Author: thinksurfmedia

Since Marcus Garvey unfurled the UNIA’s iconic tri-color flag at its Liberty Hall headquarters in Harlem over a century ago, the seeds of environmental consciousness have been slowly germinating within America’s Black urban centers—nurtured by the conviction that the red blood offered by Black freedom fighters will nourish the growth an independent green Africa.  On the day the symbol of Black Power debuted before the dozens of delegates from across the globe who attended the first international convention, a spectacular affair that lasted the entire month of August 1920. By then, Harlem was already home to 70,000 African Americans, nearly half of New York City’s  Black population. In the two decades that had passed since the turn of the century, Harlem had more than doubled in size, surpassing all metropolises in terms of the sheer size of the Black population, earning it the title of the “Black Mecca” of the globe. All of America’s major cities were seeing their Black swell population from the of a profound social transformation, however, all did make up a much greater share of the population of major American cities elsewhere. of Some 400,000 to 500,000 Black southerners made the trek north during WWI, lured by the chance to work in industrial plants that experienced labor shortages when the outbreak of hostilities in the old world reduced the immigration of European laborers to a trickle. However, Blacks And while more than 8 in 10 Blacks still remained in the south, just under half of the top 50 cities where Blacks made their residence were located somewhere outside the region. Buoyed by descriptions of city life that appeared in the pages of newspapers like the Chicago Defender, growing numbers of sharecroppers and unskilled laborers settled alongside the smaller contingent of well-to-do, middle-class Blacks professionals who arrived North decades prior.   “One Defender reader in Mississippi expected State Street,” then the epicenter of Black Chicago, “to be heaven itself.”

 nature must be established if either are to survive the rapacity of our industrial civilization. Garvey’s vision, symbolized in his call for Black diasporans to return to Africa, ignited the hopes of countless Black migrants who had uprooted themselves from the backwaters of the former Confederate states, seeking a Promised Land north of the Mason-Dixon line. driven by the sense that a new relationship with

Contrary to the rosy picture painted in the pages of the Black press, the cities to which migrants fled had the look and feel of Dixie north. New arrivals usually found themselves confined to blighted neighborhoods, caged in by white prejudices that were given expression in invidious nicknames like “Darktown,” “Black Bottom” and “Coontown.” Overcrowded housing became increasingly common as Black migrants arrived from the South in droves, hungry for better-paying jobs offered by industrial plants where militant unions had won more generous wages and benefits for their members. In the steel town of Pittsburgh, a contemporary observer noted, with some alarm, that the sudden influx of “thousands of migrant meant ‘the utilization of every place in the Negro sections capable of being transformed into a habitation. . . . [A]ttics, cellars, storerooms, churches, sheds, and warehouses” were suddenly “turned into [makeshift] accommodations . . .” No matter what the particular city, conditions were equally bleak. Speaking of Chicago, the pioneering Black sociologist Charles S. Johnson “found that in a single day[,] there were 664 Negro applicants for houses, and only fifty houses available.” Inadequate sewage system, sanitation services, and water treatment facilities, along with residing in “undesirable localities,” further exacerbated the difficulties faced by Black migrants. Mary McLeod Bethune, future founder of the National Council of Negro Women, could’ve had Anytown, USA in mind when she penned an essay in 1925 on “The Problems of the City Dweller” that ran in Opportunity magazine, the house organ of the National Urban League: “It is ever the problem of living a rational, healthy life in the midst of an environment which for the masses is for the most part, unfavorable,” she wrote. “It is the problem of fresh air, wholesome food, sunshine and freedom within limits as pitilessly circumscribed as prison walls.”

