Last summer, in Detroit’s St. Paul Church of God in Christ, I watched Bill Cosby summon his inner Malcolm X. It was a hot July evening. Cosby was speaking to an audience of black men dressed in everything from Enyce T-shirts or polos to blazers and ties. Some were there with their sons. Some were there in wheelchairs. The audience was packed tight, rows of folding chairs extended beyond the wooden pews to capture the overflow. But the chairs were not enough, and late arrivals stood against the long shotgun walls, or out in the small lobby, where they hoped to catch a snatch of Cosby’s oratory. Clutching a cordless mic, Cosby paced the front of the church, shifting between prepared remarks and comic ad-libs. A row of old black men, community elders, sat behind him, nodding and grunting throaty affirmations. The rest of the church was in full call-and-response mode, punctuating Cosby’s punch lines with laughter, applause, or cries of “Teach, black man! Teach!”
He began with the story of a black girl who’d risen to become valedictorian of his old high school, despite having been abandoned by her father. “She spoke to the graduating class and her speech started like this,” Cosby said. “‘I was 5 years old. It was Saturday and I stood looking out the window, waiting for him.’ She never said what helped turn her around. She never mentioned her mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother.”
“Understand me,” Cosby said, his face contorted and clenched like a fist. “Men? Men? Men! Where are you, men?”
Audience: “Right here!”
Cosby had come to Detroit aiming to grab the city’s black men by their collars and shake them out of the torpor that has left so many of them—like so many of their peers across the country—undereducated, over-incarcerated, and underrepresented in the ranks of active fathers. No women were in the audience. No reporters were allowed, for fear that their presence might frighten off fathers behind on their child-support payments. But I was there, trading on race, gender, and a promise not to interview any of the allegedly skittish participants. “Men, if you want to win, we can win,” Cosby said. “We are not a pitiful race of people. We are a bright race, who can move with the best. But we are in a new time, where people are behaving in abnormal ways and calling it normal … When they used to come into our neighborhoods, we put the kids in the basement, grabbed a rifle, and said, ‘By any means necessary.’
“I don’t want to talk about hatred of these people,” he continued. “I’m talking about a time when we protected our women and protected our children. Now I got people in wheelchairs, paralyzed. A little girl in Camden, jumping rope, shot through the mouth. Grandmother saw it out the window. And people are waiting around for Jesus to come, when Jesus is already within you.”
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Cosby was wearing his standard uniform—dark sunglasses, loafers, a sweat suit emblazoned with the seal of an institution of higher learning. That night it was the University of Massachusetts, where he’d gotten his doctorate in education 30 years ago. He was preaching from the book of black self-reliance, a gospel that he has spent the past four years carrying across the country in a series of events that he bills as “call-outs.” “My problem,” Cosby told the audience, “is I’m tired of losing to white people. When I say I don’t care about white people, I mean let them say what they want to say. What can they say to me that’s worse than what their grandfather said?” From Birmingham to Cleveland and Baltimore, at churches and colleges, Cosby has been telling thousands of black Americans that racism in America is omnipresent but that it can’t be an excuse to stop striving. As Cosby sees it, the antidote to racism is not rallies, protests, or pleas, but strong families and communities. Instead of focusing on some abstract notion of equality, he argues, blacks need to cleanse their culture, embrace personal responsibility, and reclaim the traditions that fortified them in the past. Driving Cosby’s tough talk about values and responsibility is a vision starkly different from Martin Luther King’s gauzy, all-inclusive dream: it’s an America of competing powers, and a black America that is no longer content to be the weakest of the lot.
Posts: 496 | From: Greenland | Registered: Mar 2011
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"No reporters were allowed, for fear that their presence might frighten off fathers behind on their child-support payments"
....now I wonder what kind of people would create such an idiotic, sociopathic, counterproductove and evil system such as the current child support system in the US.
.....debtors prisons..were abolished by the "founding fathers"......who in their right mind would bring them back ???,
....aha i know. .... White people....
