THE HERITAGE OF SLAVERY

foreign [Music] of Black America the heritage of slavery with George Foster Charleston South Carolina has a beautiful Harbor and a historic one the Civil War began here with the shelling of Fort Sumter and even before that the British fleet was beaten back at the harbor entrance by American revolutionary troops but there is another history here and it has own kind of troops two boatloads of them once starved themselves at this Harbor rather than enter Charleston another 40 000 of them were rushed through this three-year period so they could go to work in America for nothing they were Africans but in this country they were taught to look at themselves another way as slaves Charleston is one of America's oldest cities much of the city is lovely and much of its loveliness is the product of slave labor but Charleston like the rest of America learned very early that if it was going to have slaves it had better sleep with a gun under its pillow like other immigrants to America the slaves were huddled masses but unlike the others what blacks were huddled against was America itself often they rebelled quite often partly in order to deal with inside agitators Charleston put walls and fences all over the place it turned out that if you bought a slave you may have bought yourself an insurrectionist today all over America there are still Echoes of the noises made when One race tries to subjugate another [Music] we will explore the heritage of slavery and the roots of black Rebellion [Music] 20 Africans were landed in America in 1619 one year before the Mayflower by 1860 there were four million black men women and children the private property of White America the new world meant possession to the white man it meant dispossession to the black man slavery was an attitude as much as a condition and attitudes black land can be inherited on the plantation outside Charleston where his family has lived for eight Generations since 1672 Norwood Hasty was asked if he thinks slavery was immoral no no I don't because it because uh when a slave came from Africa he couldn't speak the language he was totally untrained to do any any job at all that would fit in with the civilization someone had to take care of him someone had to take care of them 24 hours a day and it's pretty hard to to do that unless you own the person so I think slavery just had to be in those early days Mr Tasty what was life like in those early days as far as the colored people were concerned I feel that they were a good bit happier than they are now they had less in the way of material things but I can remember back in the 20s when I was a small boy they were always singing at their work they had a great sense of humor now today they just don't seem to care about as much about that as as they used to and I think they've lost their sense of humor somewhat which I deploy what do you think are the differences between the races I think there's a refusal to accept responsibility I think there's a lack of motivation I've tried here to promote people to a former superintendents but they just refused to do it they just don't want the responsibility they don't worry like the the white man they have troubles they go to sleep and wake up the next morning and that trouble is over is it possible that white people have something to do with the lacklability for blacks to assimilate into this culture absolutely uh white man has certainly been prejudiced and to quite an extent unfair but Customs die awful hard it takes takes a long time and everyone knew years ago that the negative would have to be given equality but in the south knowing Negros as we think we do we realize it would take time as to the it's been compared to straightening teeth it takes a slow steady pressure you can't do it with a hammer and and wait people's attitudes will change in time I'm a lot more liberal than I was five years ago and I know I'll be a lot more liberal five years from now and I think almost everyone else is in that category what has tended to make you more liberal well realization that the Negro there's a human being like anyone else Mr Hasty what did you think we were before you began to think of us as human beings well in a way we thought of you almost as a very Superior pet of something or rather someone we had to take care of because we had to do so much of their thinking for them we had to do almost everything uh for them that except living their own own lives anything outside we had to do for them if Masters did the thinking for slaves it is not recorded who did the thinking for Masters most Southerners didn't even own slaves but they became victims of the glamor surrounding big plantations today there is talk of equality in the future but it is the Romance of the unequal past that still infatuates and torments much of Charleston for blacks that past is a little thin on Romance it is true that in a home like this one Scarlett O'Hara might have lived and a home like this might have contained an overseer like Simon Legree but it is an absolute certainty that if I had been around in those days I would have lived right here and that for an increasing number of black Americans today is what American history is all about the process of slavery Began in Africa the slave trade was very rewarding new englanders made quick fortunes at African profiteers who were not exactly Soul Brothers sometimes helped them a black captive was marched Overland to the west coast of Africa where a molten Branding Iron gave him a new instant identity it was found that if you strip a man of his culture prevent him from learning a new one and separate him from his family it does not take him too long to start feeling like a commodity the West's Naval Architects competed to design slave ships where more men could be packed into less space Gustavus Bassa was a slave who later bought his freedom a reading from his diary recalls his abduction in 1756. the ship filled me with Terror when I was carried on board