“My Ancestors” or “our Ancestors” always trigger a startled look or a sudden smile from whites.  The startled are those who are rather stunned that I would bring them up and that long ago time.  I suspect, too, it is a new experience to be reminded of them and that time, for the startled suddenly drift into an expression of pain, as if they were experiencing a pinched nerve.  Those who display the sudden smile, know of this feeling of pain and they have developed a mechanism that automatically shuts down the brain's ability to imagine any disturbing images associated with “my Ancestors,” “our Ancestors.”

Our Ancestors — those Africans kidnapped, purchased, shipped, and enslaved in the Americas, who permitted this country, in particular, to flex its industrial muscles.  The labor, ingenuity, creativity, suffering, and death of my ancestors contributed greatly to the imperialist development of this nation.  Four hundred years of people unfree, people exploited, brutalized, raped, lynched — four hundred years of this violence — contributed to the development of the leisure life of wealth, to the development of the middle class. 

Let’s not forget that white Affirmative Action has been a critical factor in the formation of the white working class, writes David R. Roediger (The Wages of Whiteness) and the “systematic development of a sense of whiteness went hand in hand for the US white working class.”  Enslaved Blacks, those millions and millions of Africans and their descendents, toiled to make possible this sense of whiteness.  White supremacy, as an ideology, spoke of “liberty” from England or the Old World in order to “protect black slavery,” write the historians Alfred W. and Ruth G. Blumrosen (Slave Nation).  Freedom meant “white freedom” and equality referred to equality with Europeans.  Pioneers could run roughshod through hills and mountains, killing and maiming the Native American population with impunity, on their way to gold in the west.  With the east, north, and south already devastated by the violence of enslavement, it was now time to secure the remaining country for further exploration. By the millions, these ancestors contributed greatly to this nation’s discourse on freedom and equality, even while the practice of slavery and the carrying out of genocide represented the first display by the U.S. of its use of weapons of mass destruction.   

It could also be said that the Ancestors have been a factor in unifying violence as a way to respond to difference, particularly racial difference.  Yet, those millions of Ancestors, then, desired freedom from the pursuit of “white freedom.”  Black people desired freedom — peace — from violence, but many were quite capable of defending themselves, their families and communities. They desired, in short, non-violence, and they documented this desire in countless slave narratives, speeches, sermons, essays, and novels.  The Ancestors were visionaries who could envision the possibility of justice and equality for all of humanity.

We have all benefited from the existence of the Ancestors — it just depends on what is claimed as an inheritance as a result of their existence in the U.S. 

The Ancestors who spoke from the experience of oppression are here, still active for some of us opposed to domestic and foreign aggression and the passively engaging of America’s desire for wealth and power in the Middle East.  The whole nation now — from east to west, north to south — is devastated by economic policies that benefit the “entrappers,” merchants, shipbuilders, property moguls, and overseers.  The Middle East, like Africa in the past, has something Americans want to possess — by any means necessary.  In that case, I suppose the Ancestors are a shadowy people from which white Americans and some Black Americans want to separate, in order to forget.  

I find it necessary to point out that my Ancestors and their descendents, as well as Native Americans, Latino/as, Asians, Muslims, and Arabs have usually been on the receiving end of America’s violence. 

So this brings me to Martin, M.L.K.

Thank you, Langston Hughes! (And what do they call Black women?)

The King of “Beyond Vietnam” (delivered at Riverside Church in New York, April 4, 1967, exactly a year before his assignation) had come a long way from the King of “I have a Dream” (1963). This is the King who most Americans prefer to forget, if they remembered this King or read of this King at all.  This is the King who cost him his life, not the King who spoke of little Black children sitting side by side little white children.  This is the King who generates a collective sudden smile.  This King was hated because he spoke of white America’s obsession with domestic and foreign violence.   

