Beyond Ideology

Whole Earth,  Summer, 2000  by Julius Lester

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

It is spring, 1968. I am sitting in my apartment in New York with one of my closest Movement friends. I am a very private person, and there are not many people with whom I share my home and family. This friend was one of the few who had eaten my wife's cooking and mine and had played with our children. We are alone in the apartment that afternoon chatting with an ease that is possible only with those to whom we have entrusted our souls. He and I had trusted our very lives to each other on the back roads of Alabama. Suddenly, he says, "I probably shouldn't say this, man, but I don't think you should be married to a white woman. You probably think it's none of my business." Quietly, I say, "You're right." He nods, and there is nothing more to be said--about that or anything else. After a moment of silence as long as winter, he gets up. "Take care of yourself," he says. "Yeah, you too," I respond and I close the door gently behind him. I never saw him again and a few years later he was dead, killed in a bombing.

By 1968 the Movement that had begun with the singing of "We Shall Overcome" was shouting "Black Power." I wrote a book called Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama [1968]. It was the first book that sought to explicate Black Power, an angry book, expressing not so much personal anger as racial anger. It was also a very funny and outrageous book, which I thought would be evident from the title. Everyone took the title seriously. I will never forget the headline in a Fort Wayne, Indiana newspaper: "White Mamas in Danger, Says Black Militant Lester." I knew, however, that "white mamas" had the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines to protect them. I was the one in danger, and in ways I had not anticipated

I was invited to speak on college campuses and I saw the disappointment in the eyes of black students when I got off the plane and I did not have a ten-foot-high Afro and was not wearing a dashiki made by Jomo Kenyatta's grandmama. I found myself being asked, angrily, to explain how I could consider myself a black activist and have a white wife. For a while, I wondered, too. But I kept remembering one close friend who had dissolved a relationship with the love of his life for no other reason than that she was white, and I remembered too, his unhappiness and shame. Having grown up in the South, where whites decreed who I could and could not marry, I was not going to turn around and give blacks that power. My eventual divorce had nothing to do with my wife's race or mine but with us and who we were as persons.

Second thoughts abounded now like wildflowers. Both the black and white movements attacked individuals within their ranks more viciously than they attacked the administration in Washington. The personal had become political, and the gray-flanneled conformity of the fifties was replaced by a blue-jeaned and Afroed totalitarianism. A mysterious and mystical entity called The People became the standard against which everyone was measured and judged. One's actions, thoughts, and lifestyles had to serve the needs of The People. At one meeting, I asked a simple question: "Which people? Do you mean junkies, winos, and prostitutes? Do you mean the churchgoing people, the manual laborers, the unwed mothers, or the strivers?" When the meeting continued as if I had not spoken, I knew that I had committed a revolutionary faux pas. I also knew that I had asked a good question.