Raphael Warnock and His Black-Fashioned Senate Candidate Herschel Walker: The Failure of a Black Man to Win

I thought the US Senate race between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker was very painful to watch, observe and analyze as a Black man. It was assumed that a famous Black football player in Georgia would be enough to split the Black vote, but the reality was that not many White Georgians were willing to vote for Walker.

Black women in particular proved key to Warnock’s victory. The campaign of former Democratic nominee for governor, who later became a candidate in 2020, and his help in organizing the largest voting turnout campaign in the state’s history paid off. The Warnock campaign’s grassroots efforts helped to build the kind of multiracial coalition that would have made Dr. King proud.

Walker possessed absolutely no credentials to become the Republican Party’s Senate nominee, other than being a famous former athlete friendly with Trump.

Almost half of Georgians supported him despite the allegations that Walker coerced women into abortions, engaged in extramarital affairs and abused women. Walker, who denied the allegations of violence against him and has admitted to having mental health issues but doesn’t deny being violent toward his wife, rejected the abortion allegations when pressed by reporters. “You know, I’m done with this foolishness,” he told reporters. “I’ve already told people this is a lie.”

On January 5th, 2021, she became the first Black person to be elected to the US Senate from Georgia. Alongside Jon Ossoff, who became the first Jewish senator ever elected from the state, these historic victories were overshadowed by the tragic circumstances that commenced the next day.

The Story of Black Power, the New York Times, and Black Lives Matter: A History of Race, Democracy, and Precarious Pregnancies

The 1619 project was a multimedia project created by the New York Times which was brought to life in the first two episodes of The 1619 Project.

As the first two episodes of “The 1619 Project” make dramatically clear, “the relentless buying, selling, insuring, and financing” of Black people “would help make Wall Street and New York City the financial capital of the world.”

The stories “The 1619 Project” shares with viewers are fundamentally American ones, where Blacks take center stage as among the most fervent, patriotic and resilient stewards of democracy in the nation’s history.

The New York Times Sunday Magazine special edition, multimedia educational social media supporting materials, and bestselling anthology all came from the documentary series.

Yet an ever-deeper legacy of Black Power goes beyond politics. The year 1966 also brought a cultural flowering of racial pride that could be shared and celebrated by Blacks of every class or educational background. This “Black Consciousness” became manifest in the spread of Afros and dashikis, in the first celebration of Kwanzaa, and in Black parents proudly giving their children names that marked their racial identity—like Breonna, or Tyre.

It’s important to focus on democracy here. For perhaps the most important revelation of “The 1619 Project” and the ensuing praise and controversy surrounding it is the relationship between race and democracy.

As Black History Month begins, we are witnessing a resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests and calls for police and other reforms in the wake of the fatal police beating of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols in Memphis. The roots of a lot of the current Race relations in the US date back to 1966, when the Black Power movement was born.

The series’ second episode, “Race,” explores the racial and gender hierarchies against the backdrop of the contrast between the lives of Hannah-Jones’ White maternal grandfather and her Black paternal grandmother.

Our racial identities being listed on certificates of birth and death are more than bureaucratic signposts. They serve as markers of destiny and signifiers of future wealth and prosperity for some and punishment and premature death for others.

Forced reproduction laboring in unspeakable work conditions resulted in precarious Black pregnancies, where Black women were forced to give numerous births against the backdrop of high rates of infant mortality and generational trauma. Maternal mortality and infant mortality are connected to challenges that women had giving birth during slavery, according to a historian in the episode.

This is an incredibly painful history to confront – and one that is more necessary in our own time than ever. It also may help to explain how a Black woman as rich and famous as Serena Williams almost died from complications after giving birth to her daughter Olympia.

In 1966 the political lesson for Black Lives Matter activists was that street protests and defiant slogans are not enough to bring about lasting change. It’s essential that there’s clear messaging and policy objectives.

The June 1966 Meredith March became known as the “Summer of Civil Rights” due to the visit of America’s top civil rights leaders. They were making their way from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi to carry on a solo voting rights march begun by James Meredith, the Black activist who had integrated the University of Mississippi three years earlier. The man had been shot by a White supremacist and was admitted to the hospital.

When the march reached Greenwood, Mississippi, Stokely Carmichael, the recently named chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), got permission from a local Black school to erect sleeping tents on its grounds. But as he was helping to put up the tents, he was arrested by the local White police chief, known as “Buff” Hammond, and dragged to the local jail.

“Black Power!” the crowd shouted back. “We want Black Power!” Carmichael cried again, five times in all. The book is about black power. Each time the crowd roared back.