That day at Riverside, King said that he formed his dissent on the war in Vietnam “based upon mandates of conscience and the reading of history.” When others objected and told him that “‘Peace and civil rights don’t mix’” (can you imagine!) and asked if he were not “hurting the cause” of his people, King said he was “greatly saddened.” These people did not know him or anything about his calling, nor did they “know the world in which they live.”  Therefore, that day, King gathered up his spirit, not to speak to “Hanoi or the National Liberation Front.”  Instead, King spoke, he said, “to my fellow Americans.”  

First, King said he found the struggles against poverty in the U.S. interrupted for “adventures like Vietnam.” In a “society gone mad with war,” people, skills, and money to fight poverty at home suddenly went down “some demonic, destructive suction tube.” War, King understood, was “an enemy of the poor.”

Even more tragic was the way the Black youth were called upon to defend “freedom” and “democracy” in a foreign land. “We are taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.” In turn, King said, this “cruel manipulation” of the poor devastated the hopes of the entire Black community. Black parents, mentors and coaches are encouraging Black youth to stay home thus “undermining the imperial machinery of death,” John Walsh writes. 

On October 15, 2007, Walsh’s article, “Why Won’t Liberals Join Them? Blacks Turn Against the War,” notes how the numbers of young Blacks joining the military today has dropped significantly.  Still over-represented in the military, Blacks have halted their turn “over to the merchants of death.” “The Black Resistance to the war is poetic justice, given the racist roots of the neocon movement that spawned the war,” he continues.  “It is simply not racism directed at Muslims and Arabs that informed the neocon project but racism directed at Blacks and Hispanics from the very first.”

In a speech given prior to “Beyond Vietnam” speech, King said that “America has been backlashing for more than three hundred years.” (“The Other America"). There hasn’t been a single commitment to Black progress on the part of white America,” he added. Today, forty years later, Blacks are subjected to unfair jail and prison terms; Black children are still subjected to a denigrating education; and nooses are appearing in neighborhood yards, at the workplace or on office doors even while the country ask that Black youth serve the “merchants of death” so white America and middle-classed Blacks can continue engaging in their favorite pastime activities — shopping and overlooking the destruction of lives here and abroad.  And in keeping with the heritage of their Ancestors, the Black community, once again, has spoken.  

Back at Riverside Church, King said that he had come to oppose the war in Vietnam because of the issue of violence. 

In Vietnam, the killing of bodies and of spirits was already a practice of the American government against the Black community.  And in keeping with our Ancestors, who truly fought for freedom and equality, who wanted an end to the violence, and who spoke out at risk of death, King, too, spoke out against aggression, against war, torture — violence that killed thousands of innocent lives per day and disrupted families and communities. 

Today, the consequence of a foundation in violence is still very real.  As someone recently told me, we need only substitute the word Vietnam in King’s Riverside speech with the words Iraq or Afghanistan. We were told what to expect from this kind of existence forty years ago…

“If we continue,” King said  “There will be no doubt in my mind and in the minds of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop the war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play.  The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve.”

The King of 1967 and 1968 still speaks to us, forty years later.

America’s “maturity,” to cite Black Commentator columnist, Larry Pinkney (Keeping It Real – Issue 249 – October 18, 2007), demands “the much needed fundamental structural/systematic change” and no mere reform.  Reform, he writes, “would simply serve to continue the masquerade of American democracy and white liberals, conservatives, and their surrogates know this.”

Ultimately, America’s “maturity” depends on its recognition and rejection of its heritage of violence and its acknowledgement of the heritage of the Ancestors who offer a way to truly understand the meaning of freedom and equality — or this country will find its way down that “demonic, destructive suction tube” for sure this time. 

In the meantime, Black America will not wait because we have long known that the call of our Ancestors is to struggle and free ourselves from the nymphomaniac of power and her smokescreen of innocence.  Freedom is never given to a people, we must remember, and we have never sat by idly as we resisted the bed of bombs.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist Jean Daniels. PhD is a writer and lecturer in Madison, Wisconsin.. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.