INTERVIEW: A LOOK AT CIVIL RIGHTS THROUGH THE EYES OF TWO
UNSUNG FAMILY HEROES OF MINE (Part I)
I took the opportunity to interview my mother-in-law, my
wife's mother and I wish I could have conducted this interview with both of her
parents prior to my father-in-law transitioning in 2015; they had a serious
history in the civil rights movement in Durham, North Carolina and they would
share all these powerful stories with me about the role they played in fighting
for justice and equality in Durham and these personal stories would always
captivate me because they were stories of bravery, integrity, determination,
will power, etc. They had both become Elders and so often, we are allowing our
African-American family oral history to slip away and we are not taking the
time to converse, record and document our families history (and preserve this
valuable history); my in-laws were in their 70s and had made tremendous
sacrifices and stood on the front line of fire to achieve some of the goals
that
the civil rights movement were
aiming. They are two of my unsung heroes and my wife's father was like a father
to me and I know that I was liken to a son to him. He helped transition me into
manhood relative given me the tools to be a good husband and good father to my
children (he taught me the importance of standing up for what is right and
fight for what you believe in); he taught me patience and the value of kindness
and he taught me Islam and what the Muslim overall responsibility should be. My
mother-in-law and my father-in-law had been married for over 57 years and I had
never seen them have a real fight or argument. My mother-in-law was kind but
was a fighter for those things she held dear to her heart and she loved family.
So this interview is part one of their story told to me by mother-in-law. I
chose not to include their real names into this public blog because of security
and privacy concerns, I chose to shield their true identity in telling their
story and still share this story with my Blog audience as an authentic personal
historical account. I changed momma's name to Khalilah Abdur Shabazz and my
father-in-law will be referred be to as Baba Sharrieff Muhammad Shabazz.
This essay will focus on the Civil Rights Movement in
Durham, North Carolina as a partial oral history told to me by my
mother-in-law, momma Khalilah Abdur Shabazz
(born in the eary1940s)[1] as primary history and will use secondary
information provided by scholars, historians and intellectuals as supportive
evidence in order to provide an empirical and objective approach to this
discussion. This writer, will attempt to explore a small portion of the civil
rights movement in Durham between the years 1965-1968, as told to me by
mother-in-law momma Khalilah Abdur Shabazz from her personal insights and experiences, but it
will not be a comprehensive analysis that explores the entire civil rights
movement relative to the many personalities and events that helped shaped the
national political, economic and social debate during this turbulent time in
American history. [2]
In 1896, the
United States
Supreme Court passed the Plessy versus
Ferguson
decision in which the high court ruled that ‘separate but equal’ was legal and
constitutional, which ushered in a time in American history known as Jim Crow.
Jim Crow laws led to African Americans being denied access to public
accommodations and established strict racial laws based on discrimination,
which led to segregation. Blacks could not enter certain business
establishments (and in many places in the south, they had signs that read
‘white and ‘colored’).[3]
These Jim Crow laws and policies created almost two distinct
societies inside the United
States of America, what scholar Andrew
Hacker, describes in his book titled, Two Nations: Black and White,
Separate, Hostile, Unequal, “Black Americans are Americans, yet they still
subsist as aliens in the only land they know. Other groups may remain outside
the mainstream-some religious sects, for example-but they do so voluntarily.
In contrast, blacks must endure a segregation that is far from freely chosen.