I was put down under the decks and there with the loathsomeness of the stench and crying together I became so sick and load that I was not able to eat two of the white men offered me eatables and on my refusing to eat one of them held me fast by the hands while the other flogged me severely the closeness of the place and the heat added to the number in the ship which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself almost suffocated us the air soon became unfit for respiration from a variety of loathsome smells and brought on a sickness among the slaves of which many died the shrieks of the women and the groans of the dying rented a scene of horror almost unbelievable when they reached America slaves found auction blocks waiting for them any slave could be sold at any time slave markets were very effective socially they broke up the black family but even if you were a commodity you remembered the last time you saw your mother a slave described his own sale in 1858. my brothers and sisters were bit off first while my mother Paralyzed by grief held me by the hand her turn came and she was bought by Isaac Riley then I was offered to the assembly of purchases my mother pushed through the crowd to the spot where Riley was standing she fell at his feet and treating him to buy her baby as well as herself and spare her one child at least will it can it be believed that this man was capable of disengaging himself from her with such violent blows and kicks as the reducer to creeping out of his reach I was then five years old slaves were sold at several markets in Charleston and one of them had been meticulously preserved for visitors recently a biracial committee was formed and it has worked hard to build a new link between whites and blacks very little of what American cities have come to think of as racial turmoil has occurred in Charleston but underneath the graciousness old relationships are often found intact descendants of slaves work for descendants of slave owners Mrs Lionel leg retains the tone of a past she cherishes so Daisy was my little playmate my meat my friend and the daughter of all Catherine who is a cook that we adored and so all those years we've played together and everyone was happy we never heard of all these things that we hear about today and there were nearly a hundred enormous race plantations with many animals around and a beautiful old house and I bought a hundred colored people there would we love them do our friends and then it's not disgrace to see they're like children when we see when we see that it's because they are like happy children some of them because they like to sit in the Sun and rather than work hard and that's and they'd rather work please and work if you could would you paint a picture for us of what it was like on the plantation in your early days it was a lovely happy time living in Open Spaces with many lovely colored people animals and flowers and Fields my father had everything sour bread from the pigs horses to dogs and the people had to be Thoroughbred and we would get into a buggy with him and drive to the plantation from what we call the Pineland where we live and we'd spend every Saturday this week we would spend a day in all Fortune I can see him now would give us dinner and we would have a Heavenly Time and all April he was the dairyman that's all he did wisdom all he did was to skim the cream over these great big balls of plaber and put them in the wooden churn and churn this marvelous fresh butter that was April's job he didn't do anything else but love us and and skim the cream the southern white man just loves to say that all our new girls are happy they they like it they like the way things are other people just leave them alone there wouldn't be any problem and some I think really believed it and I think that that's one thing perhaps just sort of throwing them off balance but all of a sudden they have Negroes who aren't behaving the way they thought they ought to behave she was just a Duramax and that's with good relations came in as long as you're a doormat may have wonderful relationships they just felt that until recently relations between the Negroes and white were just so very good just wonderful relations it's outside agitators and yet it never occurs to them that they were good on Whose terms on their terms those terms have been dictated by a white aristocracy that has ruled the South for almost 300 years the aristocrats said slavery was one of Mankind's noblest inventions but it was a nobility often maintained by violence if a slave got beaten enough some of the milk of human kindness was likely to drain out of him the master got mad at me and he buckled me down across a bow and with me till he cut the blood out of me it felt like I would die but he owned us body and soul and there wasn't anything we could do about it when the master died we were called in to look at his coffin we all marched by him slowly and I just happened to look up and caught my sister's eye and we both just naturally laughed why not we were glad he was dead slaves began running away in the 1600s but the principal method of Escape wasn't formed until the 1800s it was called the Underground Railroad but the journey was usually on foot Harriet Tubman the railroad's outstanding conductor would walk innocently past a plantation singing steal away to Jesus and the slave would literally steal away to Philadelphia or Boston wherever there was slavery there was also resistance the Revolutionary movement among blacks began long before the spirit of 76. until 1800 slavery was legal in the north New York City had a massive slave Insurrection in 1712. there were at least 250 recorded slavery votes in America the most effective Insurrection was led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831. Turner and his fellow revolutionaries killed 60 white people before they themselves were captured and executed by state and federal troops The South was terrified owners decided they had