Here is Brother Vincent wrestling as a poet with America. His dignity, and that of the great movement of which he spoke, contrasts utterly with, though it is a hope of, the America in which we find ourselves. For America is, and remains an opponent, giving way but glacially at best, as Black Lives Matter heroically and tragically, shows (yesterday a 16 year old young man was gunned down in Utah for holding a stick – see here<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BnXW2Uxqqc>). How can Freddy Grey and Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and Walter Johnson and Trayvon Martin and so many others have been murdered, here and now, in America by officials as depraved and obtuse as those of Wetumpka, how can buildings still be named for the Klan-lover, segregator Woodrow Wilson at Princeton or University Presidents and other officials just not care that black folks are sometimes subject to derogatory howls in the night?
***
Dr. Vincent Harding
November 1966, Negro Digest
“Pentagon officials are praising the Negro as a gallant, hardfighting soldier. New figures show that proportionately more Negroes have died in Vietnam than military personnel of other races.”
– Atlanta Journal, March 10, 1966
U.S. Marines and South Vietnamese troops attacking under a murderous barrage of artillery and searing napalm Friday trapped and crushed an elite communist force… Killing an estimated 522 of the enemy… Heavy artillery and flaming napalm bombs… took a savage toll among the communist troops…”
– Atlanta Constitution, April 23, 1966
* This poem was written in response to the refusal of city officials in Wetumpka, Alabama to bury to body of Jimmy L. Williams, a fallen black soldier, in the local military cemetary.
My brothers,
I weep for you
Hearing sounds of your death in the jungle,
performing great deeds of gallant savagery
I weep because I remember
I remember how long has been this dying.
I remember how it began in the jungle,
dark jungle, they said.
How it began
when white and Christian they came
to save you
From savagery
and paganism.
To save you from heathen habits
—like burning your enemies to death
To save you
for one hundred and fifty dollars a head.
I remember, my brothers, how you died in thousands
with hands chained behind your backs,
How you died as you walked the path of sorrows
from the heart of darkness
to the light
of Christian ships and guns
and hymns of praise.
Were you gallant then
dropping along the way,
dropping with wife,
falling by screaming child,
Or were you brave
as you watched them dragged away?
Were you heroes then
when you left your final whiteness on a jungle path
to bleach the eyes of some next weeping band!
You are good at dying,
gallant black brother.
Too good.
I remember how you died on board a thousand ships
And heard no mourners song
where you were left
one hundred fathoms in the deep.
Were you gallant then?
Or just a stinking slave?
The times have changed black brother.
The times have changed,
The tunes have changed
and I weep for you
because I remember.
Who praised you
when first you touched these blessed shores
for sweet new dyings
on such safe and solid ground?
Who gave you medals sir
when lashes from ten thousand whips
stole bitter measures from your flesh?
When the booted feet of praying men
stamped your black image into the dust
of God’s own chosen land?
Who saw
Who cared
when all emasculate you fell
into unmarked darkness of hell
driven from those so fierce moanings
of a wife possessed
by the white white heat
and the rigid sperm
of a master’s burning frame?
What death of soul was in that fall?
Who marked it, praised it,
called you brave?
They say you die well my brother.
Oh God, how you have died!
On each plantation acre,
God how you died!
In every city’s new plumbed paths,
On each road gang
Canal and shipping crew
Your dying fed the water and the land.
Wherever lines of building digging men
cried out their old new songs
One was your mourner’s dirge.
And when the wars began
Oh blessed wars!
For freedom,
and liberty
and land
and insanity,
I remember the irony in all your dying.
How you killed Indians
to be slaves on their land,
How you obeyed orders
And won full rights to continue ways of death.
I remember the wars—
Crispus Attucks and his rag-tag crew
helping a nation wrench free
to strangle you (and me).
I remember where you fell
at Lexington and Concord
and how the Father of our country
said you were useless—
until the Redcoats wooed you.
Then you rowed the Delaware with freedom’s friend
To Philadelphia’s freedom stand
where patriots crowned him president
and wrote your bondage large
with freedom’s blackest ink.
I weep for you,
black companions in the way,
Rescued, so they say,
from jungle and from night
to live and die for freedom’s light.