So America
may be seen as two separate nations. Of course, there are places where the
races mingle. Yet in most significant respects, the separation is pervasive and
penetrating. As a social and human division, it surpasses all others-even
gender-in intensity and subordination.”[4]
Moreover, this was the social climate that my mother-in-law
and her family grew up in and there was no doubt that this social history had
helped to shape their worldview. This writer could hear the pain endured, as
well as, the determination and resolve they had in confronting these barriers
and overcoming them.[5]
Black protest
movements evolved out of the oppression, racism and overt inequalities that
took place during this 58 year period of Jim Crow and it was the Brown versus
Board of Education decision 1954 (Topeka, Kansas) in which the United States
Supreme Court overturned the Plessy versus Ferguson decision and declared
‘separate but equal’ as being unconstitutional.[6] The quest for freedom,
justice and equality took on many forms, which various black protest movements
arose during different time periods in America to challenge racist public
policy and injustices. For example, the political spectrum ranged from the
Marcus Garvey model (back to
Africa movement)
of black nationalism to the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who advocated
integration and civil disobedience to alter social change.[7]
Yet, this writer, was aware of the historical role lynching
played and how and why the voices of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and W.E.B. Dubois
came about on the national stage in founding the Niagara Movement (1903) that
evolved into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in
1909—committed to social justice for African American people.[8]
Durham and its Unique Black History and
Experience
In a book titled, Black America Series: Durham’s Hayti
stated, “Durham,
like most Southern cities in the 1880s and 1900s, had rigidly segregated
communities. The majority of African-Americans resided in the southern and
southeastern sections known as Hayti, pronounced as ‘hay-tie’. In 1920, W.E.B.
Dubois, a prominent African American historian, referred to Durham, specifically the Hayti area, as the
‘Negro business mecca of the South’. He wrote, ‘There is in this small city a
group of five thousand or more colored people, whose social and economic
development is perhaps more striking than that of any similar group in the
nation.’ Booker T. Washington, the noted African American leader and educator
at Tuskegee Institute, agreed with Dubois that Durham provided an opportunity for African
American to excel economically. But Washington
also recognized the existence of friendly relations between African Americans
and whites. He stated, ‘Of all the Southern cities that I have visited I found
here the sanest attitude (among) white toward the blacks.’[9]
Momma Khalilah Abdur Shabazz migrated from Western, North Carolina to Durham
with her mother and her two siblings when she was about twelve years old at
this time. She and was raised in Pearsontown (an area near North Carolina
Central University and Fayetteville Street) and where many of the black elite
lived (an adjacent neighborhood in and around NCCU and next to where the old
Hillside High School used be located on Concord Street and Lawson Street). These educated blacks fitted
into the social and economic class of
what W.E.B. Dubois referred to as the talented tenth and what E.
Franklin Frazier called the ‘the black bourgeoisie’.[10]
Durham
being a southern city was very segregated, as most of the south was during the
1950s and 1960s; thus, my momma Khalilah explained to me that Pettigrew Street
(at the railroad tracks) separated the white community from the African American
community. She and my (father-in-law the Baba Sharrieff Muhammad
Shabazz-2015)[11] both attended segregated public schools and as much as she
admired the things Dubois and Washington stated about Durham—the Durham she
experienced had more of a sense of black classism in which prominent black
Durham leaders had cut behind door deals with the white establishment that
allowed the black elite class to create strong business opportunities and
banking ties, which led to the establishment of Mechanics and Farmers Bank and
North Carolina Mutual Insurance Company.[12]
For example, prominent blacks and families such as John
Merrick, Dr. A.M. Moore, C.C Spaulding, W.J. Kennedy, Bert Collins, Asa T.
Spaulding, J.W. Goodloe, W.J. Kennedy, etc., ( momma Khalilah called these elitist
black Durham leaders and businessmen ‘spluking ducks’ it was slang term they
used to describe for high class light skinned ‘Negroes’ of the bourgeoisie
persuasion) and viewed them and their off springs as privileged Negroes, but I
got the picture that she perhaps saw their political approach as being reactionary.[13]
It was evident that in Durham my in-laws experience a wealth disparity and
race and privilege were dictating quality of life and economic mobility. My in-laws met a young civil rights worker named Howard Fuller (he was a
cross between Minister Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in ideology
and philosophical thought) he had come south to engage in the war on poverty in
the early 1960s, Fuller’s commitment to altering social change in Durham and
throughout North Carolina would shape my grandparent’s political
views.[14]
Howard Fuller: Durham’s Civil Rights Icon Enters on the
Scene
Devin Ferguson in his book titled, Liberalism, Black
Power and the Making of American Politics 1965-1980 describes Howard Fuller
and his leadership in the Durham
civil rights movement in this manner: “Since the mid-1960s Fuller had been
hailed by adversaries and acolytes alike as the state’s leading black activist.
