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By Kevin Powell
Writer
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Langston Hughes, my favorite writer, wrote a poem in 1926, when he was 25 years old. It declared, with a mix of substantial sadness and delicate defiance, "I, too, am America."
Born in the long twilight of American slavery, Hughes produced this piece because he lived through lynchings of Black bodies, racial segregation, the destruction of Black communities in places like Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the erasure of Black history, Black culture, and the souls of Black folks, except as horrific stereotypes, in every aspect of American society.
I am a direct beneficiary of the American civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, and was able to attend schools and live in neighborhoods with individuals of various identities—something my mother, born during the same chapters of Jim Crow as Langston, could never have imagined. Even as a straight-A student from kindergarten through 12th grade, all I learned about our nation's past was war tales, explorations, and a few innovations.
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As for the enslavement of my African ancestors, who literally built the economic infrastructure of America with forced, free labor, from 1619 to 1865—246 years—this section of the American journey was reduced to mere paragraphs. Nor was it ever referred to as the grave, global miscarriage of justice that it was, but simply "the peculiar institution."
I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was a child, because I had discovered Ernest Hemingway in a library my single mother made me visit, though she neither read nor owned any books herself, save the Bible.
But I had no clue of Langston Hughes, of any Black writers, of any meaningful account of the American experiment that included Blacks, until a civil rights-era program, created by a wealthy White Republican state assemblyman named Tom Kean, made it possible for me to attend Rutgers University, despite being the heir to generations of poverty, dating back, yes, to slavery.
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It was at Rutgers, because of its Africana Studies Department, and later because of major cultural institutions, like the Schomburg in Harlem, like the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., that a different world was presented to me. I was finally able to see, feel, and hear myself, in that history. I would argue that that new education saved my life. And it is the reason I became a writer, like Langston.
That is why I say, no, it is no shame to share the whole chronicle of America, inclusive of everyone, and each critical moment. Shame is when we claim to be a democracy, ignoring the truth of our shared history. The story of African Americans is not a perpetual sorrow song. It is the story of a miracle people, a hopeful people who, in spite of slavery and then another 100 years of legalized racism, managed to serve in every single war this country has fought, performed gallantly in multiple Olympics, and has gifted America everything from music to food to language to dance to sports to countless inventions to freedom marches for all. Notwithstanding our being the descendants of enslaved people.
Because, in point of fact, my ancestors were stripped of their names, cultures, and languages; told they were ugly, inferior, and subhuman; and were subjected to a plethora of cruelties on those plantations, like rapes and mutilations, both in my mother's home state of South Carolina and my home state of New Jersey. That we survived; that I come from a mother with an eighth-grade education and a grandmother who could not read or write; that we are a people who inherited centuries of traumas, which still manifest today in how we even talk about ourselves, our hair, our skin color; says, plainly, how devastating slavery was to my people, to my nation. Because I, too, sing America.
My wife and I first visited the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture a couple years back. We marveled at how the museum does not begin with slavery but instead ancient Africa, who we were before being stolen and brought to the Americas, be it what is now the United States, the West Indies, or Latin America. It is a study in resiliency, and how, regardless of what we've endured, we have rarely treated others as we have been treated. As a matter of fact, there are few Americans as patriotic and loyal as Black people on these shores, in spite of how we've been continually wounded, from slavery to Selma, from Emmett Till to Breonna Taylor.
Attempting to minimize or eliminate conversations about slavery also minimizes the poetry, music, food, language, and customs of Black people in America. This comes as no surprise to those of us who are Black in this first quarter of the 21st century. We have seen bans on Black books, attacks on Black-elected officials, Black history sidelined at schools, and, yes, Black people like George Floyd scream for their mothers and breathe their final breath, only because of who they are.
This is not just about displays in the Smithsonian. America will never move forward, nor heal, as a society of diverse people with diverse stories, if any of its people are being silenced, ignored, purely because some with power are hateful of whole truths.
Kevin Powell is a Grammy-nominated poet, filmmaker, and author of 16 books. He previously wrote a Newsweek cover story on Spike Lee. Kevin lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. Follow him on all social media platforms: @poetkevinpowell.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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