I weep remembering that night,
so endless night,
when first I heard your songs
of troubles and chariots
and sorrow and hope
of groping and thirsting
for the morning.
I weep because I know the seed of those songs
springing from a thousand dyings,
dyings with no citations
with no speeches
and no praise,
because you were only dying,
black brother,
only dying, and not killing,
only dying,
and crying
in the blackness of night.
But then you sang a new song
marching behind Jackson into battle,
Blessed battle!
Killing with him you sang a new song
Dying for him you sang a new song
Dying for him you sang a new song
and the nation sang along
and the praises rose again
while I weep for you my brothers
because they say you die well,
meaning really this, my brother,
meaning really this:
“You kill well.
You kill our enemies with such valiant savagery
singing your tender songs.
And when he kills you
we weep,
officially.
So sad to see you go.”
But the sentence is not ended, black brothers,
only bent
to purposes of death,
and I weep to hear it close
like this:
“When we kill you,
Oh niggers,
Oh niggers
When we kill you
Sometimes we are silent,
officially.
Sometimes we smile,
But sometimes we shout,
nigger,
Sometimes we shout
like we did in Cincinnati
firing cannon at your shacks
and in Philly
pulling you black and bleeding off the trolleys
and in New York
burning your flimsy homes
and across the South
breaking your spirits and your backs
(While our dear General Jackson,
now rewarded for blood,
sits in Washington,
expels the Indians,
brings in the millennium
and DEMOCRACY
for all men
not black
or red
or dying.)
But we do not weep when we kill you.
We do not weep.
We shall not weep.”
This is the way the world ends, my brothers.
This is the way the world ends.
And Nat Turner is a witness.
I remember Nat Turner
Who was not willing to die,
Who had learned how to kill,
and did not think Indians
or Redcoats
or Spainiards
were his enemies,
and led—in the name of Christ—
a band of black avengers
across Southhampton county,
leaving trails of whitened dead
along a path of sorrows
in terrified Virginia.
Here was killing for freedom,
Slaughter for liberty,
Destruction for the Lord,
all the things they praise you for
dead brothers.
But where are the songs?
I hear no songs for him,
see no medals struck,
no towns named,
no schools or streets
called by Nat Turner’s name.
Why?
Did he learn too well
his catechism of Christian death?
Did he choose the wrong men to kill?
I weep for Nat Turner,
Led by the masters’ bloody Christ
to the master’s grave,
unheeded,
unsung,
unknown,
officially.
No hero,
but a savage black slave—
who would not let the master
name his enemies.
I remember Nat Turner,
to witness
to the lie.
They say you die well my brother,
but only in the line of duty
under white orders
to kill.
Medals go only to slaves
who die at their masters’ command.
I weep when they speak of your gallantry
and how you have proven
to be men.
For I remember Civil War beginning
how you rushed to Father Abraham
offering your lives again
to kill well
and die well.
And I remember how he sent you home
asking if you would not like
to emigrate
to Central America instead.
I remember how
you pounded even then
on doors of death again
and were not admitted
‘til the war’s dark days
brought cries for help,
even yours.
I remember how they blamed you
For the war,
How they refused to fight
when someone said
it now was meant to free you.
I remember how they rioted
rather than fight at your side,
how they killed you in the cities of the North
gently humming “John Brown’s Body.”
They say you die well
and they are right.
For I remember how you fought
when finally you were let in
to all the pleasures of Civil death.
The United States Colored Troops they said;
And your bodies lay as still as any others
in The Wilderness,
and at Gettysburg
even though they paid you less than whites
to die
and kill.
You won your medals
and your praise
and proved that you were men.
And when the marching was over
And the bodies cleared away
you were still men
when they lynched you
and burned you
and took away your vote
and fought for your male organ
in the sunlight
of a thousand towns
across the blessed land.
Perhaps they had forgotten,
forgotten you were men
forgotten you were gallant,
for they remembered only
black nigger
as you died
so well
in the darkness
and the light.
God, how you died!
Brave black men.
And I weep for you
that with the stench
of your brothers’ burning
still plucking at your nostrils
you volunteered again
and were refused again
and finally convinced the nation
that you should die again
in Cuba
for freedom
and liberty
for the blacks and mulattoes
who looked like your twins
and found as much freedom
as you had known
under the heavy hand
of America.