The appellation was apparently well deserved. Amid physical threats to himself
and family. Fuller mobilized fair-housing rallies, protest marches, and
university demonstrations. More important, he had earned the confidence of
fellow activists and local residents. “I walked the streets of the most
dilapidated sections,’ one observer noted, ‘and talked with tired Negroes on
their front porches. Most all of them knew of OBT {Operation Breakthrough} and
the residents council and spoke well of them.’ The success of grassroots
organizing and black political power in Durham,
community and fieldworkers claimed, was largely attributable to one man, Howard
Fuller.”[15]
This writer had personally met Fuller on a number of times
at my in-laws' home and I knew that my father-in-law and my mother-in-law were
very fond of him,[16] but as I talked with my mother-in-law, I really did not
know much about him and his huge relationship with the Durham civil rights
movement. Moreover, doing this research and having these various conversations
with my mother-in-law this writer started to immediately develop a deeper sense
of appreciation for the role they played as grassroots activist and their personal
connection to one of the premier Durham civil rights leaders in the 1960s and
most all I came to appreciate their work and the personal sacrifices they made
to change a social and political system that was fundamentally flawed and
wrong.[17]
My mother-in-law said they would go out at night and she did
not know, if they would return home because of possibly being arrested or
killed (being deemed as black agitators) and I sought of got the feeling that
some of their tactics deviated from King’s non-violent confrontational
position, but she stated ‘those who tell don’t know and those that know don’t
tell’. She made it clear that whatever this writer wrote, she does not have to
read the final version, because she lived this history.[18]
But as much as she had high praises for Fuller and his work,
this is what Fuller had to say about my in-laws in his book: “On Sundays, I
occasionally spoke at local churches, where I met people like, Khalilah Abdur Shabazz and Sharrieff Muhammad Shabazz a young married couple in their early twenties, who would
become two of the movement’s most dedicated and committed warriors. They were
among the few married people living in McDougald Terrace. They had heard that a
young black man from ‘up North’ had been traveling around town, telling black
folks that they did’nt have to accept how they’d been living. So, they came to Mount Zion
Baptist Church
on Fayetteville Street
one Sunday night to hear for themselves what I had to say. My message about the
need for poor people to come together and change things tapped into their own
simmering anger and frustration. Later on in life when I asked Sharrieff what
attracted him to the movement, he told me: ‘There were these fires burning
inside of us with the way we were treated. And you came along and started
blowing on those flames.’Khalilah and Sharrieff joined the movement and never
looked back. They were true salt–of-the-earth North
Carolinians—welcoming, unpretentious, dedicated, and
determined.”[19]
They Accepted the Challenge
My in-laws became active in the civil rights movement in
approximately 1965, participating in marches freedom rides, picketing,
boycotts, sit-ins, etc. they both had a love and a passion for social activism
and shared in some of Durham's most historical civil rights moments.[20] They
worked alongside Howard Fuller (my father-in-law.once said to me next to his
father, Fuller was, perhaps the second man that had the most impact on his
life); Fuller was a grassroots leader that led the civil rights struggle in
Durham with passion and commitment, he was one of the faces and voices in black
Durham who did not mind speaking truth to power; he was the Malcolm X of the
south and gave a lot Black folk backbone to stand up for equality and justice.
[21]
There were also Ben Ruffin (North Carolina Central
University even named a building after Ruffin called Benjamin S. Ruffin
Residence Hall), Floyd McKissick, Sr., (Floyd McKissick, Jr., the son Floyd
McKissick, Sr. now sits in the NC State Legislature); McKissick, Sr was one of
the attorneys for Durham Civil Rights movement and also founder of black
incorporated township in Warrenton, North Carolina called Soul City, Howard
Clements, Ann Atwater, Pat Rogers, Ruby Gattis, John Edwards, Lonnie Wilson,
Joyce Thorpe-Nichols, and countless others that were involved in desegregating
Durham and forcing the local and State government to abide by the Civil Rights
Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) relative to Black people. All of
the above activist worked with my in-laws as activist and community
organizers.[22].
