Political Pimps

        Last night on a radio program I was asked to share my thoughts about today’s black leaders. I responded that in the past we had authentic black leaders who were freedom fighters; people who would lay down their lives for the cause. Today we have a lot of political pimps posing as freedom fighters, whose deepest desire has little to with the liberation of the masses , and more to with economic and  celebrity status. This may be fine for personal upward mobility, but it does nothing to liberate the masses.

I remember many years ago, wearing overalls and marching behind a mule,  alongside SCLC leaders like Golden Frinks and Hosea Williams.  Many of today’s leaders wear designer suits while only  pretending  to lead the masses from limousines and expensive hotel ballrooms. Most of these people were tried and tested in the early day s of the struggle, but seem to have become blinded by the bright lights of their own personal success.

Where Have All The Leaders Gone

  

I believe that the greatest hope for a brighter future for inner city youth and ending gang violence is for our leaders to first acknowledge, and then take steps to remove, the psychological chains of slavery. It’s time to call a spade a spade. It is self-hatred that has given rise to self-destruction and dysfunctional behavior in the inner cities of America. That self-hatred has its roots in the psychological trauma of slavery. As evidenced by significant population of successful African Americans, the psychological chains of slavery have been broken for most. For others, not so much.

For many, the pain and humiliation of indentured servitude, along with the separation of families during slavery, has left a lasting and ongoing legacy that has for far too long, been overlooked. In most cases, a defining legacy that has seldom been openly addressed. Therefore, without realizing it we have passed down from generation after generation, a legacy of inferiority and self-hatred.

Young people who hate themselves don’t have a problem hating others , or killing someone. They hate themselves because subconsciously, they believe in their minds, that in the eyes of society they aren’t good enough, that they aren’t equal. They don’t feel empowered to determine their own destiny. Therefore to them life has very little meaning. It’s kill or be killed.

We need to find ways to empower our youth. We need leadership that will subscribe to that fact. We need an army of courageous leaders to not only identify viable solutions to this problem, but also to lead a mentally enslaved peopled to the Promised Land, where self-hatred, hopelessness and fear are non-existent.

But where can we find such leadership? It seems that our most introspective and talented leaders have fled to a safe haven in the plush surroundings of  suburbia, leaving behind so many who so desperately need to bear personal witness to  the successful achievements of people who look like them. It is selfish not to acknowledge where you came from, and it is insensitive not to be willing to lead to freedom those you have left behind. Yet I understand all too well your reluctance to look back. You have little or no desire to return from whence you came, especially when your most vivid memories are rooted in desperation and hopelessness. You somehow beat the odds, you played by the rules and made it to suburbia vowing to never return to the bowels of that slave ship from which you so desperately fled.

Honoring Mothers of the Wilmington Ten

              

The Mothers of Wilmington Ten

  

The Wilmington Journal had had just been bombed. My mother had been sitting at the kitchen table with a young civil rights leader named Ben Chavis. Suddenly the plates on the table rattled from the concussion of a loud blast around the corner from the house. With my mother leading the way, they rushed out of the door toward the sound of the explosion. As they approached ground zero, they found a shocked Tom Jervay Sr., standing in front of the building he owned. The iconic structure which stood in heart of black Wilmington, had just been blown to smithereens. It had been home to the cities’ black newspaper, The Wilmington Journal.

The 1973 bombing had come in the wake of racial hostilities that had begun in 1968 with the closing of the city's only black high school. Mr. Jervay had been the voice of the black community throughout the turmoil. No doubt, the bombing was a not-so-subtle attempt to muffle the resounding sound of Jervay’s constant drumbeat for justice. 

As if this courageous man needed reassurance, my mother looked up at him, as he stared blankly at his blackened building - she said, “We are not going to let them scare us. Bombing our community’s newspaper will not silence us.” 

That was my mother. Like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, like Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King. Dolores F. Moore will always be remembered as one of those brave and courageous African American Women, who made a difference in the world around them, who “refused to remain silent in the face of injustice.” 

To me Dolores F, Moore was the greatest civil rights leader of all time. “Triumphant Warrior” is my attempt to honor her legacy. She once said in a documentary on the Wilmington 10. 

“Wayne would never speak up about what was happening to him, She then said “I had no choice but to step forward.” 

