It was with some wonder and overwhelming ignorance that I stood outside Louis Michaux\u2019s bookstore on the corner of 125^{th<\/sup> street and Lenox Avenue in the heart of Harlem on a cold spring day in 1961, staring at the signage:<\/p>\n}

THE HOUSE OF COMMON SENSE<\/p>\n

AND THE HOME OF PROPER PROPAGANDA<\/p>\n

WORLD\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 HISTORY<\/p>\n

BOOK OUTLET ON<\/p>\n

2,000,000,000<\/p>\n

(TWO BILLION)<\/p>\n

AFRICANS AND NON-WHITE PEOPLES<\/p>\n

Underneath it were pictures of African revolutionary Jomo Kenyatta, the father of Kenyan independence, \u00a0and Marcus Garvey, the legendary Black Nationalist. \u00a0Of course I didn\u2019t know who they were, I only learned that later.<\/p>\n

Beneath the pictures on the upper part of the large display window, were large graphic sun rays and the words,<\/p>\n

NATIONAL MEMORIAL TO THE PROGRESS<\/p>\n

OF THE<\/p>\n

AFRICAN RACE IN AMERICA<\/p>\n

And under that were pictures of the twelve heads of African states that had won their independence from colonial rule. \u00a0I didn\u2019t recognize them either.<\/p>\n

Posters hung at street level around the window. Two of them made me laugh:\u00a0 \u00a0\u201cThe White Man\u2019s God,\u201d was a picture of a Hollywood idealization of Jesus except he had kinky hair.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis can\u2019t be him he has the wrong hair,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n

The other one was titled, \u201cThe Black Man\u2019s God,\u201d and had a Black Jesus.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis could be him,\u201d it said. \u201che has the right hair\u201d<\/p>\n

Two other posters that I didn\u2019t think funny hung beneath them.<\/p>\n

THE<\/p>\n

GODDAMN<\/p>\n

WHITE MAN<\/p>\n

THIS IS THE TITLE OF THE BOOK<\/p>\n

READ IT<\/p>\n

And the other read,<\/p>\n

LUMUMBA<\/p>\n

LYING IN STATE<\/p>\n

FROM 1 TO 7<\/p>\n

PUBLIC INVITED<\/p>\n

Patrice Lumumba,\u00a0 an African Nationalist, and\u00a0 leader in the Congo\u2019s fight for independence against Belgium was the first democratically elected President of a newly independent Congo. He was the reason I was standing outside Michaux\u2019s bookstore that cold spring day.<\/p>\n

Lumumba had been assassinated that February during a coup staged by African soldiers under the control of the Belgium government with the connivance of Britain and the CIA. His assassination shocked many.<\/p>\n

Just a few days earlier a riot had broken out in the gallery of the United Nation\u2019s General Assembly led by Black Nationalist, James Lawson, and singer\/actress Abby Lincoln protesting the murder.\u00a0 The riot at the U.N. introduced a new Black Nationalism to the United States and scared many white Americans.\u00a0 Lewis Michaux\u2019s bookstore was the main gathering place for Harlem\u2019s Black Nationalists.<\/p>\n

At the time, I was working as a desk assistant (read copy boy) at CBS News.\u00a0 I was twenty seven and it was my first job after coming to New York.\u00a0 It was still the glory days of CBS News. Edward R. Murrow had just left to head up the USIA, but the legendary staff \u00a0he had assembled was still there. My job was to do whatever chores anyone needed done. I got coffee for some of the icons of TV journalism, Charles Collingwood, Eric Severeid, Howard K. Smith\u00a0 and Richard C. Hottelett, picked up\u00a0 staff newspapers downstairs in Grand Central Terminal and ripped and posted the copy off the wire services.\u00a0\u00a0 It was like my army experience: structured, no authority, but also, no real responsibility.\u00a0 After breaking my ass in Law school, the menial work was a relief. I felt myself at the heart of something big and important, and even though I didn\u2019t know what I wanted to do with my life, or where this job would lead, I loved it.\u00a0 Every day I learned something new.<\/p>\n

On my days off,\u00a0 instead of doing my laundry, cleaning my room and running\u00a0 errands I went with reporters and crews as they covered breaking stories in and around New York. \u00a0I sat in the editing rooms with them as they cut the stories, wrote narration \u00a0and\u00a0 added voiceovers. It was the beginning of my news and production education.<\/p>\n

On one of those days off Sam Jaffe, CBS\u2019s UN Correspondent, got the assignment to cover the Lumumba story in Harlem and I tagged along.<\/p>\n