Atwater, A Durham
Civil Rights Warrior Forgave Ku Klux Klan Adversary
Ann Atwater one of the chief community organizers of
Operation Breakthrough who worked side-by-side with Momma Khalilah and
co-authored a book with a former head Ku Klux Klan member named C. P. Ellis
titled, The Best of Enemies: Race and Redemption in the New South,
authored by Osha Gray Davidson. My mother-in-law said some of the former civil
rights workers were very critical of Atwater
sitting down some 40 years later and having dialogue and conversation with one
of their staunch adversaries and talking about forgiveness, atonement and
reconciliation. She had vivid memories of the hooded Ku Klux Klan marching down
Main Street
in Durham
holding up Confederate Flags and spewing vitriol hatred.[23]
Amazon review of the book stated: “C. P. Ellis grew up in
the poor white section of
Durham,
North Carolina, and as a young
man joined the Ku Klux Klan. Ann Atwater, a single mother from the poor black
part of town, quit her job as a household domestic to join the civil rights
fight. During the 1960s, as the country struggled with the explosive issue of
race,
Atwater
and Ellis met on opposite sides of the public school integration issue. Their
encounters were charged with hatred and suspicion. In an amazing set of
transformations, however, each of them came to see how the other had been
exploited by the South's rigid power structure, and they forged a friendship
that flourished against a backdrop of unrelenting bigotry. Rich with details
about the rhythms of daily life in the mid-twentieth-century South,
The Best
of Enemies offers a vivid portrait of a relationship that defied all odds.
By placing this very personal story into broader context, Osha Gray Davidson
demonstrates that race is intimately tied to issues of class, and that
cooperation is possible--even in the most divisive situations--when people
begin to listen to one another.”[24]
Thus, for me reviewing some of this historiography this
writer has to take into consideration the historical time and approach my
assessment and analysis with a clear understanding of the context of the
historical timeframes and what the political, economic and social climate was
like that created the feelings my mother-in-law was still having relative to the
former Ku Klux Klan member C. P. Ellis[25] and although I am supposed to
approach my research with a level of objectivity, it was not difficult for me
to understand why momma Khalilah emotions' about Atwater having this humane
dialogue with the former Ku Klux Klan was still a little unsettling to my momma
Khalilah even in 2017 .[26]
Yet, simultaneously I could reckon with Atwater and Ellis
being forty years removed from that antagonistic history and perhaps Ellis had
come to the conclusion based on time and human development that this
conversation needed to take place in a broader context and allow the public to
look deeper into the conscious minds of how a racist ideology had shaped and
molded the course of history of two human beings, one white and one black (and in
the larger context their lives were a microcosm and typified the social and
political tension that existed in America during the 1960s and 1970s).[27]
Their discussions evolved out of socio-economic timeframes
in American history that was drastically different in the 1960s and I further
believe by 2007, it was enough time and space that had lapsed, which allowed
for some 40 years later for forgiveness and redemption to take place in spite
of the past historical divisiveness and racial tension that once separated
these two unsettling souls. I personally think people have the ability to
change and be reformed and although my momma Khalilah would disagree the above mentioned book is a
testimony of the power of personal healing and redemptive love.[28]
Fuller in his book titled, No Struggle, No Progress: A
Warrior’s Life From Black Power to Education Reform stated, “That
understanding of the relationship between struggle and progress is what
propelled me down dark alleys and dirt roads in some of North Carolina’s
poorest communities in the 1960s, and pushed me into the bush, mountains, and
war-torn villages of Africa nearly a decade later.”[29]
Unknown History: The Civil Rights Movement
Begin in Durham
It would be under Fuller’s leadership and tutelage that my
in-laws entered the Civil Rights Movement in 1965—they were concern with
housing, jobs and poverty in
Durham
and somewhat like King, Fuller advocated civil disobedience[30]. Momma Khalilah
talked about how they use the strategies and tactics of boycotts, sit-ins,
picket lines, etc., to agitate the white power apparatus in
Durham City
with the objective of disrupting business. She even argues that the first
sit-in actually took place in Durham, North Carolina at Royal Ice Cream Parlor
(on Roxboro Road and Dowd Street) in 1957 and this event actually took place
three years prior to the Greensboro Four (North Carolina A&T State
University students) sit-ins at counter of Woolworth in February 1960, but the
Durham sit-in did not get the public and national notoriety as the Greensboro
incident.[31]
Momma Khalilah stated
that the white business leaders who were practicing segregation in Durham
became fearful of them, because the protests begin to affect their bottom
economic line and she recalled a few incidents where they shutdown city council
meetings, if their demands were not met. She said boycotts were a very
effective way of protesting and altering social change.[32] She stated on
August 28, 1963, she can remember almost like it was yesterday when Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. called for the March on Washington
and almost two hundred thousand people converged on the capitol grounds that
rallied around jobs and justice. She said at the time, she had four small
children, but she supported the goals and objectives of the march.[33]
Thorpe-Nichols: Durham Public Housing Resident and the U.S. Supreme
Court
Momma Khalilah joined an anti-poverty organization called
Operation Breakthrough as a community organizer in early 1960s, which was
geared toward organizing poor people in public housing relative to
understanding their legal rights, and directing them toward services—they
became advocates for the disenfranchised poor in Durham. Momma Khalilah told me about Ms.