She is the pillar on which I lean, and the prism through which I have always viewed the future . When I was lost she helped me find my way back home. When I was weak she lifted me up; when the jaws of injustice and persecution swallowed me up, she boldly and courageously stepped forward to free me. She taught me to never give up, to never forget to hold my head up high, to be bold in the face of injustice, to love even my enemies, that it is always better to give than to receive. I cannot fill her shoes, but I promised her during her transition that I’d try to walk courageously in her footsteps. With “Triumphant Warrior” I have at least stepped forward.

Addiction To Racism

 

 

               Seldom does anyone, black or white, ever want to be told that they have issues.  Just try getting an alcoholic to admit that they are an alcoholic, or a husband or wife to admit that they are the reason the marriage failed. It gets worse when you try to get a racist to admit to being a racist.

 

 I have for some time now, felt that racism is an addiction not unlike addiction to drugs or alcohol.  Donald Sterling   retreated into denial the second his blatant racism was revealed before the world.  After having his addiction to racism exposed, he denied that there could have been even the slightest possibility of racism underlying his “unfortunate words”.

 

Just as Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone with the Wind”, boasted about how well she treated her slaves, Sterling continues to boast about how well he treats “his” blacks, especially his black players. He talks of buying them “food, and cars, and houses”. He doesn’t have a clue how that sounds to his millionaire players, whose exceptional talents helped him make his billions. He is so blinded by his racist superiority complex, that he actually believes that his players love him. In all actuality, they probably want to open up a can of ass-whipping on him.

 

               Like most addicts, Sterling has failed to seek the help he most urgently needs.  He is learning the hard way, a very important lesson; that in 2014, he lives in a society where the majority of its citizens, at the very least, want to appear to treat its fellow citizens with a degree of fair-mindedness and humanity.  The blatant transgressions of a few brought on by years of unbridled addiction to a tradition of racism will no longer be tolerated.

The Thing I am Learning to Accept

Since the soft launch of my memoir, Triumphant Warrior, in my hometown of Wilmington, I have been overwhelmed by the positive feedback I have received from local educators and former Williston Senior High classmates like Diane Emerson.

The praise from Diane means the most to me because is deeply rooted in a story that we both share. That story hit home a few years ago when I read her doctoral dissertation. It was only then that I came to realization that we had both accomplished things that are often praised in society. We had achieved a certain level of success beyond the stereotypical expectations of folk from the inner-city.

Diane once lived on the front row of Jervay Projects just across Dawson Street from Dew Drop Inn, a local hang-out for Wilmington’s most “aspiring pimps, players and pushers had obtained their kick-ass diplomas there. It was where dope addicts went to get their fixes and potheads went to cop a nickel bag.”

It has been said that living in the projects is a horrible and demeaning way of life designed to control an entire segment of society. But not everyone can be controlled. Not everyone is willing succumb to the wretched designs of the environment in which they live. Diane was such a person. Like Diane I too am a product of Jervay projects, though I was there by choice. It was the one place my mother always told me to never hangout. She had heard all the horror stories about the drugs and shootings in and around Jervay. “Nothing good can happen by you hanging out there” she said. Yet I had been hanging out in front of the Dew Drop Inn across the street from Jervay when a friend provided me a way out. 

“One evening, in September 1973, my old friend, Kojo Nambtambu, walked up to me and took me aside. He asked with worry and concern playing in his eyes. “What are you doing hanging out on a street corner? You need to be in college.”

 Kojo Nantambu, no stranger to how the streets can wreck the aimless, asked me if given the chance I would go to college. I said sure, and he said, “Go home and pack your bags. We are going to Raleigh and Shaw University tonight.” I did exactly what Kojo told me to do. I went home, packed a duffel bag full of clothes, and rode off to Raleigh in Kojo’s ‘67 Dodge Rambler. Like Diane, I was able to see beyond the "now' in which I then lived. Life in and around Jervay was environment in which mere survival is worthy of praise. A place where praise is seldom looked upon as being sincere.

I have never expected praise for doing what I believe is a natural instinct. Nor have I ever wanted to be looked upon as a victim. As we approach Mother's Day, I should mention how I have long been inspired by the courage of the mothers who survived the Middle Passage, after giving birth to their young, in the bowels of slave ships. Like those mothers, people like Diane were determined that it would be themselves, and not their environment, that would determine their destiny.