As we entered the bookstore we were ushered into the back room. It was cramped and chaotic. There were no windows, the lighting was bad, there was a jumble of books and papers scattered about, and on the walls, tables and floor were dozens of framed photos of Negro celebrities, from W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson to Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, as well as some prominent African Nationalist revolutionary leaders like\u00a0 Kenyatta, and Kwame Nkrumah.<\/p>\n

It was a little overwhelming especially since my understanding of Negro (as we termed it then) culture, like that of most Americans of the 40s and 50s, came from listening to \u201cAmos and Andy\u201d on the radio and following the exploits of Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson. In my freshman year in college I would sometimes go with my friend Bernie to the Oasis, a Black owned\u00a0 jazz and \u00a0r&b club on south Western Avenue to listen to the Treniers and\u00a0 try to look as cool as the all Black crowd.\u00a0 Afterwards, we\u2019d sit in his car drinking from \u00a0quarts of Pabst beer and feel sooo hip. I\u2019d read a little while in the army: James Baldwin\u2019s\u00a0 Go<\/em> Tell it On A Mountain<\/em> and Notes of a Native Son<\/em> and Richard Wright\u2019s Native Son.<\/em> But the number of Negroes I knew personally you could count on the fingers of one hand. There was Timmy Devault, a slick centerfielder whom I played Muni baseball with while in high school, and Sam Brown another center fielder I played baseball with at UCLA and in the Army, and Ethel, whose last name, I\u2019m ashamed to say\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember even though she cleaned our house and cooked our meals from the time I was thirteen until I left for \u00a0New York after law school.\u00a0 She\u2019d get up at five or six in the morning to take care of her family before boarding a bus for the ninety minute ride to our house in west LA for her day\u2019s work.\u00a0 She\u2019d leave around seven \u00a0that evening after dinner and the dishes were done for the long bus ride back to Watts. My brother and I had no sense of her life outside of our home except that she was an avid church goer. She and her work were taken for granted. With scant experience of Negroes the celebration of Blackness in the back room of the bookstore was both fascinating and strange to me.<\/p>\n

Even stranger, \u00a0was an open coffin in the center of the room. \u00a0Inside the coffin lay, not a body, but a likeness of a body, a paper mache likeness of the body of Patrice Lumumba —\u00a0 a protest designed to call attention to the CIA\u2019s involvement in his assassination.\u00a0\u00a0 The room was so small that I was in the way as the crew began setting up to film the coffin and interview Michaux.\u00a0 so I wandered out into the main room to explore the shelves.<\/p>\n

The front room of the bookstore facing the street, featured books by American and Caribbean Negroes,\u00a0 Africans, and revolutionaries from around the world and even though I considered myself pretty well read, most were new to me.<\/p>\n

Above the book shelves and along one wall were pictures of a Black Jesus surrounded by Black angels.\u00a0\u00a0 I was looking at those pictures when a man said,<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll bet you\u2019ve never seen a Black Jesus before.\u201d<\/p>\n

I turned\u00a0 and saw\u00a0 a very tall, light skinned Negro with a goatee watching me. He wore a dark overcoat which, even though we were inside was buttoned, a dark suit, white shirt, dark tie, a dark hat and rimless glasses, that gave him a scholarly look. I admitted I hadn\u2019t seen a Black Jesus before.<\/p>\n

\u201cNor Black angels,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

His manner was quiet and polite,<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy do you think that is?\u201d he asked<\/p>\n

When I admitted I didn\u2019t know, he went on,<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause whites have stolen him\u2026Jesus was a black man\u2026 Black people were the original people\u2026whites stole Jesus.\u00a0 They also stole the great African cultures like the Egyptian and Sumerian civilizations,\u00a0 and made them appear as white Europeans.\u201d<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t know whether that was true or not, but he said it with such certainty that I wasn\u2019t going to argue, especially since I didn\u2019t know my ass about it, had never thought about it, and didn\u2019t have an opinion, so I decided \u00a0just to listen.<\/p>\n

Then, in the same even matter of fact voice he quietly switched his focus,<\/p>\n

\u201cAll white men are racists, \u201d he said.<\/p>\n

I felt myself get angry.\u00a0 Was he goading me? Was he picking a fight?<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not a racist.\u201d I protested<\/p>\n

\u201cYes you are. All white men are racists\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat makes me a racist?\u201d I demanded, trying to remain cool.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause you live in and prosper from a system of white supremacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

