Seeing Self

September 14, 2002
By Bukka Rennie

One usually senses that a particular column will engender massive responses. It is about touching and striking a special nerve, awakening truths that people seem instinctively to have always known but somehow were never before forced to confront. Until the awakening comes.

The column, "Missing history", really struck home and there have been many responses, each adding its own dimension to the issue.

But Edwin Wilson from Virginia provided a particular perspective that indicates a similarity of experience between Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American of which many of us may not have been aware. For that reason it was decided to give up this space to him.

Following is what Mr Wilson had to say:

Dear Bukka Rennie, I read your article in the Guardian, August 3, 2002. You have hit the nail right dead on the head.

I live in Virginia, was born here. My family were mostly of the farming class. It's the same story even here in the past decades - '20s, '30s, '40s and even '50s. Black people can relate to you about businesses and farms that our people owned.

You have medium size towns and cities where blacks used to own large amounts of land, houses. Now those properties belong to city governments and wealthy white owners...

How did our peoples lose control of their land, houses, businesses? You have answered that question to a certain extent in your article... We basically substituted "formal education" instead of "acquiring land", we were sold on the virtues of "education", that an education was supposed to be more important than "common sense".

Here in this country in the '40s, '50s, we had black men especially who had college degrees and some advance degrees, PhDs, who upon their completion of their educational studies came back home to rural communities and couldn't find work.

A lot of these men and women wound up working in hotels doing cleaning jobs, washing dishes, cleaning bathrooms and had college degrees. One of my brothers had to take a job working in a sawmill and had almost completed college.

Those who went North during the great migration of black people to northern cities such as Washington, DC and New York didn't find it any better there. They had laws in place that made it almost impossible to find employment once up North.

My mother's sister finished college in the '50s and the only work she could get was cleaning white people's houses.

We had Afro-leadership with such people as Booker T Washington who started a school to help blacks learn skills...

Washington was not thinking of blacks going to work for whites, he knew they wouldn't be able to find employment, that a racist country wouldn't hire them; he emphasised self-sufficiency within their own communities...

He was labelled a black traitor, Uncle Tom, but what pathway did our other leadership lead us down? Integration?

A lot of today's new black leadership are questioning the concept of integration... The same thing happened with Marcus Garvey, UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association)... the powers that be knew they had to stop him.

When we lost our lands, farms, we were relegated to housing projects, slums.

The imperative here is still on "education", but what good is an education if you have to work for the "white man" for 25 or 35 years of your life? You still will never own anything.

It's been way past time for us here to re-think Booker T Washington and Garvey. Our scholars need to find out how black people here were dispossessed of the land and other holdings. As you stated, that is the necessary history of the 20th century that is vital for our re-education!