  A century later, the apprehensions of earlier generations of Black leaders, who feared southern immigrants setting out in search of a promised land would only find an industrial waste pit, have now become our reality. Regardless of where their journey terminated, the once-bustling industrial boomtowns, to which millions of Blacks relocated as part of the Great Migration, would undergo a complete transmogrification in the decades that have passed since. Here’s what Dr. Robert Bullard, recognized as the father of the environmental justice movement, said in a recent interview: “Environmental challenges that many of our communities face, including climate challenges, are made worse by racial redlining that occurred 100 years ago, when Black communities were not provided flood protection, were not provided the kinds of trees and green space and landscaping and design. In the 2020s, those same areas that were redlined are hotter because there are no trees, green canopy. They’re more prone to floods. They have more pollution, and they have more Covid-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths.” Indeed, many Black and Brown communities now resemble real-life Robledos, the fictional city outside of L.A. that serves as the backdrop for Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Set in the year 2025—just one New Year’s toast away—Robledo is a Hobbesian hellscape that will be familiar to any inhabitant of the American city today: a never-ending war of all against all, fueled by gun violence, mass addiction, lack of economic opportunities, and public utilities that can no longer provide an adequate supply of water or energy to locals. Bulter’s dystopic cli-sci-fi thriller could’ve been taken from the flashing red chyron of our headline-making news. These real-life developments going on just beyond our doors are quite disquieting. In fact, serious thinkers are beginning to question if they’re the first warning signs of a coming civilizational collapse.

  Confronted by the threats in their own time, earlier cadres of Black leaders thought the solution could be found by fusing the politics of race and place into potent forms of Black nationalism. Garvey’s well-known call for diasporic Blacks to “return to Africa” has meant the establishment of a separate state continues to be regarded by many as the highest stage of political struggle. Self-determination; economic development; mutual aid and racial solidarity—these are the seen indispensable ingredients from which Blacks must devise policy solutions to the daunting problems we’re now confronted with.  “I do not believe that there is any manhood future in this country for the Negro,” AME Bishop Henry McNeal Turner averred—bitterly, “and that his future existence, to say nothing of his future happiness, will depend upon his nationalization.”

  In addition to the dreams of an independent republic in Africa, calls to establish independent, all-Black autarkies somewhere on U.S. soil have also galvanized popular grassroots movements that have arisen among Black Americans before and since. In the 1870s, for example, Benjamin “Pap” Singleton gained fame as the self-proclaimed “Moses of the Colored Exodus” after persuading thousands of Black sharecroppers to pool their monies to purchase land that available for sale under the Homestead Act and establish independent townships under Black control in the Kansas and other areas in the west. Unfortunately, this movement was largely a failure. However, it would be revived in far more ambitious form, decades later, when Black communist theoreticians like Harry Haywood began to revamp Marxist doctrine as the competition for colonial domination of Africa came to be regarded by many as the root cause of WWI. Along with radicals from the African Blood Brotherhoods, Haywood rejiggered the tenets of Marxism into a call for the establishment of a “Black Belt Republic” in the areas of the south where Blacks predominated. Whether it was to be realized at home or abroad, the dreams of independent statehood likely strike us as anachronisms from another time, when uninhabited land was in far greater supply than today. Mass exodus from the city, simply put, is no longer a viable option. The metastization of localized industrial pollution into a global climate crisis is forcing Blacks to consider an age-old question: where do we go from here? Is there anywhere to go, moreover, when the crisis blankets the entire globe?

  To answer these questions, the post-civil rights generation could profit by taking a second look at UNIA’s “Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World,” the remarkable 1920 manifesto which christened the colors red, black, and green as the banner of an intercontinental Pan-African struggle. Beyond the primary goal of wresting control of Africa from Europe’s colonial powers, this declaration delineated another 50 demands, including provisions aimed at the empowerment of Blacks who constituted a minority in white-majority Western nations.  In his recent study of Black nationalist thought, political scientist Dean Robinson notes that many “nationalists” thinkers understood “black administration of key institutions of social, political, and economic life” to be in alignment with the call for independent state: “Wheresoever they form a community among themselves,” the declaration insists, “Blacks should be given the right to elect their own representatives to represent them in Legislatures, courts of law, or such institutions as may exercise control over that particular community.” Though Garvey was deported back to Jamaica in 1927, his insistence that Black Americans must gain control over the institutions of local governance would be echoed in the writings of other leaders who sought to fill the void his removal left. “All self-determination means,” Harry Haywood later remarked, “is that Black people have the right—in their area of major concentration, the Black Belt—to whatever degree of self government (sic) they find necessary to guarantee equality.”