I laughed. I had a menial job, made $60 a week and lived in a tiny rented room on 108^{th <\/sup>street and Riverside Drive. I could barely make ends meet.<\/p>\n}

\u201cI hardly prosper,\u201d I shot back<\/p>\n

\u201cYes you do.\u00a0 How\u2019d you get your job?\u201d<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t wait for me to answer,\u00a0 he didn\u2019t have to. He knew I probably got my job through a connection. And he was right. Before I came to New York my Dad introduced me to a guy who introduced me to a guy who was visiting\u00a0 LA, and was high up at CBS News. When I got to NY and needed a job I called him and the rest is history.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow many so called, \u201cNegroes\u201d are there where you work?\u201d<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t have to say anything, he knew the answer to that too. There weren\u2019t any Negroes\u00a0 or any people of color there.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhite men\u00a0 prosper, deny they\u2019re racist, and brainwash the Black man,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

I saw some truth in what he was saying but still felt personally attacked,<\/p>\n

\u201cHow are they brainwashed?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe white man tricks Black people into thinking integration is good for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou mean it\u2019s not \u00a0good?\u201d I said with more vehemence than I intended.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s only good for the white man.\u201d he said, \u201cIt deceives the Black man. It\u2019s like strong, black coffee. If you integrate it with cream it gets weak. And if you put a lot of cream in it, there\u2019s no more coffee.\u00a0 It\u2019s cool instead of hot, weak instead of strong. It puts you to sleep. That\u2019s what integration does to the Black man, it puts him to sleep.\u201d<\/p>\n

He reached up and pulled a book off the shelf and handed it to me saying,<\/p>\n

\u201cRead this\u201d<\/p>\n

On the dust jacket was a picture of a fat black man with a mustache in three quarter profile dressed in a comic opera emperor\u2019s jacket and tricorn hat, replete with gold braid and a medal, scowling out of the corner of his eye at the viewer. The book was,\u00a0 \u201cBlack Moses: the Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association<\/span>.\u201d<\/p>\n

I thought he was kidding.<\/p>\n

The tall man saw me hesitate.<\/p>\n

\u201cRead it,\u201d he insisted. \u201cYou\u2019ll learn about Garvey and why the Black man doesn\u2019t need integration. He needs his own country.\u201d<\/p>\n

If it wasn\u2019t for his dress and even tone, I would have mistaken him for just another New York crazy.\u00a0 I started to argue about the sacrifices young Negroes in the South were making to bring down segregation, but before I could respond Sam and the crew came out of the back room and said it was a wrap. I went to the counter and paid for the book, and as I was leaving I turned to him and said, \u201cgoodbye.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you want to know why the Black man needs his own country read Garvey and come back on Saturday,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

That is how I met Malcolm X — and how he jolted me out of my comfortable whiteness.<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

My parents would have been shocked if someone were to call them racist.<\/p>\n

They were Roosevelt Democrats, proudly liberal. Yet, black people to them were \u201cSchvartzes.\u201d My mother was especially prone to use the word, as in the \u201cSchvartze\u201d did this or the \u201cSchvartze\u201d did that.\u00a0 And, they often thought of Negroes as children. My dad told\u00a0 stories of how they\u00a0 played practical jokes on the Negro porter at the factory to frighten him and how he\u2019d react just like Step \u2018n Fetchit, the Negro character actor in the movies who made his white audiences laugh when he rolled his big eyes and acted scared.<\/p>\n

But it was complicated. One day a man rang the bell of our modest house in west LA. \u00a0I answered, I must have been about twelve. He asked to see my father. When my father came to the door the man, who was holding a clipboard with a petition on it, introduced himself to my father, said he lived around the corner on Westbourne drive, and that he had been going door to door talking with all our neighbors. My father just looked at him, so the guy continued,<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve got a fine neighborhood here, and I don\u2019t want anything to happen to it,\u201d he said. \u00a0\u201cAnd, I\u2019m sure you don\u2019t either.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you mean?\u201d my father asked. I could hear the suspicion in his voice.<\/p>\n

\u201cA Mexican family has been looking at homes in the neighborhood,\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo?\u201d my father said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, if they should buy do you know what would happen to our property values? They would plummet,\u201d \u00a0he paused for emphasis,\u00a0 \u201cand soon there\u2019d be more Mexicans and then Negroes\u2026and our property values would plummet even more.\u00a0 So I\u2019ve gotten up a petition to keep these people out. I hope you\u2019ll join us by signing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

