Destination: Overcome
How far do we have to go?
By Michael Tyler, EJS Poet-in-Residence
Fifty years after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, a minister named Jesse Moorland and a historian named Carter G. Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, in September of 1926. To put a concentrated focus on the experiences and exploits of that history, the organization sponsored a national Negro History Week, during the second week of February, coinciding with the birthdays of the two most pivotal figures for African Americans during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionist Frederick Douglas. Fifty years later, in 1976, that week had become a month-long observance and celebration acknowledged across the country.
Black history, like all history, tracks and measures the progression of people, culture and society through time, marking stages of advancements against phases of declines, the difference between the two being the distance of development, improvement and headway made by humankind, our kind. For African Americans, advancement has long been a variable factored by one word: overcome. The assessment of its value has and still remains the answer to one question: When will we? From the larcenous and barbarous Middle Passage voyage across the Atlantic, to the death-defying and covert paths of the Underground Railroad, to the perilous and courageous marches across this nation’s streets and to its capital city, “Overcome” has been the destination pursued by the African American journey in America.
A Chinese proverb from Lao Tzu instructs, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” The steps walked by shackled legs and liberated limbs have been trekking our distance for more than four centuries. In 2008, that trek reached a milestone previously considered unthinkable. African Americans, along with all Americans, walked beyond the barbed-wired, boobytrapped and barricaded racial line of demarcation to the Oval Office for the first time in history, with the election of Senator Barack Obama as the country’s first African American president.
The improbability of that moment was readied by the social evolution, cultural conversion, political alignment and generational succession occurring during the advent of the new millennium. The historic nature of President Obama’s campaign was another step taken on the long meandering and mendacious road of race relations, with the hope of moving society closer to the truth and reconciliation intersection of White American accountability and Black American actualization.
That step, added to the millions of steps taken by millions of people over the centuries, boldly lunged towards shortening the distance between the promises of egalitarian idealism noted in our nation’s charters and the realization of living with equal recognition in every venue of society, by every citizen. Now, as we are faced with the renewed, vehement vigor of bigotry and the blatant usurping of the democratic norms and principles that have been staff and compass for our journey, African Americans are faced with another question in our quest for the promised land of Overcome. Just how far have we come and how much further must we go?
A mile across the social, cultural, political and economic landscape of a nation’s character varies greatly from a geographical mile across its terrain. Movement across perspectives, attitudes and indoctrinations is paced more by the creeps and crawls of tectonic plates, than by the dashes and sprints of humanitarian ambition. How far has America moved along its “thousand mile” journey for an egalitarian society? Five miles.
That may seem like an incredibly insignificant distance given the enormous significance accredited to Obama’s presidency, especially when considering the relatively brief historical time lapse between Governor George Wallace’s 1963 acceptance speech protestation, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.”, and President Barack Obama’s 2008 inauguration address oration, “On this day, we have gathered because we have chosen hope over fear…”. However, a brief historical perspective shows just how extraordinary a distance this has been, and the tremendous effort required to overcome the obstinate obstacle of racism. It also foretells of the incredibly grand fate and destiny that lies ahead for our nation, should we ever endeavor to collectively stride, with unifying zeal, to meet the thousand-mile marker.