A short story by the Associated Press about the scene was picked up by more than 200 newspapers. Overnight, the Black Power Movement was born.

Yet for all their flaws and flame-outs, the Black Power generation proved to be prescient in their analysis of the flaws in urban policing and the limits of racial integration King preached. As children of the Great Migration, they knew all too well the heartbreak of Blacks who had left everything behind in the South in pursuit of a false promise of physical security, fair housing and job opportunities in the North.

That, in turn, made them an inviting target for J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, who launched a war of sabotage and dirty tricks aimed at preventing any of Panther leaders from emerging as a “messiah” who might rally young Blacks. Within two years, the party’s founders were all in jail or in exile, and in no position to serve as more than radical poster boys.

When the Panthers first donned their famous leather jackets and berets and posed with rifles and handguns, it was to advertise their plan to take advantage of California’s “open carry” gun laws to create armed civilian patrols to monitor the Oakland police.

As if to prove the Panthers’ point, however, the summer of 1966 brought a series of clashes between police and urban Blacks that set off riots in Chicago, Atlanta and the San Francisco neighborhood of Hunters Point. The uprisings became associated with the slogan, “Black Power,” which caused a drop in support for the civil rights agenda by the White public. Whites opposed Black protest in a Newsweek poll by more than two to one.

An ultranationalist faction within SNCC pushed to expel all White members, a bid that was initially dismissed by the group’s leaders but eventually prevailed at a staff retreat rife with drug use in the Catskill Mountains. After just a year as SNCC’s chairman, a spent Carmichael gave way to H. Rap Brown, an even more inflammatory and less-charming successor.

Another vicious cycle consumed the Black Panthers. Winning release from prison in 1966 with the support of authors who admired jailhouse essays he would write in the book “soul on Ice”, Cleaver and his team went against the advice of local police and encouraged them to embrace talk of armed revolution.

A second lesson is to be prepared for fierce backlash to any temporary progress. A student of 1966 would not have been surprised to see how swiftly the momentum for police and other reforms stalled after the last moment of “racial reckoning” in 2020, in the face of a concerted campaign to demonize “wokeness” and calls to “defund the police.”

In an essay that presents a celebration/critique of Black churches and they way they follow the same set of believes that enslavers followed, Black mentions outstanding contemporary African American writers Kiese Laymon, Jesmyn Ward, and Jericho Brown and then states: “The black pen never fails to produce spirit-filled work that, if black people read and heed, would set them free.” A work of nonfiction that should be required reading in troubled times is Black on Black.

Not whether a black person is dead, but whether the police will be held responsible is the question that is posed in “The trial and massacre of the Black Body”. The shield of cultural protection that surrounds white male patriarchy and power has been exposed time and time again by Black, who exposes the way it leads to the murder of Black people. The Floyd case may not have been the end of discrimination against Black people, but it is still shown in a lot of the examples in this essay. Black leads readers on a tour of the deadly consequences of unfettered racism, which began with the bodies of the Amistad victims and continued with the likes of the Martin and Till families.

The suppression of stories in the American narrative robs us of important historical lessons, but also warps our vision of ourselves and our future, making all of our lives less rich.

What the world should know about Marcus Mosiah Garvey and his legacy and what he didn’t: The consequences for civil society and black history

The Jamaican-born Garvey energized millions by calling for an end to colonialism in Africa, for economic justice for the entire African Diaspora and for cultural and political recognition and independence 100 years ago — a time when such declarations were just about unheard of.

The Black Star Line shipping company was started by Garvey in order to give more economic opportunity to Black people. If Garvey’s ships had helped to transport black people back to Africa and facilitate trade throughout the diaspora, then that would have been a big plus.

After thousands of Garvey’s followers (the supposed victims of the fraud) petitioned for his release, his sentence was commuted in 1927. Ultimately, after Garvey’s political vision had been silenced, advocates for racial justice in the United States and abroad began to focus less on economic justice and more on civil and political rights for most of the 20th century. Today, the widening wealth gap and other indicators of inequality suggest that this shift in focus was costly.

We have failed to learn from Garvey’s story. That’s largely because mainstream narratives rarely teach about his legacy, and when they do, they usually fail to correct the historical inaccuracies promulgated by his wrongful conviction. By failing to learn the lessons from Garvey’s case, and by underestimating the harm of politically motivated infiltration and prosecution, we open the door to continuing these policies and practices. This will result in shame for a long time.

According to the resolution, the world should know the truth about Marcus Mosiah Garvey and Black history. Johnson added that “it’s time to right this fundamental wrong” given the “utter lack of merit to the charges on which he was originally convicted, combined with his profound legacy and contributions to Black history in our country.”