My father who had a temper started to lose it,<\/p>\n

\u201cNo. I\u2019m not going to sign it,\u201d he barked. \u201cThose people have as much right to live here as you and I.\u201d And he all but slammed the door in the man\u2019s face\u00a0 and called to my mother,<\/p>\n

\u201cLibbie, do you know what that son-of-a-bitch wanted me to do?\u201d I was so proud of him. Even though I didn\u2019t entirely understand it, I knew he had done something very right.<\/p>\n

——<\/p>\n

After meeting Malcolm, I began hanging out in Harlem on Saturday afternoons standing, along with dozens of others, all Black except for me, \u00a0listening to Malcolm and other Black nationalist soap box orators. (Actually, they stood on ladders) outside of Michaux\u2019s bookstore, dubbed \u201cHarlem\u00a0 Square\u201d.\u00a0 \u00a0Malcolm was a\u00a0 fiery orator,\u00a0 and when he spoke he invoked the name of\u00a0 \u201cthe honorable Elijah Muhammad,\u201d the founder and leader of the Nation of Islam.\u00a0\u00a0 Muhammad called white men, \u201cblue eyed devils,\u201d and said that black people were blessed by God. He preached Black pride and the separation of the races.\u00a0 Muhammad may have been the Nation of Islam\u2019s leader, but Malcolm\u00a0 was the public face and chief spokesman for the movement.<\/p>\n

Before I began listening to Malcolm the only\u00a0 knowledge I had of the Nation of Islam was through the polite young Negroes in black suits, white shirts, black bow ties and hats who handed out free copies of\u00a0 \u201cMuhammed Speaks,\u201d the Nation\u2019s newspaper, in Times Square. \u00a0I barely glanced at the paper before dumping it in the nearest trash can. Listening to Malcolm speak I was embarrassed that I\u2019d had so little curiosity<\/p>\n

——–<\/p>\n

Along with my friend, Irv, a writer at CBS News, I began interviewing other Black Nationalists, with the idea of writing about this new Black nationalism for The Reporter<\/em> magazine. \u00a0I interviewed James Lawson, head of the United African National Movement, who had led the protests around Lumumba\u2019s death at the UN,\u00a0 and Carlos Cooks, head of the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement. Like Malcolm, they were Garveyites. Garvey had preached Black pride and separation of the races and led a Back to Africa Movement.\u00a0 Neither Lawson nor Cooks had large followings, but along with Malcolm they were the pillars upon which the Black Power movement of the \u201860s was to be built.<\/p>\n

These were interesting men. \u00a0Cooks was the first to clearly delineate Black from Negro and sought to abrogate Negro as a form of racial identity. He was the first to say, \u201cBuy Black\u201d and start a Harlem coop.\u00a0 It was Cooks who initiated the concept of natural hair as a source of Black pride by holding a Miss Natural Standard of Beauty Contest and supported various African Liberation Movements.<\/p>\n

Even if I didn\u2019t agree with their separatist notions, (and sometimes thought they were full of it) I began to recognize certain things about America I\u2019d not seen before. I began to see America as two separate countries, one white, the other black and brown, one prosperous, the other poor.\u00a0 I slowly began to see the pervasiveness of what today is called structural racism — how housing patterns affect health care and education; how access to jobs and services, like banks, grocery stores, cleaners – services I\u2019d always taken for granted \u2013 impact the life of a community. They helped me become more aware of my environment, often in small ways. For example when I got on the subway at 96^{th<\/sup> or 110th<\/sup> street to go downtown to work, the cars were usually filled with black women. As we headed south those women got off to go to their jobs as nannies and maids in white people\u2019s apartments and their place was taken by white people on their way downtown to their office jobs. Malcolm had said that if you go to almost any ghetto in America you will find that the major stores are owned by whites. When I began looking along 125th<\/sup> street\u00a0 I realized what he said was true. I also saw that those white owned stores hired very few Negro salespeople.\u00a0 I also saw that except for 125th<\/sup> street, there were almost no other amenities in Harlem like cleaners, shoe repair shops or super markets that were in every other neighborhood in the city.\u00a0 I learned that Blacks in Harlem had to pay deposits to get telephones, and how store prices went up the first of every month when the welfare checks came out. For the first time in my life, I was becoming aware of the notion of white privilege, even though we\u00a0 didn\u2019t call it that,\u00a0 and to pay attention to the history of racism in the country, racism that went back to before the revolution and was built into the Constitution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"}

Part I<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoirs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1408"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1602,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1408\/revisions\/1602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}