And when you returned
with the heroes’ band
to march through southern streets
Did you recognize the hanging trees
or sense the meaning
of the slightly blackened places
in the steamy village squares?
My black brothers,
My dead black brothers,
What did you think of Atlanta in 1906?
What did you think
when the riots began
and the dying continued?
Have you collected your awards yet
for those fine dyings
in the New South?
And what were the words
of the Springfield Citation
as the mobs rushed to burn your houses
and bring you the honor of death?
Did they really say:
“Lincoln freed you,
We’ll show you where you belong”
in Springfield, Illinois?
Dear Fellow-Elders, I am forwarding this celebration of Brother Vincent by Alan Gilbert, a professor of international studies at the University of Denver,, who also sent a poem by Brother Vincent, blazing with light, blazing with The Dark is Light Enough, that was published in 1966 but since then not well-known till now. Shalom, salaam, peace, Earth! — Arthur
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Vincent Harding was angered by and meditated on Jimmy L. Williams’ death in Vietnam in 1964 – Williams had served in the Special Forces – and the refusal of the “officials” (Ku Klux Klan) of Wetumpka, Alabama to bury him in the lily-white military cemetery. See the story “Burial Rebuff Shakes Battlefront Buddies” here<http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft058002v2;chunk.id=d0e5899;doc.view=print> for statements about this by his fellow soldiers. Vincent wrote this long poem, published in November, 1966, in Negro Digest which Sean Ray, who is writing a thesis on Tolstoy, Gandhi and King, discovered and transcribed.
***
There was protest at the time, particularly by Jimmy Williams’ parents, and he was buried in the integrated Andersonville National Cemetery, near where Freedmen had celebrated emancipation:
“In May 1966, 19 year old Jimmy Williams, an African American Green Beret from Wetumpka, Alabama, was killed in Vietnam. His hometown cemetery refused to allow him to be buried due to his race. His mother said, ‘My son died fighting on the front for all of us. He didn’t die a segregated death and he’ll not be buried in a segregated cemetery.’ Jimmy Williams was buried with full military honors in an integrated Andersonville National Cemetery, almost one hundred years after the Freedmen first celebrated their Emancipation only a few yards away.” (from the Andersonville National Historic Site website. h/t Sean Ray)
***
Wetumpka’s cemetery remained lily-white…Being buried there currently is perhaps spiritually equivalent to being buried in a sewer. Jimmy Williams is honored today at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, see here.
***
Vincent speaks of the “gallant savagery” with which black soldiers, often abused in the well-equipped American army, murdered ordinary people in Vietnam.
***
In 1967, Vincent authored the first draft of Martin Luther King’s memorable speech against the Vietnam War given at the Riverside Church on April 4th. It was a choice Martin made – being on the road 300 days a year, he asked Vincent to write it – as an alternative to a fairly banal speech, and Vincent wrote words – listen here<http://www.mixcloud.com/kymonefreeman/april-4-1967-mlk-revisited-by-the-author-of-beyond-vietnam-with-dr-vincent-harding-on-we-act-radio/> or read it here <http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm> – which will live as long as American English is spoken. For that speech is as true today of Obama’s drones, of CIA and Joint Special Operations Command secret activities – 12 raids in 70 countries every night – as the day it was written. For the militarized economy is “a demonic destructive suction tube” which steals resources from ordinary people, black, brown, red and white, which could be used for a common good (for an economy which works for all of us, as Bernie puts it) – and funnels them into crazy imperial, and losing wars in the Middle East and a gigantic $1.7 trillion a year war complex/militarism (short for military-industrial-corporate media-most politicians-academic-American trained and aided foreign militaries, and the like complex).
President Johnson and the commercial media then condemned and ostracized King, a central cause of King’s murder 1 year to the day later, April 4, 1968, in Memphis. Vincent spoke with many people, including me, of the guilt he felt that he wrote the words for which his dear friend was murdered. James Lawson helped to lift the cross of this somewhat from Vincent who had asked him whether he felt guilty for inviting Martin to come to Memphis, and he said: no, it was Martin’s decision.
