Sunday, October 29, 2023
In bed at 10:15, up at 5:20, stretched out on lzb for 20 minutes, let Lilly out. 39°, high of 44°, cloudy all day, AQI=19, wind N at 13, 10-14/22. w/c is 31. Sunrise at 7:22, sunset at 5:47, 10+25. Last week of Daylight Saving Time, Geri's favorite night, and shockingly early sunsets.
Little Richard, Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X. In the last few days I have watched the CNN biographical documentary on Little Richard and the Netflix biographical documentary on Best Friends: Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X. I was struck by the similarities of these 3 unique giants in America's cultural, social, and political history, despite their huge dissimilarities.
Little Richard (Penniman) was a flamboyantly gay, outrageously promiscuous, Black Rock & Roll superstar, one of my favorites when I was a teenager and up to the present. His first big hit was Tutti Frutti, Italian for 'all fruits' and its original lyrics were about homosexual sex. "Tutti Frutti, good booty, if it don't fit, don't force it, you can grease it, make it easy. Tutti Frutti, good booty, if it's tight, it's all right, and if it's greasy, it makes it easy." The lyrics I heard on the radio were cleaned up to make them acceptable for radio broadcasts. He was born in Jim Crow Macon, GA, the 3rd of 12 children. His father was a deacon in an A.M.E. church and his mother was a member of a Pentecostal congregation. He started singing and playing the piano early. One of his legs was shorter than the other which gave him an 'effeminate' gait and he was taunted when young as a queer.
Muhammad Ali was born as Cassius Clay in 1942, and raised in Jim Crow Louisville, KY. His father was a sign painter and his mother a "domestic helper." He was 13 years old when Emmett Till was tortured, mutilated, and murdered, giving rise to a national scandal that greatly affected young Cassius. He started amateur boxing around age 12 and went on to win many Golden Gloves and AAU championships, culminating in winning the Gold Medal as a light heavyweight at the 1960 Olympics in Rome. When he returned from the Olympics, he was refused service at a local diner, reminding him that while he was a hero and a champion in other parts of the world, in the U.S., he was still a "n-----." He turned professional that year and ultimately became heavyweight champion, beating Sonny Liston for the title in 1964. He taunted his opponents and he taunted the world: "I am the greatest!." He became a Muslim and when drafted to serve in the Army in 1967 during the Vietnam War, he refused to serve. He was convicted for his refusal, a conviction that was ultimately reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court on procedural grounds. He was stripped of his heavyweight championship title by official boxing commissions. He made many enemies, mostly white, by saying things like "Man, I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong" and "Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights." I was fresh from service in the Marines and many months in Vietnam and I agreed with him. To me, he was a brave man and a hero.
Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little (and later known as Malik el-Shabazz) in 1925 in Omaha, NE, the 4th of 7 children of Earl Little, a Baptist lay preacher and supporter of Marcus Garvey and leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), of which his mother was also an official. The family left Omaha because of KKK threats, moved temporarily to Milwaukee, and then to Lansing, where, when Malcolm was 6 years old, his father died either in 'a streetcar accident' or by murder by a white supremacist group. His mother later suffered from mental illness and was institutionalized in 1938 whereupon Malcolm and his siblings were separated and lived in foster homes until he moved in with his half-sister in Boston. He ended up in Harlem and lived a life of crime, including larceny, burglary, and pimping. In prison in 1946, he became a member of the Nation of Islam, the Black Muslims and subsequently became its No. 2 voice, under its founder, Elijah Muhammad. He was outspoken in assailing what White People had done and were doing and attempting to do to Black People. "If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and America hasn't even begun to pull out the knife." And: "I just don't believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression." Malcolm created outrage among most Whites when he dismissed the assassination of JFK as "chickens coming home to roost," likening it to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in Congo, the assassination of Medgar Evers in his driveway in Jackson, MS, and the bombing deaths of the 4 Black girls in a Birmingham AL church earlier that year. Malcolm had a falling out with Elijah Muhammad and was assassinated in 1965, several months before I went to Vietnam. I had and still have great admiration for Malcolm X. I believed and still believe he spoke Truth to Power.
These brief biographical sketches omit a great many important facts about each of these men but include at least some important facts.
What do these three men have in common?