Posts: 2818 | From: new york | Registered: Apr 2014
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quote: Garvey argued that blacks had rendered themselves unworthy of the white man’s respect. “The greatest stumbling block in the way of progress in the race has invariably come from within the race itself,” wrote Garvey. “The monkey wrench of destruction as thrown into the cog of Negro Progress, is not thrown so much by the outsider as by the very fellow who is in our fold, and who should be the first to grease the wheel of progress rather than seeking to impede.” Decades later, Malcolm X echoed that sentiment, faulting blacks for failing to take charge of their destinies. “The white man is too intelligent to let someone else come and gain control of the economy of his community,” Malcolm said. “But you will let anybody come in and take control of the economy of your community, control the housing, control the education, control the jobs, control the businesses, under the pretext that you want to integrate. No, you’re out of your mind.”
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" Garvey argued that blacks had rendered themselves unworthy of the white man’s respect. "
....What is so interesting is that Garvey was so unworthy of White man's respect that they formed the FBI to stop him....even tho he posed no violent threat to anyone ?? The FBI was formed to prevent the rise of ' a Black messiah'
-------------------- Keldal Posts: 2818 | From: new york | Registered: Apr 2014
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So, the thread has yet to address in any detail how we lost. Do we place the blame solely on Bill Cosby? How is what Cosby is saying related to black conservatism? I don't get it.
To me, it sounds like Cosby, a man who like O.J. was a symbol of integration throughout his career has become older, frustrated and much more vocal than he has been in the past. He couldn't/wouldn't say these things when he was getting that fat check from Jello and the Cosby show.
Posts: 4693 | From: Saturn | Registered: Apr 2012
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The senseless murder of his son may have been a factor in the change in his attitude. I guess he could see so much of the mindset of his son's murderer within the black community.
For many murdered young black males that is usually the case.
Posts: 890 | From: London | Registered: Apr 2014
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"And people are waiting around for Jesus to come, when Jesus is already within you.”
"Cosby has been telling thousands of black Americans that racism in America is omnipresent but that it can’t be an excuse to stop striving".
Great adhesions.
Black Wall Street USA
Black Wall Street: Background
Malcolm X astutely asserted that, “Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research.”
Black Wall Street is important for many reasons. While we view it as an economic model that should be emulated and have a chapter in every major urban city, it is the foresight and wherewithal of the African-American residents of that city that should never be forgotten.
At a time when the American educational system is attempting to convince us that our ancestors were slaves (instead of prisoners of war or captives), we need positive images that go beyond one-way integration, but actually show our children the audacity and courage in the face of superior odds, that our people have historically demonstrated. And finally, it is an example of the power of “rebuilding,” and this is what the Black Wall Street movement is a tribute to.
But Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma is the model.
There are “black communities” today just as there were in the 1920s, when Black Wall Street was at its height. The Greenwood Community of Tulsa was wealthy, and got that way despite resistance from powerful whites. As is the case today, integration killed the “buy black” concept and watered down much of what Greenwood stood for.
This action had an even more damaging and damning effect than the Tulsa Riot of 1921, when in June of 1921, white folks torched the homes and businesses of 35 square blocks of the Greenwood community.
When Susan Smith drowned her boys, what did she say. A black man did it. When John Stuart of Boston killed his pregnant wife, what did he say? A black man did it.
When George Anderson of Milwaukee stabbed his elderly wife, threw down a baseball cap and then stabbed himself to cover it up. What did he say? A black gang member did it. This kind of thought process has an historical basis, even since slavery.
It was this kind of “sacred white womanhood” mentality that paved the way for the torching of Black Wall Street. On that day, a 17-year old white elevator operator by the name of Sarah Page, claimed that a Black shoe shiner, a 19-year old named Dick Rowland, “assaulted” her.
The charges were later dismissed, but not before whites attacked the entire black community. Over 600 successful black businesses were destroyed, and the white community stood on the border of the city and watched as black people were shot, lynched and burned. Three hundred people dead and according to Red Cross records, 8,624 people were in need of assistance.
All told, property damage is estimated at $1.5 million, which would probably be close to $40 million in today’s numbers.
Black Wall Street was the best of us. We had our own stores, banks, libraries and six black people owned their own planes, enough though the entire state of Oklahoma, at the time, only had TWO airports!