For three consecutive years, the eyes of the American public have been fixated on the images of the legions of white militants who packed into the Capitol Hill complex on January 6th, before exploding in a political bomb blast that has left many with the uneasy feeling that our democratic order may be teetering on the verge of collapse. Far less attention has been given, by comparison, to the radicalization of the non-whites who participated in the day’s events. Non-whites made up fewer than 1 in 10 charged for criminal conduct that day, it is true. However, their involvement is crucial to understanding the political violence that rocked our democratic institutions, the combustible bit of charcoals in the gunpowder that may propel an open shooting war in the future.

In an article titled “Why Young Men of Color Are Joining White-Supremacist Groups,” Arun Gupta, an Emeritus Professor at the University of Austin, notes the growing number of Blacks, Latinos and other mixed-race men rising to prominence within extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer. These groups, who openly embrace hooliganism, have been likened to the paramilitary Brownshirts who terrorized German citizens before Hitler’s Nazi regime took over. Fueled by a potent rage that combines a disgust for the seeming degeneracy of hip-hop culture, an ideological heritage of anticommunism that sees the modern bureaucratic state as a dangerous behemoth, and a fervent belief in heroic individualism, the presence of people of color among the far-right ranks, Gupta rightly notes, “gives it legitimacy to challenge state power and commit violence against their enemies.”

Viewed from a broader historical perspective, this not the first time Black America’s self-image as the standard-bearer of freedom has been contradicted by significant numbers of Black political activists aligning themselves with the forces of illiberalism that have arisen in the U.S from time to time. Novelist Richard Wright, the author of the blockbuster novel Native Son, portrayed the transformation of a Black teen into a cold-blooded killer as fascist movements were threatening to topple Western liberal democracies. In his essay “How Bigger Was Born,” a lengthy coda to the runaway best-seller, Wright reflects on the allure of fascism for some segments of the Black population.

“I’ve heard Negroes say that maybe Hitler and Mussolini are all right; that maybe Stalin is all right. They did not say this out of any intellectual comprehension of the forces at work in the world, but because they felt that these men ‘did things,’ a phrase charged with more meaning than the mere words imply. In the back of their minds, when they said this, was a wild and intense longing (wild and intense because it was suppressed!) to belong, to be identified, to feel alive as other people were, to be caught up forgetfully and exultingly in the swing of events, to feel the clean, deep, organic satisfaction of doing a job in common with others.”

While it’s commonly believed the homicidal impulses that drove Bigger to the electric chair were fed by experiences of racial oppression unique to American, Wright contends, to the contrary, that the “Bigger in America, Bigger in Nazi Germany, and Bigger in old Russia” shared certain modern experiences that transcended racial and national boundaries: “a world whose metaphysical meaning had vanished; a world in which God no longer existed as the daily focal point of men’s lives; a world in which men could no longer retain their faith in an ultimate hereafter.” (446)

For contemporaneous examples, Wright had to look no further than downtown Chicago, home to Eugene Brown, better known as Bishop Conshankin, a flamboyant community organizer and stepladder orator who styled himself “the Black Hitler.” Brown, who changed his nom de guerre to Sufi Abdul Hamid when he moved to Harlem, was hardly alone in his embrace of fascism. In a 1937 interview, Marcus Garvey, the UNIA’s charismatic leader, claimed his organization was the prototype for the fascist movements that arose on the European continent: “We were the first fascists,” Garvey averred. “We had disciplined men, women, and children in training for the liberation of Africa. The black masses saw that in this extreme nationalism lay their only hope, and readily supported it. Mussolini copied fascism from me but the Negro reactionaries sabotaged it.” Historian Gerald Horne identifies Lawrence Dennis, a fair-skinned Black who passed for white, as the “brains” behind the fascist movement that emerged in the United States during the interwar years. Several months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, an attack that would make the open advocacy of fascism verboten, Life magazine gave Dennis the dubious distinction of “America’s No. 1 Intellectual Fascist.”