better be protected from their property slave laws became more severe in 1850 Congress lent the South a hand by passing The Fugitive Slave Law allowing Southerners to come north to reclaim their Runaways but resistance had its own momentum too it was articulated fiercely and with finality in the famous appeal by David Walker a free black man living in the North I asked one question here can our condition be any worse had you not rather be killed than to be a slave to a tyrant who takes the life of your mother wife and dear little children I speak Americans for your own good we must and shall be free in spite of you you may do your best to keep us in wretchedness and misery but God will Deliver Us from unto you and whoa whoa will it be unto you if we have to obtain our freedom by fighting throw away your fears and prejudices and we will love you more than we do now hate you what a happy country this will be if the whites will only listen begins [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] on the side of an old church in Charleston the most daring of all slavery vote was planned by a freed slave named Denmark Vesey with 9 000 supporters of easy intended to capture the entire city of Charleston but he was betrayed by a house slave the Reverend Henry Butler inspires his congregation to be proud that slavery was met by insurrection so Denmark Denmark Visa an anti-slavery leader of 1767 1822 he was an insurrectionist so they tell me he organized an unsuccessful slave revolt here in Charleston South Carolina but it was yeah on this spot and a little old wooden structure downstairs that Denmark Visa plan his Insurrection and then as now some of the people could not keep a secret and I can sympathize because I have a forefathers were taught not to keep anything secret from the master and there was a servant who told the master of Denmark Visa's Insurrection and of his plan and of course the plans were broken up and in South Carolina passed along closing all schools and daring Negroes to be called reading and this place was closed when we think of those that were hanged those that were persecuted those that were killed those that have had holes and water poured on them those that have had Bloodhound on their Trail those that have been mistreated and in the midst of it all somehow they stood up because they had a spiritual backbone that caused them to look beyond the temporary things of life if we are to move in this new day we cannot have backbones like a jellyfish what is man man is a part of God each man is a thought of God each man is entitled to be recognized and we trust that in the future we will not have to do what our fathers had to do but if necessary we have to do what is to be done doing what he thinks must be done in Charleston is what Bill Saunders of black activist worries about he finds the past too close for comfort although it is more than 100 years since the end of legal slavery in America Saunders believes too many whites act like Masters and too many blacks feel like slaves old slave masked and slave condition that existed 100 200 years ago is still here in Charleston who we as black people were brought into this country for slave labor and we have worked as slaves from the time that we were brought into this country until the present time I'm fighting so hard for black survival because I believe that this country is getting to the place that they don't need that labor anymore and since they don't need that labor anymore they don't need black people anymore the past have taught me and that I got to do something for my race to survive here in America and that's why I feel like you know a lot of us will have to stop talking out and saying exactly how we talk about the situation we really got nothing to lose really we got no jobs to lose we ain't got no business to lose the only thing that we have got to lose our lives and I've been taking that anytime he wanted the thing that I am saying or that I am preaching that instead of going to jail for the man all the time for nothing that's going to go to jail go to the gym go to jail for something let you make have yourself a plan to make something come when you do go to jail this is the this is the type of program but you got to you got the the thing that we don't have if we don't have no program to go to the man and say this is what we want but there's a lot of things in my past that I'm guilty of first my parents were black and then I was born black you're not guilty you know of no crime at all except for being black the white man is my oppressor he's the one that controls the jail he controls the hospital he controls the Army controls the Navy he controls everything and he's the man that I have to fight White America got to wake up and realize and listen and understand that not only black folk got to make sacrifices but white folks gonna have to stop making sacrifices some sacrifices to make this country what it's supposed to be other than that there's not going to be no country and child in Mississippi can rationalize how they have always been friends to the colored man all of a sudden they wake up here one morning in in a toll at what the way they've operated for the last hundred years is wrong this is a hard thing to just tell a man that he spent his life doing something wrong he doesn't have to believe it and then all of a sudden with some kind of demon if you live in Mississippi and run a cotton Plantation you're supposed to be some kind of demons this is the national image of a cotton Plantation operator in the Mississippi down Humphreys McGee owns a 2500 acre Plantation in the Mississippi Delta his mother's family has been in the state for seven generations and on his father's side the McGee's moved to the Delta from South Carolina after the Civil War while Charleston was the elegant capital of Southern Culture in the 19th century Mississippi was the frontier attitudes hardened early the old way of life is endured in Mississippi longer than anywhere