The first mile began with the European transatlantic slave trade aboard the White Lion, a Dutch merchant ship delivering the first captive Africans to Virginia as slaves, in 1619, a year before the Mayflower landing. Steps to freedom began with slave revolts like the Stono Rebellion of 1739 and Nat Turner’s uprising of 1831. Spiritual anchors were dropped in 1754 with the establishment of Mt. Pisgah AME Church in New Jersey, and in 1816 when Bishop Richard Allen created the first wholly African American denomination. A cobblestone was laid in 1832, with the formation of the Female Anti-Slavery Society, the first Black Women’s abolitionist organization. During that period, enslaved Africans were made to fight for the American Revolution, beginning in 1775, while never being shown the road to freedom. A way was mapped out of no way, with the charting and plotting of the Underground Railroad in 1820 and by the first National Negro Convention in 1830. Our purpose stepped forward to realize the publication of Freedom’s Journal in 1827 — the first black-owned newspaper, followed by such abolitionist newspapers as William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator in 1831, and Frederick Douglas’ North Star in 1847. Two years later, in 1849, Harriet Tubman escaped to freedom, before going on to guide more slaves out of bondage. Our walk grew more hazardous with the Cincinnati Riots of 1829, igniting a rash of big city violence against blacks across the country for decades to come. Our courage remained unwavering. Despite legal obstruction and lethal opposition to our education, we opened doors to Cheyney University, the nation’s first HBCU, in 1837. We cleared the undertow of the Amistad case in 1841; insisted on being recognized by Sojourner Truth in her 1851 “Aren’t I A Woman” address; persevered beyond the setback of the Dred Scott decision in March of 1857; and fought with self-determined valor on the bullet-strewn battlefields of the Civil War from 1861-1865. The last slave ship to America, the Clotilda, arrived in 1860, and the last of us to be notified to join the journey happened in June of 1865, with the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas. As the nation peered forward to envision its Reconstruction, it took sight of the first mile marker — the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery, in December of 1865.
The second mile turned onto a perilous path in 1865, as a paramilitary group established in Tennessee to enforce white supremacy, began to line the route — the Ku Klux Klan. Two months later, in February of 1866, Tennessee enacted the first Jim Crow laws in the South. In response, the Civil Rights Act in April of 1866 sought to issue a statutory passport for safe passage, by establishing that all persons born in America are citizens. It was also in that year, that the U.S. Army formed the 10th Cavalry Regiment, the first all-black military unit — the Buffalo Soldiers. In 1867, within a month apart, Morehouse College and Howard University were founded to yield more navigators for the many miles to come. Despite passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, granting citizenship to any person born or naturalized in the United States, the intimidation of lynchings remained and the legally sanctioned “separate but equal” apartheid of Plessy v. Ferguson was upheld in 1896. As improbable as it must have been, Hiram Revels became the first Black U.S. Senator in history in 1870, one month before the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified to enfranchise Black men. In 1881, both Spellman College and Tuskegee Institute enrolled their first students. Through this mile, we were greeted by luminaries like Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells, Paul Robeson, Jack Johnson and Adam Clayton Powell. Scott Joplin created ragtime music in 1899, to quicken our pace. In 1900, the first “Brothers Johnson”, James Weldon and Rosamond, performed Lift Every Voice And Sing. We saw the founding of the Chicago Defender in 1905, and the creation of both the NAACP and the National Urban League, from 1909-1910. Jack Johnson showed us how to fight in the ring of injustice, becoming the first Black heavyweight champion of the world. We moved beyond the Red Summer, the Omaha, Elaine and Chicago race riots of 1919, and the Tulsa massacre in 1921. We streamed by the 1915 cinematic release of D.W. Griffiths, The Birth of a Nation, and trooped into World War I in 1917, 370,000 in number. The Negro League began playing baseball in 1920 with eight teams, coinciding with our intellectual and cultural revival during the Harlem Renaissance. Our numbers swelled to 1.2 million, when called to serve the nation during World War II, from 1939-1945. And we triumphantly cleared the denigrating hurdle of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, with Jesse Owens’s four-gold medal effort in the 1936 Olympics, and with the valiant fighter pilot heroics of the Tuskegee Airmen. We took instructions on where to turn from Marcus Garvey. In 1940, we witnessed Hattie McDaniel becoming the first African American to win an Academy Award. We followed that road less traveled during the Great Migration, leading us from the Jim Crow south to the northern and midwestern cities of opportunity, between 1910-1940. By 1945, we were able to read the first issue of Ebony Magazine. In 1946, Kenny Washington became the first Black player to run the gridiron in the NFL. As he dashed towards the two mile-marker a year later, he passed the baton to his former UCLA teammate in 1947, as Jackie Robinson stepped onto Ebbets Field for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and crossed the color line in baseball.