(1) They all had tremendous charisma. They moved masses. Millions of teenagers, including me, loved Little Richard songs and were disgusted by Pat Boon's 'covers.' Ali commanded and filled whatever space he entered. Nobody, White or non-White, could ignore the words of Malcolm X. Having grown up in highly racist Chicago in the 1940s and 50s, I knew he was a truth-teller about Black-White relations.
(2) They all had courage in the face of widespread antagonism. Little Richard faced rejection, even in his family, because of his effeminacy. Ali was rejected by 'the Establishment' for his adherence to Islam, and his resistance to the Vietnam war. Malcolm incurred widespread fear and antagonism from Whites and contempt based on his criminal background.
(3) They each had many supporters from both the White community and the Black community. Little Richard reached millions of White teens like me with his powerful music, though he started out being played solely on Black radio stations playing what was categorized as "Race music", i.e. music for Blacks. It was the power of his music and his performances that forced it across the culturally enforced color line. Millions of Whites knew the truth of Ali's famous to some, infamous to others words: “And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. … Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.” And ditto for even the harsh words about "White devils" by Malcolm. To this day, I wonder why there is not more militant resistance to the White Power Establishment by American Blacks. I was powerfully struck by the words of one young Black woman interviewed on TV after George Floyd's murder: "You're just lucky that what we are demanding is Justice and not Revenge." I have wondered about this many times - why isn't there more anger, more bitterness among the Black community than there is. What would my attitude towards Whites, and towards the American culture and society, and power structure be, if I were Black? I can never know, any more than I can know what my attitudes would be if I had been born female rather than male, a Jew rather than a gentile. To borrow from the blog's title, these are Imponderables which ought to give me a lot of humility when thinking about women, Blacks, and Jews - indeed anyone born without White male Christian privilege.
(4) Each of them was a leader. They were all highly visible. The views and positions that made them unpopular to millions of other Americans also made them leaders to those whose positions they represented and defended: gay rights for Little Richard, draft resistance and war opposition for Ali, and Black empowerment and dignity for Blacks for Malcolm.
(5) They each grew up as a member of an oppressed caste in America. I suppose nothing more need be said of this commonality. Little Richard had the double burden of being both Black and gay. Ali couldn't buy a cup of coffee in a Louisville diner even after being a Gold Medalist representing the U.S. at the Olympics in Rome. Malcolm's family fled Omaha because of racist threats, received more in Lansing, and may have had the father murdered by White supremacists.
(6) For each of them, religion was an important part of life. Little Richard led a dissolute life for many years but he never lost his belief in the God he learned about in the AME and Pentecostal churches of his youth. He moved back and forth between his raucous R&R life and his abstemious religious life and was very religious in his last years. Ali and Malcolm were believers in Islam, with Malcolm experiencing a profound re-understanding of the religion after his visit to Mecca.
(7) Each of them had tremendous belief in himself. Despite all the challenges and adversities they faced, all three of them had great self-respect, a belief in their own worth, their own excellence, and their own calling. They were proud men, sure of themselves. Little Richard moved back and forth with his lifestyles, and in his religious phases he rued his R&R phases, but his belief in his tremendous talent and historical status as the 'originator' of a revolutionary new style of popular music never wavered. Ali's self-confidence is legendary: "I am the greatest!" And Malcolm's self-respect is precisely what he preached and tried to instill in all his followers in the Nation of Islam, and not in a niggling way. "One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself. Then you can come to an intelligent decision for yourself. If you form the habit of going by what you hear others say about someone, or going by what others think about someone, instead of searching that thing out for yourself and seeing for yourself, you will be walking west when you think you're going east, and you will be walking east when you think you're going west."
(8) Despite my membership in the Dominant Caste, I had great respect for each of them, what they accomplished and what they endured, especially for Ali and Malcolm.
Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, "Privileged Class:
The moral attitudes of dominant and privileged groups are characterized by universal self-deception and hypocrisy. The unconcscious and conscious identification of their special interests with general interests and universal values, which we have noted in analysing national attitudes, is equally obvious in the attitude of classses. The reason why privileged classes are more hypocritical than underprivileged ones is that special privilege can be defended in terms of the rational ideal of equal justice only by proving that it contributes something to the good of the whole. Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.
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