Pawns In Their Game
From the day we start school, our heads are filled with propaganda, the fertilizer for racism and white privilege.
White and black students are played like pawns who have been systematically brainwashed with false and misleading portrayals of blacks in American history. Was it all an accident? There are no accidents.
We are all, whites and blacks, manipulated to believe that people of color are simply inferior to whites. And when you dehumanize people you make it much easier for the majority to rationalize all things racist.
The system thrives on lies and they are buried deep in our souls. Mostly we don’t even know they are there, insidiously affecting the way we live our lives and how we look at people of a different color. Worse, the deception is just as imprinted on people of color who come to believe they are inferior.
We’re taught the famous African Americans are people like Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, the Supremes, James Brown, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Muhammad Ali, Jesse Owens, Sammy Davis Jr., Miles Davis.
They are all performers, either on the ball field or boxing ring or before the microphone. Of course, there is Barack Obama and Martin Luther King but that shows that the exceptions prove the rule. Right?
The message: Blacks can sure dance and they can sure run but they sure can’t think.
Who are the famous whites in history? Albert Einstein, Christopher Columbus, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Elvis, the Beatles, Jonas Salk, Madame Curie, Babe Ruth, Joe Dimaggio.
The message: Whites can do it all.
This is not meant to be a primer in African American history but rather a reminder of how ignorant and manipulated we are and have been. Contrary to what we may have been taught, there have been so many accomplished African Americans out of the realm of entertainment and sports. People like:
Robert Abbott, 1870–1940, founder of the Chicago Defender, one of the most important black newspapers in history. A graduate of Hampton University, Abbott was leading voice for African Americans to move north and leave the Jim Crow south. Circulation of the weekly Chicago Defender grew to more than half a million readers, roughly the circulation of the Miami Herald and Orlando Sentinel.
Alvin Ailey, 1931–1989, founded the revolutionary Alvin Ailey American Dance theater. Ailey’s work is as emblematic of American art as tap dance, jazz, the literature of Toni Morrison and hip-hop. Ailey explored issues of social justice, racism and spirituality in the African-American experience.
Richard Allen, 1760–1831, was an abolitionist, former slave and educator. In 1794, Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in America in Philadelphia. It was the first independent black denomination in the U.S. Today, the church has more than 2.5 million members in 6,000 churches.
Maya Angelou, 1928–2014, was an acclaimed poet and writer of prose who won three Grammy awards, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a host of honorary degrees.
Her life was hard. She was San Francisco’s first African American female cable car conductor and later worked in the sex trade and as a calypso singer. She joined the Harlem Writers Guild where she was guided by a friend and fellow author, James Baldwin. As a result Angelou wrote the best-selling autobiography “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” in 1969.
Ella Baker, 1903–1986, was not as well-known as some but was a key worker in the civil rights movement. She was an NAACP field secretary in the 1940s and in 1957, she helped the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Baker also laid the foundation for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, later to become one of the most important organizations in American civil rights history.
James Baldwin, 1924–1987, a novelist and playwright, wrote about the experiences of a gay black man in white America. He confronted American racism and explored homosexuality through his literature and in his life.
His first novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” published in 1953, was about the struggle of poor, inner-city residents. His collection of essays in “The Fire Next Time” explored the black identity at a time when the country was coming to terms with white supremacy.
Mary McLeod Bethune, 1875–1955, was an educator and civil rights leader and advisor to five U.S. presidents. She founded the Daytona Literary and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls which later merged with Cookman Institute of Jacksonville, Fla. She was president of the Bethune Cookman College and was later president of the National Association of Colored Women.
Bethune worked to end poll taxes and lynching. She organized protests against businesses that refused to hire African Americans and demonstrated in support of the Scottsboro Boys.
Shirley Chisholm, 1924–2005, was the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress, representing New York’s 12th District for seven terms from 1969 to 1983. Chisholm fought for improved education; health and social services, including unemployment benefits for domestic workers; providing disadvantaged students the chance to enter college while receiving intensive remedial education; the food stamp program; and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children program.
In 1972, Chisholm ran for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, the first black candidate for a major party’s nomination for president.
Benjamin O. Davis Sr., 1880–1970, was the Army’s first African American general. Davis fought segregation and created plans for limited desegregation of U.S. combat forces in Europe during World War II. President Harry S. Truman ordered the end of discriminatory practices in the armed forces because of Davis’s work.
During World War II, Davis headed a special unit charged with safeguarding the status and morale of black soldiers in the army, and he served in the European theater as a special adviser on race relations.
Frederick Douglass, 1818–1895, was a slave who escaped bondage and fled north. His writings portrayed brutality, the severing of familial bonds and mental torture, totally discrediting the southern propaganda of the happy slave.
Douglass rose to prominence in the abolitionist movement and was known for having rejected President Lincoln’s suggestion that African Americans immigrate to another country. In the following months, Lincoln realized his idea was wrong.
Dr. Charles Drew, 1904–1050, was a surgeon and researcher who greatly expanded the understanding of plasma, showing it lasts much longer than whole blood and can be stockpiled. He was the first African American to earn a doctorate from Columbia University and became the world’s leading authority on blood transfusions and storage.
As medical director of the American Red Cross National Blood Donor Service, Drew led the collection of tens of thousands of pints of blood for U.S. troops fighting in World War II.
These are just a small sample of noted African Americans. Undoubtedly there are many more talented African Americans who have been blocked from success by racism.
Other noted African Americans to consider are W.E.B. Dubois, Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Johnson, Henrietta Lacks, Thurgood Marshall, Toni Morrison, Gordon Parks, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington and Ida B. Wells.
Bob Dylan wrote “Only a Pawn in their Game” after the murder of civil rights worker Medgar Evers in 1964. The song made clear that the murderer was a pawn in the overarching strategy of southern white racists.
“A bullet from the back of a bush
Took Medgar Evers’ blood
A finger fired the trigger to his name
A handle hid out in the dark
A hand set the spark
Two eyes took the aim
Behind a man’s brain
But he can’t be blamed
He’s only a pawn in their game
A South politician preaches to the poor white man
“You got more than the blacks, don’t complain
You’re better than them, you been born with white skin, “ they explain
And the Negro’s name
Is used, it is plain
For the politician’s gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game
The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid
And the marshals and cops get the same
But the poor white man’s used in the hands of them all like a tool
He’s taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
‘Bout the shape that he’s in
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game
From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks
And the hoofbeats pound in his brain
And he’s taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide ‘neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain’t got no name
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game
Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught
They lowered him down as a king
But when the shadowy sun sets on the one
That fired the gun
He’ll see by his grave
On the stone that remains
Carved next to his name
His epitaph plain
Only a pawn in their game.”