else whites and blacks in the delta look at the past from different angles but it is a shared past see the Civil War is Over and regardless of the evils of slavery these people understood each other it was not some sort of medieval torture for a person to be a tenant Farmer on a plantation and I don't know anybody that's ashamed of the system the way it worked um it's it's it's an impossible system to return to with that mechanical cotton picker one man could do what 150 men had been doing this was the crown and blow to this system everything's geared to Machinery the way I used to have 83 families on the plantation I have 15 boys working machine operators but I I will say that the system we had was a system that on the surface developed a very outgoing happy group of people they're old people now but that's these are the people that that I grew up thinking I knew get up at four o'clock and get my Breakers done just sit down a day I'll go to fear and be pick cotton Mr and Mrs Haywood the Jenkins of Sharkey County Mississippi have between them picked cotton for over a century the boss man came along he says uh Beijing I said sir says I say when you washed I said I washed dogs last night he said I don't want you to do that no more that's my agent you know he says every Friday morning or Friday evening you wash out and let all the children stay there with you until you get feeling when you get through then y'all go back now the agent was me some of them some of them was me and that kind of white man come along he says hey but you ain't in the field yet he just said started applying he said yes I'm just not gonna eat my dinner God damn it you ain't doing a goddamn thing to his uh God damn it auto take this damn stick and feel the hell out of you he said no he said if you feel hell out of me God damn I feel like a lot of you make me feel bad if I was under them you know how mean he was to treat us like trulips like that in the frontier days slaves begged not to be sent to Mississippi where their work was almost as harsh as the overseers [Music] resistance was often subtle but seldom absent a runaway slave said that each so-called Happy song was a testimony against slavery and a prayer for deliverance [Music] yeah foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] this system in its best sense was based on no bless Oblige by the landowner but I don't have 83 families anymore than I feel like I'm the daddy of I do not expect to ever have this relationship with the younger generation the the children of these men they are uh oriented and entirely differently they grew up in the 50s there they're conscious of the change in the status quo they they are fairly confused about what their position is they don't want to be subservient from when I saw my mother and father and my brothers do while I was growing up I feel that I want done one of my kids going in a world like this because I know some days I saw my mother slaving from six in the morning and hot sun 100 degree weather from putting a hole in a field from six until night with about an hour's break between us all this time and my father doing labor that that that machines believe me made to do hardly [Music] and I feel that if we've been working this long it can't eat them on the shirts on our back I feel that we have to take some drastic steps some drastic steps to make something happen to make a change come about because Mississippi is going to either have to change or the canvino Mississippi and we have to do this in any means as possible through our parents we've earned Mississippi there's no question about it bro I mean if I if my mother got there and sweated from morning until night and you tell me I don't own anything she sweated on I mean how can that be how can it be the white man does not want to give over his institutions and that's what people fear that would happen you just don't want to turn over the reins of everything and give up control who wants to give up control let's go it's a white supremacy is undoubtedly a feeling that white people have all over the world of course how the black man and the white man would live together has been the Paramount concern of people ever since the Mississippi Valley will settled especially when the greatest number was the black people the problem is I don't need the man I used to need Humphrey's McGee can run his Plantation with machines now and the government takes care of surplus cotton that leaves Surplus people and no one does anything about them they cluster into chatty towns like this one in Cleveland Mississippi and they wait for something almost anything to happen first is slaves and then as tenants and sharecroppers black mississippians turned the Delta swamps into the richest plantation soil in the world now the soil and the crops no longer need the people the mechanical cotton picker an instrument of agricultural efficiency became also an instrument of History in many Mississippi counties blacks have always been in the majority which means whites have had a problem if you've got the land and the money but not the numbers it's natural as Humphreys McGee says to want control in Mississippi white control has made the past hard to distinguish from the present more than anyone else the spirit of resistance to this control has been Fannie Lou Hamer at the 1964 Democratic Convention Mrs Hamer was a leader of the attempt to unseat the regular Democratic delegation from Mississippi Mississippi [Music] is not just walking up like they used to do in the past walking out you know shooting a man down or getting maybe two or three hundred people carrying out and lengthening you but it's it's in a most subtle way um you know being led to starve to death not give you jobs these are some of the things that's happening right now in Mississippi see Mississippi is not actually Mississippi's problem Mississippi is America's problem because if America wanted to do something about what has been going on Mississippi it could have