Up until recently I shunned praise. Who can you trust? Praise can be the voice of friendship but it can also be the language of the insincere, the fair-weather friend. Additionally, it didn't quite seem fair to be praised for just surviving when other classmates were being praised for their accomplishments. So, I developed a way to measure when it was okay to accept praise. For me, that development has come only in the past few years - - now that I am being praised for being a man of triumph, an overcomer, a writer, an author, the founder of a social justice organization - instead of a victim. 

What I am noticing is that I am slowly learning to accept praise. It is why when a Ph.D. from the projects reaped praise on my work I jumped for joy. She had been where I had been. Done what I had done, and understood my triumph.

Book Excerpt

My new book, Triumphant Warrior will be released Mother's Day Weekend. Here is a small excerpt:

Once, when I was a teenager, I sat on a huge rock at Fort Fisher, a state park with sugary sand beaches, squawking seagulls and keyhole urchins, all about 30 miles south of Wilmington. During the Civil War, this out-stretched earthen and brick fortress was, as one historical reference put it, “the South’s most powerful bastion.” But on this sunny afternoon, I wasn't thinking much about the Confederacy and the bulging buckets of blood, referring to the union and rebel blood that had soaked this ground. My gaze was fixed on the vast Atlantic Ocean that restlessly rippled and rolled against the shimmering horizon. I was thinking of a mighty carnage, of mass murdering and kidnapping on a global scale.

Before I fully realized it, I was reflecting on what the journey across the Atlantic must have been for my ancestors. I was lost in thought thinking about the Middle Passage. The roar of the waves as they pounded the shore gave due and timely notice of the destructive forces that most certainly confronted any vessel of that time on the high seas. It would have been hard enough for a seaman on some creaking, sea-slickened deck of a slave ship. But what about below, in the bowels of such ships? There, in a dark, dank, stink of a waking nightmare, I contemplated what it must have been like to be captured, chained, innocent of no crime other than being seen as inhuman in the cold eyes of those who captured you. Little did I know that I would, years later, get a glimpse of an answer, experiencing a 20th-century version of the slave ship in which I was captured and locked away – confined -- for no other reason than the color of my skin.

In the darkest days of my incarceration behind the “Wall” of Central Prison in Raleigh, N.C., I reached into the not-so-deep recesses of my mind for ancestral memory. I would revisit where I had actually never been, the way lots of African Americans making their first trip to Africa talk about “going back.” I daydreamed, nightmared really, of the ship and felt a real connection between my now and my people’s then. I experienced a kind of inner vision, seeing myself lying on my back in manacles, as the ship groaned all around me in a horror hold of others just like me, chained.

I could hear the dying, the sick and the able bodies unable to do anything more than rattle their shackles, and beg their gods for freedom now stolen. I’d live these atrocities in my head, even experiencing enslaved Africans giving birth to the first African Americans in those ships, and I would appreciate, that much more, being a black American. Sometimes, during my incarceration, I would open my eyes and convince myself that I didn't have it so bad behind bars compared to their struggle.

Back then behind bars, I’d tell myself an unshakable truth: I come from people who have endured much worse, like slaves, lynch mobs and the likes of the Wilmington Massacre of 1898. With that, my pain would lessen for a while, and I’d feel my shoulders begin to square and my backbone stiffen.

I wish I had known all of that, the great record of black people’s relentless courage, strength and faith, when I was a little black boy growing up in Wilmington, North Carolina.

What Being Pardoned Means To Me

For the last forty years, I seldom lost sight of my  connection to all those who never once expressed any desire to either forget their past or to bury it……. Harriet Tubman…..Sojourner Truth…..Nat Turner…..Toussaint L’ouverture……Malcom X…..Martin Luther King……  Although I am over joyed to have received a pardon of Innocence after forty years of immense pain My deepest  desire was never so much that I be vindicated from any culpability in the case of The Wilmington 10 but that I courageously draw strength through struggle  from  all those Triumphant Warriors who came before me.

 The trial and  conviction  of the Wilmington Ten disrupted our lives in  ways which are unimaginable. I wish I could say that the cruelty that the state of N.C. allowed to be perpetrated on a group of mostly high school students is unprecedented. It is not. Certainly I need not list  the many instances in which the justice system has betrayed the hopes and dreams of young black men. My deepest desire is that these kinds of injustices continue to be exposed, so that what happened to the Wilmington Ten won't continue to destroy the lives of young black men. This Pardon of Innocence can't give me my life back. It does however officially bestow on me the title of Triumphant Warrior.

triumphantwarrriors.ning.com

Strength Through Struggle

By Wayne Moore

Reaffirmed.