***
From the age of 26 on in Montgomery, assassination attempts had been made against King; he told Coretta then that he would not reach the age of 40….
***
In a conversation with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez on Democracy Now on this speech in 2008, Vincent spoke of King’s magnificent craziness, of which there is something, as I saw in being with nonviolent village protestors in Palestine, in Dr. Harding also:
“I think Halberstam was very, very much on the point there, Amy. I think that it is impossible to stand with the poor, to speak on behalf of the poor, without getting the kind of responses that people gave to Martin’s speech. He became a voice that was considered to be an alienated, out-of-his-arena kind of speech. And this was only natural in light of the commitment that he made. When you decide that you must go and stand and work with garbage workers, even though you have a Ph.D. in philosophical theology, it is only natural that many people who are accustomed to hanging out with Ph.D.’s in philosophical theology will say that you are crazy for hanging around with garbage workers. But Martin had a magnificent craziness about him that made him very uncomfortable for some people to understand and to live with.
But, Amy, what I want to remember is not simply what Time magazine said or what the Washington Post said, but what I want to remember is what Nina was remembering in her song, “The King of Love is Dead, What Should We Do Now?” What I also want to remember is that great Jewish rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, who said, just about ten days before Martin was assassinated, Heschel said, “Martin Luther King is a voice, a vision and a way, and we must all engage with him in his way, because,” Heschel said, “the whole future of America depends upon the impact and influence of Dr. King.” I believe that. And I think that that is part of the reason why so many people were so uncomfortable, because they knew that he was calling us to a way that was very difficult, a way beyond racism, a way beyond materialism and a way beyond militarism. And those are not easy ways to go.” See here<http://www.democracynow.org/2008/2/28/former_king_speechwriter_dr_vincent_harding>.
***
As an historian, Vincent also wrote the lyrical There is a River, the most powerful historical account of black people and the fight for freedom and decency in America up to the new opening, the hunger of poor, newly free blacks for reading and learning at the end of the Civil War. I had the privilege of going with Vincent to the meeting celebrating the 30th anniversary of its publication at ASALH (the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History) in Richmond in 2011, and saw at a Chapel at the Virginia Theological Union, stained glass designed with the picture of a black woman reading against a fence (see here<http://democratic-individuality.blogspot.com/2011/10/vincent-harding-and-lerone-bennett.html>).
***
Vincent’s writings will live as long as people consider the struggle against the long American genocides and its corrupt, imperial – and self-destructive – wars. This epic poem is part of the journey which Vincent made in writing these other works.
***
Until Sean found this poem in The Negro Digest, I had not known that Vincent wrote poetry. Published in 1966, it traces four hundred years of violent oppression, celebrates Nat Turner but avoids his bloody hands, satirizes whites who murder blacks humming “John Brown’s body” (for reasons we never discussed, Vincent had a hard time coming to admire John Brown), comments sadly on blacks fighting in settler wars against indigenous people (to be slaves on the land seized) and ends on a vision of hope (Vincent founded the Veterans of Hope…)
***
For Vincent, the way to his measured and profound nonviolence – mass nonviolent resistance – was through an anger which once sometimes sympathized with violence against the oppressor, even where he thought it unwise. His profound nonviolence, to force oppressors to submit or hopefully change through nonviolent resistance and not to kill, a matter of spirituality and political judgment, was hard won and learned from and influenced many people, here and abroad (for instance, the courageous Bassem Tamimi – they called each other brothers – whom Vincent stayed with in Nabi Saleh).
***
Vincent’s poem cries out against a country which oppresses and throws away black people, uses them against native americans, celebrates them only when they “are gallant” and together with poor whites burn Vietnamese villages thousands of miles away, as King’s speech says, but will not let them live together in East Chicago or Detroit, a country which will not even bury Jimmy Williams in the lily-white cemetery in Wetumpka…
***
Wetumpka is still sick. There is no clear mention of Jimmy Williams even on webpage of the new Black History Museum, opened in 2015 here <http://elmorecountyblackhistorymuseum.org/> in Wetumpka…
***
Or only black,” Vincent writes
and dead,
and gallant
and slaves?”
