We Remember Che Too! – Represent Our Resistance

I don’t remember the entertainment that day. At successive Black Expos I would see Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder. One time, the Jackson Five would share the backstage with us, the Operation Breadbasket Choir, for about three minutes. But on this first day, I remember the words spoken with such conviction by activist ministers, including the young Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Family members did not gather around the television to watch broadcasts showing the water hosing of black people as they did to watch brown-skinned people dance and sing. We gathered to watch Cassius Clay, who later changed his name to Mohammed Ali, fight in the ring, but no one explained to me or even whispered among themselves about the “fighting” taking place in various rings in Georgia, in Mississippi, and in Alabama. It was as if these were truly distant events among distant Negroes that had little if anything to do with us Negroes in Chicago. I remember once reading a Jewish writer and asking my mother why people hated Jews. I didn’t suspect white people hated Blacks. My mother gave me “the look” but never answered the question. My grandmother, a strict Catholic the rest of the week, spent her Sundays in the kitchen listening the WVON’s Gospel broadcast from morning to late at night, as if her life depended on it.

But my grandfather would have known about those streets of Birmingham, Selma, and those infamous popular trees in Mississippi and the associated smell of magnolia in Louisiana, his home state. My father, too, would have known more, since he and his seven older sisters and older brother all fled the white fields of cotton and hooded men in Arkansas. Only his older brother’s skin could not take him far enough. A father of three young children, he was kidnapped and killed on his way to church.

I watched and listened and remained silent, as young ladies did in those days. But I remembered thinking that something about this ground, right where I lived, seemed a sacred, dare I say, a battle ground, where there was something to defend, but I did not then know what . When in the fall of 1969, at the age of 14, I unknowingly joined The Movement, although I had no idea that I was already breaking rank some, flying out of formation.