This
Valentine’s Day my focus is on black love.
African
American life in the U.S. is primarily
depicted as a struggle devoid of romantic love
rather than a radical act of living,
liberation, and loving families. Under the
tyranny of colonization, slavery, Jim Crow,
and simple everyday life, how do we have time
for love?
As
a people who are are fixated on freedom, I’ve
been asked whether we have the capacity for
love. Also, bombarded by the iconography of
negative images and racial tropes on
multimedia platforms as emasculating females,
mammies, and welfare mothers as black women,
and “super-predators,” pimps, and roving
phalluses as black males, the perception is
Black people don’t engage in romance or love -
we simply have sex. We make babies.
The
22-foot-tall sculpture, The Embrace, on the
Boston Common, symbolizes the strength of
black love. It symbolizes the love of a power
couple and the hug Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
and Coretta Scott King shared after Dr. King
won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize.
For
decades, Winnie and Mandella Nelson were a
loving power couple. Winnie Mandela’s book,
“Part of My Soul Went with Him” (1985), was an
example. She endured an 18-year forced
separation from her husband, Nelson, while he
was in jail during South Africa’s apartheid.
The love letters between the two were poetic.
Two
activities converged for me during COVID-19:
when not officiating funerals, I read romance
novels and took long walks along the Charles
River, thinking about W. E. B. Du Bois as a
romantic.
During
my morning constitutional, I intentionally
passed 20 Flagg Street, where sociologist W.
E. B. Du Bois, the first African American to
receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University,
resided from 1890 to 1893 while a doctoral
student because of the university’s
segregation housing policy prohibiting blacks
in the dorms. Since 1994, thanks to then Mayor
Reeves (the first gay and black mayor of
Cambridge), the house is part of the Cambridge
African American Heritage Trail, and the
Cambridge Historical Commission placed a
marker on the front yard to commemorate Du
Bois’s life.
During
COVID, I happened upon a romantic novel by
Dubois titled, “Dark Princess, A Romance
Novel.” I was in disbelief. Du Bois said that
of his body of works, “Dark Princess, A
Romance Novel” was his favorite. Because the
book was on sale on Amazon as a Kindle ebook
for $2.99, I thought to myself, what did I
have to lose? Moreover, the thought of Dubois
having written a romance novel didn’t fit the
image of the man I had learned about in
college. He’s the man who gives us the concept
of “double consciousness” in his 1903 seminal
and autoethnographic text, “Souls of Black
Folks.”
“Dark Princess” was written
in 1924 during the Harlem Renaissance. The
novel was Dubois’s effort to showcase black
love while illustrating his concept of the
“problem of the color line” at home and
abroad and the need for solidarity across
races. While the book shows that Black and
Brown lives are globally and constantly
challenged, it also highlights that we must
find time for joy, love, and celebration as
radical acts of liberation.
African
Americans have always had a tenuous
relationship with the institution of marriage,
a symbol of our love. Therefore, one can argue
that the topic of marriage equality in the
U.S. has always been a black issue. But Black
love has always existed despite obstacles to
prevent it.
For
example, marriages of enslaved African
Americans were prohibited by both church and
state in this country until the end of the
Civil War in 1865, because enslaved people
were viewed as property and not human beings.
But we created our own rituals to signify and
honor their nuptials - Jumping over the broom.
Mildred
Loving (Loving v. Virginia, 1967), who’s often
overlooked in the pantheon of African American
trailblazers celebrated in February during
Black History Month, gained notoriety when the
landmark U.S. Supreme Court decided in her
favor that anti-miscegenation laws are
unconstitutional. Her crime was this country’s
racial and gender obsession - interracial
marriage. Married to a white man, Loving and
her husband were indicted by a Virginia grand
jury in October 1958 for violating the state’s
“Racial Integrity Act of 1924,” which was the
same year Dubois’s novel appeared.
Also,
Loving understood the interconnection of
struggles and supported the same-sex marriage
fight. Today, we are free to love and marry
whom we want. Black LGBT+ couples carry on the
tradition of the tenacity of black love.
Since
the beheading of St. Valentine in Rome in the
year 270 A.D., marriage has been controlled by
heads of the church and the state - and not by
the hearts of lovers. When Emperor Claudius II
issued an edict abolishing marriage because
married men hated to leave their families for
battle, Valentine, known then as the “friend
to lovers,” secretly joined them in holy
matrimony. While awaiting his execution,
Valentine fell in love with the jailer’s
daughter, and in his farewell message to his
lover, he wrote, “From your Valentine.”
Happy
Valentine’s Day!