stopped by now it wouldn't have been in the past few years 40 uh between 40 and 50 churches bombed and burned you see and this this you know this lead me to say you know all of the burning and bombing that was done to us and the houses nobody never said too much about that and nothing was done but let something be burned you know by a black man and then my God you know you see the flag is is drinks with our blood because you see so many of our ancestors was killed because we have never accepted slavery we had to live on it but we've never wanted it so we know that this flag is drinks with our blood so what the young people are saying now give us a chance to be young men respected as a man as we know this country was built on the black backs of black people across this country and if we don't have it you ain't gonna have it either cause we gonna tether that's what they saying and people ought to understand that I don't see why they don't understand it they know what they've done to us all across this country they know what they've done to us this country is desperately and man is on the critical list I really don't know where we go from here where many blisscipians are going is North over 400 000 since 1950 s North Chicago Detroit what is finally breaking up the old relationships in Mississippi is not Enlightenment nor Revolt nor the Civil Rights Movement it's just machines and when the machines came many of the blacks had to go thank you foreign [Music] Chicago is the present for as many as one thousand black immigrants each month the railroad isn't underground anymore but the objective is still the same nobody seems to migrate anywhere without some combination of Hope and bewilderment after 300 years the huddled masses are still looking for what eluded them in the south jobs Freedom a different way of life but the migration itself has created tensions and the polarization of attitudes well bigotry means that you believe in the Creed a cultural stem of Life a way of life and this I do believe in I believe that we have communities here we've developed in our country that we have to protect and I believe a community way of life has been developed for 75 years and I don't believe I should be broken up and I think that this is the way we'll have to fight for it for from now on in it's going to be a community life versus those that want to come into it and that's going to be rough and if this means racism it's gonna be practiced on both sides so you're practicing big event I'm attraction bigger than I believe in my way of life is there any things especially in America I haven't seen where American DNA for the blind people we have American indeed uh you get a few negro who would have positioned a higher job that's still not helping the grassroot I'm in the Grassroots my little brothers around here are in the Grand Sport my sister is living in the grasswood she still living in grasswood as a young black man I feel that I have obligation to my race of people not to no other race and no other nationality just to blind people the south side of Chicago is not a nice place to visit and it isn't easy to live there either the situation is not new over 100 years ago a brilliant black abolitionist Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery to come north Douglas found that black people were already being crowded into large Urban slums today 85 percent of Chicago's black population live in ghettos what the black man who leaves the South faces when he comes to Chicago is described by the Midwest director for the U.S Civil Rights Commission John McKnight in the South the he knows who the man is the man up there on the hill in the Big White House and when he comes to a city like Chicago it's much harder to determine who that man is such a complex society it's a different man who controls the house from the man who controls the job from the man who controls the welfare from the man who controls the hospital and the man who controls the school and I think what's happening is that he comes rather quickly to the conclusion that the man is all a white man not being able to discern his specific Captor he decides that all people with white faces are his captors and to the degree that all white people are engaged in supporting the systems of separation and racist institutions that we have in the North that judgment is basically accurate how do these institutions function in a racial way when we develop any kind of a system that by definition excludes people who are poor Inner City Limited education people we are saying black only we might put the sign back up because it's the same thing same bag the problem that we have in White America is that most white people when they hear about white racism most white people say that's not me I never discriminated against anybody never did and in their sense of what discrimination means or what racism is they may be right but they sit residing in a system from which they take full benefit A system that defines them in and and defines black people out we are going to have to face the fact that we are not a community a community is where a lot of people develop mutually beneficial relationships with each other and our racist institutions and the political boundaries of our cities Define black people out of the community white people will sit in their suburban homes and watch your television programs and hear about all of these laws that are being passed many of them are beginning to wonder uh well what is it with those colored people on there why why are they so upset all this is all this wonderful stuff that we're doing for them but we aren't focusing on the black man living on the Block he lives in a in a in a too flat on that block and he knows what the circumstance on that block was 10 years ago well and he knows what it is today and he too has heard about all of those programs and laws being passed but the hard facts of matter is that things are not changing for him it's no wonder that the white