***
And yet even this poem soars at the end toward Vincent’s (and Martin’s) vision of a common place where everyone is recognized – who owns the water? Martin asked in 1968 – or a genuine democracy as Vincent would speak about in recent years…
For King’s vision of black and white and native american and asian – all of us united in an anti-racist, multiracial democracy is the only one way forward against increasing, day by day, economic oppression and unjust wars.
***
The racist grave yards of the South – in Philadelphia, Mississippi, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner, whose parents wished them to be buried beside each other after being murdered by the Sheriff and a reverend, leading a mob, could not be buried together…
In response to the murders at Mother Emmanuel in 2015, the Confederate flag in Louisiana was taken down from public buildings – Governor Nikki Haley nonetheless, deserves credit for responding to these murders – but the journey to make the South a decent place will yet take a long time…
***
Here is Brother Vincent wrestling as a poet with America. His dignity, and that of the great movement of which he spoke, contrasts utterly with, though it is a hope of, the America in which we find ourselves. For America is, and remains an opponent, giving way but glacially at best, as Black Lives Matter heroically and tragically, shows (yesterday a 16 year old young man was gunned down in Utah for holding a stick – see here<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BnXW2Uxqqc>). How can Freddy Grey and Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and Walter Johnson and Trayvon Martin and so many others have been murdered, here and now, in America by officials as depraved and obtuse as those of Wetumpka, how can buildings still be named for the Klan-lover, segregator Woodrow Wilson at Princeton or University Presidents and other officials just not care that black folks are sometimes subject to derogatory howls in the night?
***
Dr. Vincent Harding
November 1966, Negro Digest
“Pentagon officials are praising the Negro as a gallant, hardfighting soldier. New figures show that proportionately more Negroes have died in Vietnam than military personnel of other races.”
– Atlanta Journal, March 10, 1966
“U.S. Marines and South Vietnamese troops attacking under a murderous barrage of artillery and searing napalm Friday trapped and crushed an elite communist force… Killing an estimated 522 of the enemy… Heavy artillery and flaming napalm bombs… took a savage toll among the communist troops…”
– Atlanta Constitution, April 23, 1966
This poem was written in response to the refusal of city officials in Wetumpka, Alabama to bury to body of Jimmy L. Williams, a fallen black soldier, in the local military cemetary.
Dr. Vincent Harding
November 1966, Negro Digest
“Pentagon officials are praising the Negro as a gallant, hardfighting soldier. New figures show that proportionately more Negroes have died in Vietnam than military personnel of other races.”
– Atlanta Journal, March 10, 1966
U.S. Marines and South Vietnamese troops attacking under a murderous barrage of artillery and searing napalm Friday trapped and crushed an elite communist force… Killing an estimated 522 of the enemy… Heavy artillery and flaming napalm bombs… took a savage toll among the communist troops…”
– Atlanta Constitution, April 23, 1966
* This poem was written in response to the refusal of city officials in Wetumpka, Alabama to bury to body of Jimmy L. Williams, a fallen black soldier, in the local military cemetary.
My brothers,
I weep for you
Hearing sounds of your death in the jungle,
performing great deeds of gallant savagery
I weep because I remember
I remember how long has been this dying.
I remember how it began in the jungle,
dark jungle, they said.
How it began
when white and Christian they came
to save you
From savagery
and paganism.
To save you from heathen habits
—like burning your enemies to death
To save you
for one hundred and fifty dollars a head.
I remember, my brothers, how you died in thousands
with hands chained behind your backs,
How you died as you walked the path of sorrows
from the heart of darkness
to the light
of Christian ships and guns
and hymns of praise.
Were you gallant then
dropping along the way,
dropping with wife,
falling by screaming child,
Or were you brave
as you watched them dragged away?
Were you heroes then
when you left your final whiteness on a jungle path
to bleach the eyes of some next weeping band!
You are good at dying,
gallant black brother.
Too good.
I remember how you died on board a thousand ships
And heard no mourners song
where you were left
one hundred fathoms in the deep.
Were you gallant then?
Or just a stinking slave?
The times have changed black brother.
The times have changed,
The tunes have changed
and I weep for you
because I remember.
Who praised you
when first you touched these blessed shores
for sweet new dyings
on such safe and solid ground?