If there’s any chance of preventing Trumpism from gaining more adherents in Black and Brown communities, we must start by addressing an obvious question: who are the chief exponents of the new fascism in the Black community today?

Though Trump’s ascent to power has seen a surprising number of Blacks ignore the antipathy most in the Black community would harbor toward 45 and declare their support for America’s first modern-day autocrat, none have managed to attain the degree of prominence and influence now enjoyed by the Black conservative media starlet Candace Owens. Blessed with the beauty of an Ebony fashion model and a tongue sharper than stiletto heels, Owens has a made-for-TV persona that has garnered her the support of well-heeled archconservatives. They hope she can finally help the Republican party refashion America’s racial politics as the head of the Blexit movement.

To understand how, the first thing to know is that Blexit is a portmanteau that combines Black and exit—a shorthand for the “Blexit” from the Democratic party that the GOP hopes can be effectuated under the leadership of Owens and her lesser-known Blexit co-founder, Brandon Tatum. The second is that this elusive goal has been atop the Republican agenda long before the sudden rise of these young Black millennials to the top of the media landscape.

Even though the structure of the U.S. political system gives a decided advantage to the Republican Party in congressional and presidential elections—thanks to combined effect of an electoral college that increasingly gives the White House to loser of the popular vote, a Senate system that gives the least populous states the same voting power as the most, and the practice of racial and political gerrymandering—the GOP’s quest to establish a Pax Republicana has proven elusive.

After Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980 brought the Democratic Party’s dominance of presidential politics to an end, and the Republican revolution of 1994 broke its forty-year stranglehold over Congress, the GOP appeared to be poised to roll back the far-reaching reforms that had reordered the relationship between government and society during the heyday of the New Deal. The defection of blue-collar voters, pro-life Catholics, and hawkish, pro-Israeli Jews starting in the 1970s, as the civil rights revolution sparked a ferocious conservative counterrevolution, appeared to put GOP domination of national politics within arm’s reach.

A coterie of Black Republicans, led by Thomas Sowell, then a little-known conservative iconoclast, gathered at Fairmont Hotel in liberal San Francisco to welcome what promised to be a veritable political revolution. Gone would be the days of sweeping social welfare programs that were imposed on the nation under FDR’s New Deal or LBJ’s Great Society programs. While Reagan’s victory marked the midpoint of a titanic battle that the two parties has waged during the last century over the direction of the nation, with Democrats dominating the first half (52 years), and Republicans the last (44 years), what each managed to achieve is a study in contrasts.

If the Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic Party was blessed with the Midas touch, Republicans, by contrast, were cursed with the touch of Tantalus. When the two periods are juxtaposed, a striking difference in the fortunes of the parties is thrown into relief. During the New Deal era, Democrats not only held the Oval Office for nearly twice the number of terms as their GOP rivals, while the period of Republican dominance, by contrast, saw a near-even split between the parties. They also enjoyed a higher degree of unified control over both chambers of Congress for almost three times the number of years during the heyday of the New Deal than the GOP would manage to achieve after the Reagan Revolution.

Given its precarious grip on federal power, it’s hardly surprising that the GOP’s revolutionary ambitions have resulted in rather modest accomplishments. Why? In the end, no single factor can account for its disappointments. The plain truth, however, is that, with exception of President Eisenhower’s decision to dispatch the National Guard to quell the outbreak of white violence during the Little Rock school desegregation crisis of 1957, the Republican party has spent the last century and a half trying to disavow its role as the progenitor of Black liberation.