Joyce Thorpe-Nichols who lived right around the corner from my home and this
writer, actually met her before she died (Thorpe-Nichols also informed me that
she was the first black to have received a physician assistant degree from Duke University).
Nichols in the early 1960s lived in McDougal housing projects and for whatever
reason was evicted by Durham Housing Authority without cause and Thorpe-Nichols
case made its way to the United States Supreme Court and she won.Momma Khalilah
further stated that Thorpe-Nichols became empowered by being involved in the
work of Operation Breakthrough.[34]
Momma Khalilah pulled from her archives and provided me with
an unpublished document titled, “The Evolution of Neighborhood Organizing
Around Housing Policies in Durham, 1965-1975” authored by a Duke University
researcher named Ellie Bullard of the history department, perhaps under the guidance
of Professor Robert Korstad. Bullard stated: “Thorpe received an eviction
notice. The reason for the eviction was not made clear to her, most likely
retribution for her involvement with the Breakthrough-organized neighborhood
council. Regardless, Thorpe refused to leave her home in McDougald Terrace,
even when Durham
police officers came to the door . . . if you got an eviction, you had no
recourse. . .So I said, ‘I am not going anywhere.’ And I didn’t, Thorpe said.
With the help of Howard Fuller, Joan Alston, and civil rights lawyer Floyd
McKissick, Thorpe pressed against the Durham Housing Authority for failing to
give her a reason for eviction. In a case that would last until 1969, the
Supreme Court finally ruled “you can’t evict people out of public housing
without giving them a reason.’ ‘We are the reason for that, ‘said Howard Fuller
years later.’[35]
Conclusion and Historiography
analysis and comments
Lastly, this research project exposed me to the rich civil
rights history that existed in Durham and the
roles that my in-laws played, in particular and the impact their activism
had in general, in the State of North
Carolina. Thus, last year my father-in-law father
Baba Sharrieff Muhammad Shabazz (2015)
passed and as this writer was writing this narrative and formulating my
thoughts, I could not but think about the many stories and accounts he often
talked about relative to their involvement in desegregating Durham (he loved to
talk about their conviction to social justice).
Both of my in-laws took a lot of pride in working as
community grassroots workers and advocating for the ‘have nots’ and participating
in boycotts, sit-ins and walking picket lines to ensure that African Americans
would be treated as human beings and receive justice.[36] The 1960s was
tumultuous period in American history in which there were many issues pulling
in many political directions such as the Vietnam War, the 1963 assassination of
President John F. Kennedy, the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr. which made America a social tender box. Moreover, cities like Newark, Jersey, Detroit,
and the Watts section of Los Angles were overtaking by riots and social
rebellion.[37] Durham remained relatively
peaceful, but that is not to say that racial tension was not high in Durham. My mother-in-law
said former U.S. Senator Jesse Helms would come on the radio spewing hate and his
approach to public policy reflected a rightwing conservative viewpoint in which
many liberal blacks and whites took offense.