What many forget is that the area was rebuilt and became a jazz mecca in the 1950s and 1960s just as it had been in the 1920s. But, as today with freeways and eminent domain, along came urban renewal that destroyed the area to make way for a highway loop around the downtown district.
Today there is still the Greenwood Historical District, and it is from the perseverance of these incredibly resilient black folks that the Black Wall Street Movement finds it energy and inspiration.
THE BLACK WALL STREET MOVEMENT
Today’s movement is an important one. The conditions of our communities have not changed all that much since the 1920s in Tulsa. We remain largely segregated and external forces control much of what is taking place in our midst.
The important models offered by Black Wall Street can be found in one key word: “self-determination.” Back then they saw the need and potential of turning our power inward. Today, thanks to beliefs in “one-way integration,” we truly seem to believe that the white man’s ice is colder than our ice. Black Tulsans didn’t buy into that.
The purpose of the movement, as the Black Wall Street Website makes clear, is “about the ancestry we never met, ancestors who sacrificed (and) died paving the way for us all.” And, as importantly, “It’s also about our willingness to perform the same ground-paving efforts for generations we will never meet.
” It is a movement that is growing stronger each day, with districts all over America and in Uganda, Ethiopia and Ghana. With growing resources and a mega-successful membership drive, Black Wall Street will become a model for others to emulate and admire. And …
NOW COMES DALLAS …
As a neighbor to Oklahoma, Texas should have been on this decades ago and, in fact, should have created a Black Wall Street in any one of its five largest cities: San Antonio, El Paso, Dallas, Fort Worth and/or Austin (the capital city). an organization devoted to the economic, social, cultural and political preservation and on-going expansion of black communities all over the nation, with emphasis on Dallas,
The primary purpose of the Black Wall Street - Dallas is Texas, a key subsidiary of Black Wall Street USA and extension of Black Wall Street Oakland, our national chapter. Other purposes will include:
• Providing a setting where educational attainment, job preparation and development of social skills geared toward economic and business development, will be prioritized;
• Providing personalized information to all members of the community to expand their knowledge of the Tulsa, OK. District and all related stories and issues;
• Sponsorship of seminars, forums, conferences and workshops addressing issues related to all aspects of urban, economic and development history relative to community-building and organizing;
• Producing a local newsletter, “Black Wall Street Visions,” that will be circulated once each month to all chapters and to African-Americans all over the metro areas of this state, addressing issues pertaining to Black Wall Street organizations all over the nation;
• Where possible, to seek to generate funds through our own fundraisers and grantsmanship to expand and fine-tune Black Wall Street districts all over the United States.
Black Wall Street-Dallas will join Black Wall Street-Houston as key cogs in the Lone Star state that are committed to African-American economic development and self-determination.
By: Matthew C. Stelly Black Wall Street Dallas Black Wall Street USA South Region Organizing Team Member
Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010
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quote: Garvey argued that blacks had rendered themselves unworthy of the white man’s respect. “The greatest stumbling block in the way of progress in the race has invariably come from within the race itself,” wrote Garvey. “The monkey wrench of destruction as thrown into the cog of Negro Progress, is not thrown so much by the outsider as by the very fellow who is in our fold, and who should be the first to grease the wheel of progress rather than seeking to impede.” Decades later, Malcolm X echoed that sentiment, faulting blacks for failing to take charge of their destinies. “The white man is too intelligent to let someone else come and gain control of the economy of his community,” Malcolm said. “But you will let anybody come in and take control of the economy of your community, control the housing, control the education, control the jobs, control the businesses, under the pretext that you want to integrate. No, you’re out of your mind.”
Well spoken, by great leadership.
"A Black Holocaust in America" The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921
quote: In the 1921 riot, whites attacked blacks who were living in the Greenwood area, also known as Black Wall Street. The Tulsa police were not only indifferent, but they also took part in the destruction of the wealthiest black city in America, with officers helping to set fire to the property of blacks who had lived and thrived in that area.
As a result of white supremacist terrorism, an estimated 10,000 blacks were left homeless and 35 city blocks were burned to the ground. Blacks who had been injured during the assault could not even seek medical care because the black hospital was one of the buildings torched by white mobs.
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