Who gave you medals sir
when lashes from ten thousand whips
stole bitter measures from your flesh?
When the booted feet of praying men
stamped your black image into the dust
of God’s own chosen land?
Who saw
Who cared
when all emasculate you fell
into unmarked darkness of hell
driven from those so fierce moanings
of a wife possessed
by the white white heat
and the rigid sperm
of a master’s burning frame?
What death of soul was in that fall?
Who marked it, praised it,
called you brave?
They say you die well my brother.
Oh God, how you have died!
On each plantation acre,
God how you died!
In every city’s new plumbed paths,
On each road gang
Canal and shipping crew
Your dying fed the water and the land.
Wherever lines of building digging men
cried out their old new songs
One was your mourner’s dirge.
And when the wars began
Oh blessed wars!
For freedom,
and liberty
and land
and insanity,
I remember the irony in all your dying.
How you killed Indians
to be slaves on their land,
How you obeyed orders
And won full rights to continue ways of death.
I remember the wars—
Crispus Attucks and his rag-tag crew
helping a nation wrench free
to strangle you (and me).
I remember where you fell
at Lexington and Concord
and how the Father of our country
said you were useless—
until the Redcoats wooed you.
Then you rowed the Delaware with freedom’s friend
To Philadelphia’s freedom stand
where patriots crowned him president
and wrote your bondage large
with freedom’s blackest ink.
I weep for you,
black companions in the way,
Rescued, so they say,
from jungle and from night
to live and die for freedom’s light.
I weep remembering that night,
so endless night,
when first I heard your songs
of troubles and chariots
and sorrow and hope
of groping and thirsting
for the morning.
I weep because I know the seed of those songs
springing from a thousand dyings,
dyings with no citations
with no speeches
and no praise,
because you were only dying,
black brother,
only dying, and not killing,
only dying,
and crying
in the blackness of night.
But then you sang a new song
marching behind Jackson into battle,
Blessed battle!
Killing with him you sang a new song
Dying for him you sang a new song
Dying for him you sang a new song
and the nation sang along
and the praises rose again
while I weep for you my brothers
because they say you die well,
meaning really this, my brother,
meaning really this:
“You kill well.
You kill our enemies with such valiant savagery
singing your tender songs.
And when he kills you
we weep,
officially.
So sad to see you go.”
But the sentence is not ended, black brothers,
only bent
to purposes of death,
and I weep to hear it close
like this:
“When we kill you,
Oh niggers,
Oh niggers
When we kill you
Sometimes we are silent,
officially.
Sometimes we smile,
But sometimes we shout,
nigger,
Sometimes we shout
like we did in Cincinnati
firing cannon at your shacks
and in Philly
pulling you black and bleeding off the trolleys
and in New York
burning your flimsy homes
and across the South
breaking your spirits and your backs
(While our dear General Jackson,
now rewarded for blood,
sits in Washington,
expels the Indians,
brings in the millennium
and DEMOCRACY
for all men
not black
or red
or dying.)
But we do not weep when we kill you.
We do not weep.
We shall not weep.”
This is the way the world ends, my brothers.
This is the way the world ends.
And Nat Turner is a witness.
I remember Nat Turner
Who was not willing to die,
Who had learned how to kill,
and did not think Indians
or Redcoats
or Spainiards
were his enemies,
and led—in the name of Christ—
a band of black avengers
across Southhampton county,
leaving trails of whitened dead
along a path of sorrows
in terrified Virginia.
Here was killing for freedom,
Slaughter for liberty,
Destruction for the Lord,
all the things they praise you for
dead brothers.
But where are the songs?
I hear no songs for him,
see no medals struck,
no towns named,
no schools or streets
called by Nat Turner’s name.
Why?
Did he learn too well
his catechism of Christian death?
Did he choose the wrong men to kill?
I weep for Nat Turner,
Led by the masters’ bloody Christ
to the master’s grave,
unheeded,
unsung,
unknown,
officially.
No hero,
but a savage black slave—
who would not let the master
name his enemies.
I remember Nat Turner,
to witness
to the lie.
They say you die well my brother,
but only in the line of duty
under white orders
to kill.
