Re-Searching, ReThinking, ReWriting, and ReTeaching
I do not own the copyright/license of the visual content in this article. However, I am a contributor to the BAM Encyclopedia listed below. My inclusion of the visuals are not intended for personal gain solely — but for an educational demonstration.
Should academics ever settle for popular narratives? I’m coming straight from my teacher’s diary today.
I’m rebellious. No, that sounds mawkish. I’m not rebellious: I’m curious, and that makes me appear rebellious to others. I simply do not accept “pre-set” narratives. Something inside me says, “There’s gotta be more to this story.” As a child, I was tired of hearing the implausible story of a washer-woman with achy feet changing America. I knew there was more to her story. I was tired of hearing the same clips of the “I Have a Dream Speech.” I didn’t want to listen to one more Dr. King impersonation in elementary school! Year-after-year, it was the same thing. The man was a doctor, meaning he was a scholar. I used to wonder, “What else did he say or write?”
As an adult, my sometimes infuriating curiosity has become a driver of what turned out to be pretty good research and teaching skills (at least my students say that I am a good teacher). As a professor, I see myself as a good teacher who researches and publishes stuff. My research fuels the teaching. My publications drive the students to become better writers. They somehow feel comfortable laughing at my perpetual procrastination or my need to be elbow deep in musty books. It’s comforting to them that I can’t write good conclusions, either.
My discomfort with narratives includes the Rosa Parks story and how the Civil Rights Movement has been mistaught, misunderstood, and misused. When I teach African American Literature, my students get a Long Civil Rights Movement narrative, in which they learn that James Weldon Johnson, the poet, sponsored The Silent March of 1917 in New York City as a response to the race riots of East St. Louis; thus began the long tradition of African American respectable protest in America.
Yes, most of my students have heard the first verse of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” but they do not know about the political involvement of many Black artists. For example, Lorraine Hansberry hosted the fundraiser that paid for the car of the three slain Civil Rights Workers! Further, students are shocked to learn that the Civil Rights Movement started in the American North, and not the South as they have been taught all of their lives.
When I teach African American Studies, students are introduced to someone who was purposefully left out of the Civil Rights Movement: Claudette Colvin, a 19-year-old young lady who was ejected on March 2, 1955. At the time, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), along with the NAACP raised money to defend her, but they did not choose her to be the test case in Montgomery. More likely, according to several sources, they passed up Colvin because of her dark skin, young, and out-of-wedlock pregnancy.
Instead, an older lady with political experience, lighter skin, and a husband was chosen: Rosa Parks. I DO NOT downplay Parks’ experience with political upheaval, but part of what drove the choice was her respectable, matronly look and soft voice. In short, Black citizens of Montgomery carefully chose who they wanted to represent them to the world (as the eyes of the world would be on them), and it was not any young girl with dark skin and the type of hair that needed to be chemically/heat straightened.
Enter Black respectability politics. Many students, Black and white, have never heard of respectability politics and the psychological/emotional pain that Black people endure in order to gain acceptance by white society. As a society, we tend to focus on the scars that we can see, and leave the invisible ones -mainly chromatism and poverty shaming — safely tucked away from the world. It is true that “we wear the mask,” but these masks are painful and tiresome. If we never take them off before one another and tell the truth, we may never heal from the scars that slavery originally caused.
While I do bring Claudette Colvin from the forgotten pages of Black history, I NEVER downplay Rosa Parks’ contribution to the Civil Rights Movement. In the pages of history, her activism has been reduced to tired feet, and IT DRIVES ME NUTS! She risked her personal safety by investigating the rape of a young lady by several white youths. She was already director of the youth division of the NAACP in Montgomery. She later became the secretary. After the bus boycott, Parks spent the rest of her life battling racism in Detroit.
Once when I was teaching this unit during an African American Studies class at a Mississippi institution, I had a student from Detroit stand and literally cuss me out! She told me that she KNOWS what her mother and grandmother taught her, and that I was only saying things to disrespect Detroit. I asked her that if her mother and grandmother taught her so many horrible things about Mississippi, why did they send her to college at a predominantly white institution in Mississippi? Why didn’t she go to school in the North? Further, Detroit is home to the only Black Nationalist Asian: Grace Lee Boggs.
Had I asked security to escort this young lady out of my class, I would have been in my full rights as a professor. However, I used it as an example of how Black history is used and misused. She was loud and disrespectful. She was also emotionally wounded. The facts that she learned in class versus the stories she was told by her mother and grandmother.
Currently, I am working on a project of the Black Arts Movement. Critics and historians keep declaring it dead. I don’t think so. Have these critics heard and seen Boogie Down Productions? Common’s “The Corner”? Royce da 5'9"s “Caterpillar,” or even the spoken word songs of Jean Grae? Probably not. Recently, I contributed to a whole encyclopedia about the Black Arts Movement and its continuity through RAP music. And while it may seem like I’m doing a shameless plug for myself, seriously, check it out. This may make some of us rethink the declaration that the BAM is dead. It may help us imagine it as a movement that stretched from the 1960s until around 1980 rather than the short decade it is given in most anthologies. In fact, maybe we could link the 1980s to the 1960s? Doyen Wanda Coleman may have begun as a BAM poet, but her career extended until her death in 2013. In all of her writing, she never lost that original fire kindled by the Black Power Movement in Los Angeles. She deserves further study, and many other BAM writers need attention.
“BAM encompassed a loosely-associated group of artists, musicians, novelists, activists and playwrights whose work combined innovative approaches to literature, music, film, visual arts, and theatre with a heightened consciousness of black agency and autonomy. Along with the radical politics of the civil rights movement, the Black Muslims, and the Black Panthers, BAM represented a collective effort to defy the status quo of American life and culture. Between the late 1950s and the early 1980s, the movement produced some of America’s most original and controversial artists and intellectuals.”
I know that my research and teaching make more than a few of my colleagues uncomfortable, but I don’t wake up with the express intention of being a pain somebody’s rear. I have an old, John Hope Franklin type of curiosity. For example, lately, I have been listening to other speeches by Dr. King and looking into the organization that Rosa Parks founded, alongside her husband, in Detroit. I’ve been cussed out in class and rejected time and time again for publication pieces that simply do not fit the going narrative for what is valid or respectable African American Literature/Studies scholarship.
As always, if you like this article, clap back (press the hands). Or, you could always register for one of my classes!
