I have met Louis Satterfield, Lena Horne, Ivan Dixon, Tom Bradley, Louis Lomax, Jesse Jackson, all in my youth. I remember Operation Breadbasket came over to Dorsey High and Jesse brought dancers. I sat in the front row. He said he was changing the name to PUSH. The cute dancer with the big fro took the moment in her song when the lyrics said 'you' and pointed to me.
They used to come to us, all of them. They believed that children were our future. They wanted to teach us well and let us lead the way by showing all the beauty we possessed inside. So we developed a sense of pride. Black pride. Unquestionable. Unstoppable. We had become a new people top to bottom. By the time I was a teenager, there were no Negroes left in America. I can remember the sunny day in Los Angeles when McFadden & Whitehead came on the radio. Do you hear the strings? The ladies chorus? The synth drums? It was a new sound. There was TSOP and Fly Robin Fly. But here's the thing that a lot of people forget about what happened after 1968, the year the US burned. NASA was still in full effect and the dream kept spreading. I've often talked about how nobody wants to be an astronaut. When I was a kid, that was the greatest thing anyone could possibly be. And in the Old School, we were setting our minds in that direction.
The leap was cultural. It was the difference between Soul and Funk. Soul had its left foot in the Blues and its right foot in Gospel. It was a moaning and groaning affair filled with longing and don't nobody know the trouble I've seen. Funk had its thighs high and its mind in outer space. It poplocked and did the robot to synthesizers and attended the arrival of the Mothership. It was going to do what it wanted and if the people of Earth couldn't handle it, we would go to a new dimension. Jesse had a clue having us say "I am somebody", but we were going to be somebody else entirely.
For a long time, I attended my generational imperative. I wanted to keep on that tangent of pride, keep that black cultural revolution alive. I felt obligated to move the new Talented Tenth agenda forward. But something embarrassing happened. And in retrospect I have considered that the problem wasn't the aim or the spirit, but it was the infrastructure and the capitalization. Revolutions are expensive. And even though spirit travels through space, time and immovable objects, you can't ever be sure that it is focused or radiates in the proper direction.
The second thing that I noticed was that our quantum leap of emergence in spirit sometimes spent its energy, emit its photon of funk and dropped back to a lower orbit. And while a quantum seems like a great leap forward, in the great scheme of things it's not much of a distance. When you can raise spirits with something as inspirational as a song, you have to realize that maybe they can get beat back down by another song. You know and I know that only Queen Latifa escaped the gravity of rap like a queen. And yet I believe my kids are as likely to fall in love to an old Lionel Ritchie song as I was. Some inspirations of love are endless. That's why when you hear McFadden & Whitehead, whoever they are, that same message comes through.
We will come to them, the next youth. And I will tell tales of the next level, when 'first black' didn't mean bus driver, but CEO. And I think that the thing I've seen that my parents never did, the insides of big businesses from coast to coast - from every major city except Memphis, St. Louis and Milwaukee will be useful.
I know and have learned the hard way many times that nobody knows what 'black' is. Nobody knows black culture, except that everybody knows something to call black culture. It is transparent. So we will have to wait for patient historians to connect the dots in a lasting fashion for future generations. I've always thought that I was doing my part here at Cobb to write some piece of source material for future grad students to incorporate. It's really the only reason I do much self-promotion; I'm aiming for the Long Now. So I no longer get upset that some of us called the Old School doesn't 'own' black. The Old School is what it is, and how it will be remembered will be beyond our control as are all reifications of black culture for various reasons.
This weekend I got mad for the last time, reflecting on Brother Brown calling my transformation to post-blackness complete. Yeah. When we were black we did it right and everybody else has polluted the legacy, black doesn't stand for what it used to. Then again I look at Lee Archer when it actually stood for doing twice as much. He flew 156 combat missions in WW2. That's when black meant something, but they didn't even call it 'black' back in 1942. They didn't even call it the Air Force, but the Air Corps back then.
We're not what we used to be, and time marches on.
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