population and the black population are pitted against each other when the black man knows that the change is not coming and the white man thinks that major efforts are being undertaken when they are not so I don't think anybody should be surprised when one sees the black people in an open attack on the system because I I suspect that they don't see that there is any other realistic alternative [Applause] James Turner an instructor in political sociology at Northwestern University also teaches a summer study group what black patriotism means to him Denmark visi the insurrectionist of Charleston is Turner's lesson for the evening what Denmark VC did in Charleston South Carolina is very much related to Detroit and to quartz and to Newark it is very much related to black men saying tanks be damned I'll have my freedom the price of freedom is not cheap Denmark VC was very mindful of this so it's very important for us the lessons of Denmark VC a lot of us like to think that the effective thing is to Wolf at the man to get up and blow our whole game to him that somehow the revolution will come through oratory the unique thing about BC is that he was a quiet man which is often the mark of determination yes sister how come this wasn't taught in our school I think that this is a very good question why it is that Denmark VC doesn't stand beside Patrick Henry because they've never wanted us to come to the kind of position and the state of mind that those of us who gathered around this table have come because Denmark VC released in his time as he has done for us now a whole Force of black resistance and struggle we have not been able to talk about because they're nameless and faceless the thousands of black people who fought in a more quiet way those black women who consigned to cook in the kitchens of the slave master who ground up glass to verifying bits and put it in the Master's soup and then ask the master what's the matter balls you seem like you're not well and the white man was tricked by his own notion that our people were just silly as he bled internally to death as well as the brothers in the field who set fire to the cotton the brothers who set fire to the cotton when the master came with his Whip and said boy what's going on I don't know Master sums are taking place strange and the brother went on to burn more cotton black people have resisted who have determined here today that we are going to free our people Denmark visi is alive Denmark vesi is alive and among the brothers be they in Oakland California with the Black Panthers Denmark this is a young black man named Eldritch Cleaver and Huey Newton in Oakland California Denmark VC is personified by the courageous black brother named H rap Brown Denmark VC is The Guiding Light that inspires and gives incentive to brother Stokely Carmike was the of brother Malcolm X Denmark VC walks the streets of the black community today he is in the minds and the bosoms of young black men who stride now with pride and dignity in the black community who say that they will no longer reside in the hell of the ghetto but will struggle to transform their their plight to a community they will do it or die trying but there is a fever of a revolution in America and that it's a black Revolution the only thing that is hanging us up but we must clear up we must sit down and continue to analyze and discuss what our particular role will be in the revolution Calvin Lockridge a young ghetto leader moves his training group toward confrontation with a system he finds oppressive for Lockridge the heritage of slavery is Insurrection we talk about that all revolutions are led by a hardcore discipline group and I think this is where we have to start we have to start organizing that hard quote discipline group of people and then we peer men ourselves and then we move we will move the masses of people around an issue when we were ready to move you have to have your own communication well this is how the uh Rebellion is during slavery uh was able to um move to action is because of the fact that you had members of the Revolution or the Rebellion who would move and communicate through the black Grapevine because you never knew how many people was actually involved because it meant death if you've ever found out a lot of uh Negroes they might have thought that they were given the chance but they weren't there's gonna have to be some Bloodshed and Revolution somewhere I think we are the black people have always had justification for Insurrection or dating Evolution whatever you want to call them we've been talking about the little world thing now you're saying that we should start preparing for going to the welfare rule of warfare takes training and I don't I don't know if any black person around who has done any type of training prepare themselves to grow more everyone prepares himself to go around to walk at it you wouldn't know I would hope no one would know and it's true gorilla Warfare is not a training in the use of weapons just to train it in the use of the Mind it's a Revolution going on the other one doesn't Johnny who is in the way you treat him as a straighter us back and doesn't sympathize with you he can't help you had to treat him like to trade Us by that mean you'd kill him that it's an American Revolution you know it's happening here on the American fall and that black and white are caught up in the revolution but blacks the spearhead in the revolution neither James Turner nor Calvin Lockridge could win any elections today so far they represent only a minority of a minority yet their potential constituency can be found on any sidewalk in any slum among Youth and among black opinion leaders even a minority is many thousands the question posed by increasing black activism is Will White America respond before the few become the many Chicago is 30 black while less than one percent of the city's businesses are owned by black people it is hardly a revelation that economic bondage produces social