Momma Khalilah believed that Durham’s black bourgeoisie and
black elite had often cut behind the scene deals with the white establishment
and this allowed for them to prosper in business and assisted in their wealth
building.[38] Thus, Howard Fuller often worked with them, but he was deemed a
political outsider and a threat by prominent black leaders in Durham and their
relationship was more of a political convenience. Fuller’s activism inspired my
grandparents who got involved in Operation Breakthrough and this led to them
become community organizers.[39]
In the book titled, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil
Rights Years 1954-1965 , Civil Rights leader Julian Bond who wrote the
introduction to the book stated: “The civil rights movement began a long time
ago. As early as the seventeenth century, blacks and whites, slaves in Virginia
and Quakers in Pennsylvania,
protested the barbarity of slavery. Nat Turner, Sojourner Truth, Fredrick
Douglas, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman are but a few
of those who led the resistance to slavery before the Civil War. After the
Civil War, another protracted battle began against slavery’s legacy—racism and
segregation. But for most Americans, the civil rights movement began on May 17,
1954, when the Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education of
Topeka decision outlawing segregation in public schools.”[40]
Bond’s commentary only serves as a reminder that the
continued response and opposition to injustice and inequality was not created
in a vacuum and Fuller and my grandparents’ struggles were inextricably tied to
this long legacy and history.
Yet, Harold Cruse in his book titled, The Crisis of the
Negro Intellectual, that was published in 1967, this writer does not know, if
he is considered a sociologist or historian but unlike most traditional black
intellectuals, he seemed to be very open to objectively criticizing some of the
civil rights leadership models and personalities. He consistently cited that
many of civil rights organizations, in particular the radical left often
confused reform planks with revolutionary planks which left a lot to be desired
relative to their ideological methodology. Cruses stated, “The Question arises: “Why was it necessary
for all those idealistic and intrepid direct actionists to submit themselves to
such terrible physical and psychological battering in the South to establish a
few struggling groups for local reform in politics and economics, attempting in
vain to breach Jim Crow barriers, which are, in effect, ‘separate’ movements?
It was because these young radicals did not understand, at the outset, the
divergent natures of reforms and revolutionary movements for social change.
They confused the methods without understanding them, thus imputing
revolutionary interpretations to merely reformist methods. Hence, when
direct-action methods failed against hardening barriers, they had to fall back
on what few political and economic reforms gains they had won.”[41]
Now, as I review and assess the election of President Barack
Obama becoming the first African American president and briefly comparing and
contrasting two different historical time periods in American history. This writer in looking back to the 1960s from
my in-laws’ era they probably could not have imagine in their lifetime that
they would ever have witness a black man becoming president and serving as our
commander-in-chief, but in 2008 it happened. Momma Khalilah in their hearts
know that it was their work that laid the foundation and sacrifices of so many
civil rights workers and freedom fighters who died conducting voters
registrations drives in the deep south and eliminating barriers that did not
permit African Americans to participate in the electoral process. Momma
Khalilah worked to desegregated Durham and all across this nation bigotry,
racism and discrimination were being challenged in the 1960s under the banner
of civil rights.[42] This writer does not know, if Momma Khalilah would agree
that we now live in a post racial era since the 2008 election of President
Obama, but she will agree that life is different and blacks have made
tremendous progress and strides in all fields of endeavors since the civil
rights movement in the 1960s.[43]
Senator Obama’s candidacy for president in 2008 created
excitement and enthusiasm amongst African Americans, which was undeniable—most
whites could never understand this euphoria, because it was rooted in the
history and culture of an oppressed people who were disenfranchised, denied
civil rights, and human rights from 1555-1964 until the passing of the 1964
Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Acts. But before the passing of these
two pieces of monumental legislation, Jim Crow reigned high in America. So
this writer must say that he can reckon with their enthusiasm and excitement,
for them it was a very passionate historical moment. For example, Momma
Khalilah is 75 years of age and as an elderly African American who experienced
the era of Jim Crow where race determined the political, economic and social
reality of African American people in the United States, it wouldn’t be
difficult for one to share in her and their newfound optimism and her deep
seated suspicions.[44]
The Jim Crow culture and segregation was very painful for
blacks to endure—there were racial violence in the form of lynching and
outright racial motivated murders, separate but equal policies were the law of
the land—white only public accommodations was the norm, whites and blacks could
not share the same bathrooms and/or attend the same schools. Momma Khalilah as
she recalled this painful history became teary-eyed (these were tears of both
pain and joy) and viewed the possibility of Obama becoming the first black
president in the history of the United States as being monumental in her
psyche; this same view probably resonated with millions of others just like
her. The presidential election of Obama in 2008, made it all worth the hell
they caught fighting to achieve freedom, justice and equality for the African
American race in 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, etc.. And it was a sharp contrast and
departure from the social politics of the 1960s. Just remember we are only
50-60 years removed from one of the most antagonistic times in American history
relative to modern race relations.[45]
Fahim A. Knight-El Chief Researcher for KEEPING IT REAL
THINK TANK located in Durham,
NC;
our mission is to inform African Americans and all people of goodwill, of the
pending dangers that lie ahead; as well as decode the symbolism and
reinterpreted the hidden meanings behind those who operate as invisible forces,
but covertly rules the world. We are of the belief that an enlightened world
will be better prepared to throw off the shackles of ignorance and not be
willing participants for the slaughter. Our MOTTO is speaking truth to power.