          That’s what I felt deep within, where even the January cold that stalked the National Mall  could not touch me  as I stood there on Inauguration Day. For so long, frustration and disappointment had taken up residence in the hot, earthen-red marrow of my bones. I reflected on how Michelle Obama must have felt in her husband’s maiden run for the White House when she said, "for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country.”

            On that Mall with so many others there to witness Barrack H. Obama, a black man like me, sworn in for his second term as our nation’s president, I felt overwhelmed, and like I belonged there. It wasn’t just the day’s flowery prose and poetry, its soaring songs, festive parades and fluttering flags. It was, for me, the culmination of a realization that the country that I always loved more than it loved me had done right by me – and, along the way, the cause of justice.

            In the last hours of 2012, outgoing North Carolina governor, Beverly Perdue, issued and signed a Pardon of Innocence for the Wilmington Ten. I was among nine black men and one white woman who were unjustly charged and convicted for the 1971 firebombing of a grocery store in my hometown of Wilmington, N.C. during an especially racially tense time following the closing of the city’s only black high school. At the time, I was a teenage activist who only wanted, like all ten of us, to see black students treated with some degree of respect and consideration.

           For our efforts, the Wilmington Ten were sentenced to a total of more than 280 years in prison. Our case generated widespread condemnation and support, especially following the recantation of the prosecution’s three star witnesses. Sixty U.S. Congressmen filed friend-of-the-court briefs with the Forth Circuit Court of Appeals demanding that it overturn our conviction. The Justice Department found widespread misconduct on the part of prosecutors. President Jimmy Carter even spoke up after Amnesty International declared us political prisoners in 1977.

            In 1980, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals finally overturned our convictions; we were  all  released from prison,  released but not exonerated. I was free of the degradation of prison life, of physical bondage, but I hardly felt free because every day we spent  in N.C. we  carried the gorilla of injustice on our backs That heavy weight dogged us for years, following four of the ten to all-too-early graves, and prompting me to try to start a new life in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I, now 60, live and work as an electrician.

         But I wasn’t thinking about the Great Wrong done to us as I stood at the inauguration, which happened to fall on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and the 150th anniversary year of the Emancipation Proclamation. I was thinking, as I do now during Black History Month, of all the triumphant warriors that came before me. I thought of the strength and courage of  Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner, Toussaint L’ouverture, Malcolm X and Dr. King. Of Barrack Obama.

            Being in Washington on that day was an indescribable experience, heavy with the weight of the struggles all black, brown, yellow and red people have had to wage since we all first set foot on  American shores.  I give such heartfelt thanks that I could be free, vindicated and live to see a black man stand on Capitol steps built by slave labor and take the oath of the land’s highest office in the same vein as a George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

           I am overjoyed to have received the pardon after forty years of immense pain trying to live without it. However, my greatest joy is found no so much in the fact that I have been exonerated from any culpability in the case, but in the truth that I was able to summon strength through struggle, from all those triumphant warriors who live within me.

          My greatest wish is that these kinds of injustices continue to be exposed, so that what happened to the Wilmington Ten won't continue to destroy the hopeful dreams of young black folks, any folks for that matter. A pardon can't give back my life. It does, though, officially bestow upon  me the title of Triumphant Warrior.

           Earlier that day in D.C. I found myself staring up at the great granite likeness of Martin Luther King, Jr., memorialized on the Mall, as he should be. I couldn’t help but think that this tribute was to the same Dr. King who just a  little more than 40 years ago was the subject of jeers and vilification and hatred. This great monument  stood before me in all its  majesty, honoring the same man for whom I had heard  blaring horns of cars filled with whites cheering his assassination as I strolled through the streets of Wilmington on that awful day in 1968.

        But staring up at the stone Dreamer on his January holiday, I wondered if there wasn’t a lesson in his turnabout for me, for the remaining six Wilmington Ten. Will history be as kind to us? Could those who water-boarded Lady Justice, and the many who chose to look the other way, to lock us away, ever understand that we were guilty of nothing more than acting like Americans? 

I certainly hope so, because if they do, they too will likely find their love and faith in this nation reaffirmed.

It feels so good.