In essence, each presidential election echoes the pivotal year of 1877, offering it an opportunity to either break free from or reaffirm the belief that the federal government bears the responsibility to defend or advance the collective interests of Black America. And each time, it has sounded a note of retreat more stalwart than the last. Yet, despite GOP’s decision to turn its back on the legacy of freedom that Lincoln had spawned, steadfastly refusing to enact any policies that would protect Blacks from the unending war whites would wage against them in every area they sought to enter, Black voters would continue to support the Republican party well into the mid-20th century. In fact, over half the Black votes cast in the presidential election of 1956 went to Dwight Eisenhower. Republican hopes that their support among Blacks was on the rebound were dashed, four years later. During the presidential election of 1960, incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon lost to John F. Kennedy in a closely contested election. It was followed by what has become an all too familiar ritual by now. A post-mortem conducted to make sense of the VP’s loss to the one-term Massachusetts senator laid the blame on “the party’s failure to identify itself more aggressively with the interests of the Negro and other minority groups.” “I needed only five percent more votes in Negro areas,” Nixon groaned in a 1962 interview with Ebony magazine. While Nixon may have believed the party could reverse its electoral fortunes by courting black voters more assiduously, his chief rival for the party’s nomination, Barry Goldwater, the archconservative senator from Arizona, proposed to cut the party’s ties with black voters altogether. Instead of trying to revive the old Black-and-Tan alliance between the party’s liberal white elites and Black operatives in the big cities, Goldwater opted to purge Blacks from the structure and replace it with a Lily-White apparatus. Disgruntled Southern whites, upset with the sweeping change in race relations being wrought by the civil rights revolution, were to be the new Blacks. “If Goldwater wins his fight,” Nixon warned, “our party w[ill] become the first major all-white political party.” Four years later, Goldwater and his supporters succeeded in severing the historic tie between Blacks and the Republican Party, engineering a swift takeover of the party apparatus and a coup de main over liberal New York state Governor Nelson Rockefeller in the 1964 Republican primary. Before the general election could even be held, it was clear Blacks were on the verge of abandoning the party en bloc. After being subject to a campaign of harassment, intimidation and chicanery, only 1% of delegates who attended the convention in San Francisco that year were Black. Jackie Robinson, the famed baseball hero turned Republican champion, remarked: “As I watched the steamroller operation in San Fransisco, I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”

 It is this stance, above all else, which has prevented the Party of Lincoln from attracting the number of Black voters necessary for a sustained majority. According to a report by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, from 1964 to 2008, an average of 88 percent of Black votes went to the Democratic Party’s presidential nominees, increasing to 93 percent in the last three elections. As former RNC chair Lee Atwater lamented after the disappointing mid-term elections of 1986, if the Republican Party is to have any chance of becoming a majority party, it must find a way to secure 20% of the Black vote. 

Nearly forty years later, Republican efforts to woo Black voters from the Democratic Party have converged with the ambitions of Black social media influencers looking to capitalize on the uncertainties arising from economic and cultural shifts in our nation by peddling conservative nostrums to those desperate for answers. Few are better suited to this task than Owens, who has now become a veritable master of the social media universe. Part of Owens appeal lies in the carefully crafted portrait of herself as some lone crusader In her best-selling anti-liberal broadside, Blackout, she proudly boasts of a reach that few can match: “[A]ccording to Twitter (sic), just one solitary tweet I send reaches an average of 2.5 million people.” Given her affiliations with the juggernauts of the conservative civic world, it’s little wonder she is one of the few Black media figures able to sidestep the gatekeepers in the mainstream media and instantaneously transmit her views straight to her followers. Among her benefactors are Turning Point USA, which has raised nearly $150 million over the past 5 years; Praeger University,