Mile three was met by President Truman and his 1948 Executive Order 9981 to end segregation in the Armed forces, though we had to wait thirteen years before the U.S. Army announced it would desegregate. The Supreme Court helped to clear an obstacle from our path, when it ruled against racially restrictive housing covenants in 1948, though redlining continued. We saw Gwendolyn Brooks become the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize, in 1950. That same year, Earl Lloyd took the court as the first Black player in the NBA. In 1952, Ralph Ellison helped us to be seen, when he published his seminal work, The Invisible Man. James Baldwin followed in 1953 with his first novel, Go Tell It On The Mountain. Another hurdle was cleared in 1954, as Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka struck down the injustice of the “separate but equal” doctrine. The laurel for that feat — the slaying of Emmett Till in 1955. In 1956, Harry Belafonte released Calypso, the first album to sell a million copies. We followed our sherpas: Fannie Lou Hammer, Medgar Evers, Ralph Bunche, Dr. Anna Hedgeman, Ruby Bridges, Ralph Abernathy, Diane Nash, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Bayard Rustin. We took to the streets with Rosa Parks for the Montgomery Bus Boycott only again to encounter another barrier, as the Little Rock Nine crossed paths with Orville Faubus in 1957. Barry Gordy founded Motown Records in 1959, providing us with a cultural soundtrack for generations to come. The Freedom Riders, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and John Lewis ushered us beyond lunch counter sit-ins, the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963, voter suppression, and the attack dogs and fire hoses of Bull Connor. Cassius Clay, later to be named Muhammad Ali, dealt a knockout to injustice by winning his first heavyweight championship against Sonny Liston, in February of 1963. Later that year in August, our spirits were lifted to carry on by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s soaring I Have A Dream address at the Lincoln Memorial, and then dashed by the traumatizing assassination of President Kennedy. In April of 1964, Sidney Poitier became the first African American to win an Oscar for Best Actor. In June of 1964, Malcolm X founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity, one week after three civil rights workers were slain by white supremacists, later immortalized in the 1988 film, Mississippi Burning. One month later in July, we stood at mile marker three with victorious redemption, as President Johnson enacted the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.
On mile four, we continued to follow the road sign posted by Dr. King winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. We saw new pavement laid when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission came into existence. But again, we were taken to the murderous backroads of bigotry when Malcolm X was shot to death in February of 1965, and the “Bloody Sunday” confrontation at the Edmund Pettus Bridge erupted one month later, followed by the riots in Watts that lasted for six days in August. We kept moving and climbed a hill to see Robert Weaver become the first African American appointed to a cabinet position in 1965. In August of that year, The Voting Rights Act was signed into law. A year later, The Black Panther Party came into existence. In June of 1967, we crossed a racial divide when the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. the State of Virginia, rendering all miscegenation laws unconstitutional. A day later, President Johnson appointed Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, to become the first African American to serve as a justice. Then the earthquake struck. In April of 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was slain at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The magnitude was crumbling. The fissures, soul-splitting. We fell but rose to carry on, with the raised fist resolve of Angela Davis, Tommie Smith and John Carlos. In that year, we also watched Sidney Poitier star in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner; and Nichelle Nichols kiss William Shatner on an episode of Star Trek, to make the first interracial kiss on American television; and Arthur Ashe became the first African American to win the U.S. Open; and Shirley Chisholm became the first African American woman elected to Congress. We took one of many such moments in our history in 1969, to lay Fred Hampton and Mark Clarke to rest, and later Phillip Lafayette and James Green in 1970, from the Jackson State killings. We received inspiration and instruction from the matriarchs of our literature: Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Nikki Giovanni. In 1971, Johnson Products became the first Black company listed on the NYSE, and Beverly Johnson became the first Black woman to appear on the cover of a major fashion magazine. In 1973, teenagers held a back-to-school party in the Bronx with DJ Kool Herc and gave us the birth of hip-hop. In 1974, Hank Aaron dethroned Babe Ruth as the homerun king. In 1976, Professor Carter G. Woodson established Black History Month. Everyone gathered around their television sets in 1977, for Alex Haley’s Roots. In 1980, BET launched and eventually made Robert Johnson the first African American billionaire. In 1986, the nation celebrated Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday, for the first time. A hairpin turn later, General Colin Powell was appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1989, before we encountered the sinkhole of Clarence Thomas, when he became the second African American appointed to the Supreme Court, in 1991. The following year, the Rodney King race riots ran us off the road but we rerouted ourselves for the stars, flying to stratospheric heights when Mae Jemison became the first African American woman to travel into space. Upon her landing, a meteor struck the social landscape of the nation, marking the fourth mile with the trial of the century: The People v. O.J. Simpson.