Fahim A. Knight-El can be reached at fahimknight@yahoo.com.
Notes
[1] Fahim Knight-El. Interview with Khalilah Abdur Shabazz .
May 10, 2016;
Durham, North Carolina.
[2]Ibid,2.
[3]Ibid, 3-4.
[4] Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate,
Hostile, Unequal. (New York: Scribner, 1995) 3.
[5] Ibid, Shabazz,5.
[6]Ibid, 2-3.
[7] William L. Van
Deburg. Modern Black Nationalism . (New York: New York University Press, 1997)
373-374.
[8]Ibid.
[9]Andre Vann & Beverly Washington Jones. Black American
Series: Durham’s
Hayti. (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 1999) 7.
[10]Ibid, Shabazz, 5.
[11]Ibid, 2-3.
[12] Ibid, 3-5.
[13]Ibid, 4-5.
[14] Ibid, 6-7.
[15]Devin Fergus.
Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American . (Athens,
Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2009) 59.
[16] Ibid,
Shabazz,13.,
[17]Ibid, 12.
[18] Ibid,
[19]Howard Fuller. No
Struggle, No Progress: A Warrior’s Life from Black Power to Education Reform. (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Marquette University Press, 2014) 64.
[20]Ibid, Shabazz, 7.
[21]Ibid, 6.
[22]Ibid, Fuller,
62-79.
[23]Ibid, Shabazz,
8-9.
[24] Amazon..com
–Internet online book review. The Best of Enemies,
[25]Ibid, Shabazz,
8-9.
[26]Ibid, 9.
[27]Ibid, 8-9.
[28] Ibid, 8-9
[29] Ibid, Fuller,
11.
[30] Ibid, Shabazz,
6.
[31] Internet article (2009) titled, “Royal Ice Cream marker
unveiling brings history, recognition, closure to Roxboro St”.
http://www.bullcityrising.com/2009/11/royal-ice-cream-marker-unveiling-brings-history-recognition-closure-to-roxboro-st.html.
[32] Ibid, Shabazz,
11.
[33]Ibid, Shabazz, 6.
[34]Ibid, Fuller,
67-68.
[35] Ellie Bullard. “The Evolution of Neighborhoods
Organizing Around Housing Policies in Durham,
1965-1975”.Uupublished Document; perhaps a Master of Arts Thesis; submitted to
Duke University Department of History under the guidance of Professor Robert
Korstad.
[36] Ibid, Shabazz,
10.
[37]Lerone Bennett.
Before the Mayflower; A History of Black America. (New York: Penguin Books,
1985) 423-432.
[38] Ibid, Shabazz,
3-4.
[39] Ibid, Shabazz,
11.
[40] Juan Williams.
Eyes on the Prize: America’s
Civil Rights Years 1954-1965. ((New
York: Penguin Books, 1987) xi.
[41]Harold Cruse. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. (New
York: William Morrow & Company, 1967) 547.
[42] Ibid, Shabazz,
7.
[43] Ibid, Shabazz,
7.
[44] Ibid, Shabazz, 8
[45] Ibid, Shabazz, 8
&10.