revolutionaries the future may not work but if you're black neither did the past pressures that bring about rebellion are defined by the senior editor of Ebony magazine historian lerone Bennett men uh fight when they reach the wall not because Victor is sure but because they're manhood demands that they that they that they act in this way and therefore I I'm not at all sure what is the proper measure of success when you're talking about a rebellion of an oppressed people one might almost say that that um it is normal for an oppressed people to revolt and it is abnormal really for them to accept depression which is forced upon them any oppressed people when they revoked Revolt really in the ultimate sense even in the name of the oppressors because they are re-establishing reciprocity between man and man and they're reestablishing the bounds of humanity which must govern men if they live together in the common climate I just asked you to visualize a room you know which they're all the goodies of the world all the material the goodies of the world and that people in that room and all those people are white you see and uh the door to that room is locked and that room is in a building with a hole and in that Hall of people and all those people are black now black people have been standing in that hole for more than 200 years knocking on that door and they've been saying please let us in you know we want to be with you we want to be like you we love you and that door has never opened one of the men in the hall say you know what I think I'll do say I think I will go outside get me a brick throw it through the window and take some of my things out of that Wonder because he's never gonna open the front door and another man in that hole says that um no I tell you what I'm gonna do I'm going outside I'm going under the house I'm going to take me a match I'm gonna burn the house up and everything in it including me another third man says that um wait Brothers you know might become necessary to do that but it's not become necessary yet so the problem is we've been standing there for 200 years knocking on that door and he hasn't opened the door because we haven't been speaking this language so his mother tongue is power and that perhaps if we take all our little toothpicks of power and put them together and create a whole huge baton round then the door will open one way or another I think history arranged that it eventually America would have to face itself through black people or go under and and I deeply believe that that that this is the point we occupy now in time [Music] a suburb of Chicago July 4 this year if you're white try to think black for 200 years blacks have watched white parades Roll by for most Americans the past itself has been White George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are the champions of American independence but they were also slaveholders Patrick Henry wanted Liberty or death just like Denmark BC and the young men in the ghettos today but Patrick Henry was also a slave holder Freedom like history is not supposed to have a color but when America institutionalizes freedom and history all the symbols are white Black America is still waiting for the parade to open its ranks and let in Frederick Douglass Denmark VC Malcolm X and other Heroes of the black fight for freedom Frederick Douglass the escaped slave was once invited to celebrate July 4th with white people he told them this Fourth of July is yours not mine you may Rejoice I must mourn when white people celebrate Black Heroes and black people have celebrated Washington and Jefferson the battle for the past will be over and when the path belongs to everyone so will the present most black people still don't want to wreck this parade they want to join it foreign Ty of slavery there are plenty of Heroes just like in any other tragedy deep in the Wasteland of Chicago's South Side embedded like an emerald in an ashcan is an Immaculate Wonder called as the wall of respect black artists painted black Heroes on this wall men and women willing to liberate themselves in Malcolm X's words by any means necessary there are individuals who will either have respect or will die trying to get it and some of them have It's a Long Way in a lot of years from the slave market in Charleston to the wall of respect in Chicago but neither distance nor time has yet entirely separated the black man from bondage no one needs to inflame the black race against these realities fire Rebellion started burning a long time ago what these travels in Black America have shown is that white racism created the need for black power just as slavery bred insurrection if a country can be a collective noun then America is mad at each other right now we blacks and whites are plotting separate courses with great skill and cunning you can't have oppression without rebellion and you can't have either in a country that belongs to all its people what black Americans are telling white Americans today is that this land is ours too the plaintiff question the slaves used to ask am I not a man and a brother has been replaced by an affirmation and a challenge I am a man and a brother black men are saying and if you don't think so that this country isn't big enough for both of us it's George Foster at the wall of respect after all a slave was a very valuable piece of property in anybody with any brains at all would have kept him well clothed and well fed so that he could do his his job but of course they didn't figure the slave really is having too much of a soul I guess he was more of a beast of burden almost a very Superior pet the heritage of slavery is what we're living through today in the Mississippi Delta in Newark in whites everywhere that's a Heritage I believe that Thomas Jefferson did say that I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just and he was talking about slavery because he could see what would eventually happen to America it's up to America now to deal with itself foreign