Refusal is black culture. It is our anthem, a mantra, a way of being, present in novelty and genius of our vernacular, in the newspapers and literature we create to tell out stories, in the drums banjo, and bass that permeate our music, in the vocals that refuse to be timid, diluted, or replicated.
Kellie Carter Jackson, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance
By the time I was eight years old, I knew that if I didn't read every day, I couldn't live. Most of what was available to be, outside of rather boring English language workbooks at school, were books my grandfather, a janitor, either removed from the trash or was handed to him for me, a sickly child, born with a heart condition. Nonetheless, I was determined to decipher whatever might be hidden in those adult biographies and World War II history books. Even the Reader's Digest could reveal something that was vital for a child of eight.
By 14 years old, I still had to read up to the complexity of books recommend by older, college students, members, like me, in Operation Breadbasket's Youth Division. I was all the more curious and eager to read these books because these books, for the time being, were evidence that I, a high school student now, had been lied to: Black Americans were writers too, and they weren't too pleased about the collective conditions either, and they were determined to refuse to remain silent.
Slavery, an enterprise to create wealthy for an American wealthy class, make American a great and powerful nation at the expensive of African Americans confined to a cruel and brutal and sadistic life on plantations. Enslavement, for them, was tyranny, and it was tyranny that America was peddling when it went to Indochina and Latin America. Africa. Imperialism-- the logical next step after hundreds of years of free black labor.
Read Eldridge Cleaver 's Soul on Ice! Read Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and Charles Hamilton's Black Power, Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, John G. Jackson's Introduction to African Civilization!
And a "must" read: The Wretched of the Earth!
I purchased a copy of the Martinique activist, psychiatrists, and the 20th century's "most important theorist of the African struggle for independence." In a chilling, yet liberating way.
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