The fifth mile began with us quite literally walking in the Million Man March of 1995, and the Million Woman March of 1997. In that year, Tiger Woods became the first African American to win The Masters. White America reminded us of its discontent regarding his achievement in 1998, when it tied James Byrd, Jr. to a pickup truck and dragged him to his death in Jasper, Texas. We healed and strode on to see Serena Williams become the first African American woman, since Althea Gibson in 1958, to win the U.S. Open in 1999. Two years later in January of 2001, General Colin Powell accepted an appointment to become Secretary of State, as did Condoleezza Rice to become National Security Advisor, the first African Americans to hold those cabinet posts. In September of that year, tragedy struck the homeland, as planes slammed into the Twin Towers of New York and into the Pentagon. That day, 267 African Americans lost their lives. Amongst them was Leroy Homer, copilot of Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania. In January of 2003, Senator Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the U. S. Senate and was brilliantly revealed to the nation via his keynote address, at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. That same year, he won his bid to the Senate and became only the fifth African American to serve in that legislative branch, a feat first achieved by Hiram Rhodes Revels 138 years earlier. In June of 2008, Senator Obama secured enough delegates from the primaries to become the presumptive nominee of a major political party. In August of 2008, he accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination and became the first African American to earn that distinction from a major political party, in our nation’s history. On November 4, 2008, the fifth mile marker was reached, with Barack Obama becoming the first African American president in our nation’s history. Advancing on, in 2009, Eric Holder became the first African American U.S. Attorney General. But the mudslides, boulders, ditches and fallen trees continued to line our path, as voting rights protections and affirmative action came under increasing assault. Along the way, we had to take time to say their names, as we laid to rest many who were taken from the march: Trayvon Martin, Keith Briscoe, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Tanisha Anderson, Laquan McDonald, Freddie Gray, Breonna Taylor, Eric Cole, Tyre Nichols, Angela Carr, A.J. Laguerre, Jr., Jerrald Gallion. The light in our lanterns dimmed but remained lit. In 2013, Black Lives Matter picked up the torch, when it began with Alicia Garza’s Facebook post, A Love Letter To Black People. We continued our pursuit of justice in 2015, when Loretta Lynch was sworn in as the first African American woman named as the U.S. Attorney General. Two months later, nine African Americans lost their lives at the Charleston Church Massacre. With the opening of the Smithsonian African American Museum in 2016, we renewed our spirit and were further emboldened by the bending-knee protest of Colin Kaepernick. As we trudged through the darkness of the Trump Administration, felt through the fog of a global pandemic, waded through the murky gloom of Ahmaud Arbery and stormed through the loathsome midnight of George Floyd, we kept pace behind Stacey Abrams. We saw Juneteenth become a national holiday, and we said “Yes!” when Kamala Harris became the first Black woman to be called Vice President, and we raised our hands to swear in Ketanji Brown Jackson, as the first African American woman to serve on the Supreme Court.
This is the distance we have come. We are but a few yards into our quest of the sixth-mile marker. Our journey to complete the 1,000-mile distance will continue to encounter potholes, dead ends, roadside vandals, collapsed bridges, steep trails, floods, storms and avalanches before we reach the mountain top Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of. We must endeavor to endure the climb, if we are ever to breathe the rare air of Overcome. We cannot slow. We cannot falter. We cannot quit. Journey on.