwood
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