Medals go only to slaves
who die at their masters’ command.
I weep when they speak of your gallantry
and how you have proven
to be men.
For I remember Civil War beginning
how you rushed to Father Abraham
offering your lives again
to kill well
and die well.
And I remember how he sent you home
asking if you would not like
to emigrate
to Central America instead.
I remember how
you pounded even then
on doors of death again
and were not admitted
‘til the war’s dark days
brought cries for help,
even yours.
I remember how they blamed you
For the war,
How they refused to fight
when someone said
it now was meant to free you.
I remember how they rioted
rather than fight at your side,
how they killed you in the cities of the North
gently humming “John Brown’s Body.”
They say you die well
and they are right.
For I remember how you fought
when finally you were let in
to all the pleasures of Civil death.
The United States Colored Troops they said;
And your bodies lay as still as any others
in The Wilderness,
and at Gettysburg
even though they paid you less than whites
to die
and kill.
You won your medals
and your praise
and proved that you were men.
And when the marching was over
And the bodies cleared away
you were still men
when they lynched you
and burned you
and took away your vote
and fought for your male organ
in the sunlight
of a thousand towns
across the blessed land.
Perhaps they had forgotten,
forgotten you were men
forgotten you were gallant,
for they remembered only
black nigger
as you died
so well
in the darkness
and the light.
God, how you died!
Brave black men.
And I weep for you
that with the stench
of your brothers’ burning
still plucking at your nostrils
you volunteered again
and were refused again
and finally convinced the nation
that you should die again
in Cuba
for freedom
and liberty
for the blacks and mulattoes
who looked like your twins
and found as much freedom
as you had known
under the heavy hand
of America.
And when you returned
with the heroes’ band
to march through southern streets
Did you recognize the hanging trees
or sense the meaning
of the slightly blackened places
in the steamy village squares?
My black brothers,
My dead black brothers,
What did you think of Atlanta in 1906?
What did you think
when the riots began
and the dying continued?
Have you collected your awards yet
for those fine dyings
in the New South?
And what were the words
of the Springfield Citation
as the mobs rushed to burn your houses
and bring you the honor of death?
Did they really say:
“Lincoln freed you,
We’ll show you where you belong”
in Springfield, Illinois?
Dear Fellow-Elders, I am forwarding this celebration of Brother Vincent by Alan Gilbert, a professor of international studies at the University of Denver,, who also sent a poem by Brother Vincent, blazing with light, blazing with The Dark is Light Enough, that was published in 1966 but since then not well-known till now. Shalom, salaam, peace, Earth! — Arthur
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Vincent Harding was angered by and meditated on Jimmy L. Williams’ death in Vietnam in 1964 – Williams had served in the Special Forces – and the refusal of the “officials” (Ku Klux Klan) of Wetumpka, Alabama to bury him in the lily-white military cemetery. See the story “Burial Rebuff Shakes Battlefront Buddies” here<http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft058002v2;chunk.id=d0e5899;doc.view=print> for statements about this by his fellow soldiers. Vincent wrote this long poem, published in November, 1966, in Negro Digest which Sean Ray, who is writing a thesis on Tolstoy, Gandhi and King, discovered and transcribed.
***
There was protest at the time, particularly by Jimmy Williams’ parents, and he was buried in the integrated Andersonville National Cemetery, near where Freedmen had celebrated emancipation:
“In May 1966, 19 year old Jimmy Williams, an African American Green Beret from Wetumpka, Alabama, was killed in Vietnam. His hometown cemetery refused to allow him to be buried due to his race. His mother said, ‘My son died fighting on the front for all of us. He didn’t die a segregated death and he’ll not be buried in a segregated cemetery.’ Jimmy Williams was buried with full military honors in an integrated Andersonville National Cemetery, almost one hundred years after the Freedmen first celebrated their Emancipation only a few yards away.” (from the Andersonville National Historic Site website. h/t Sean Ray)
***
Wetumpka’s cemetery remained lily-white…Being buried there currently is perhaps spiritually equivalent to being buried in a sewer. Jimmy Williams is honored today at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, see here.
***
Vincent speaks of the “gallant savagery” with which black soldiers, often abused in the well-equipped American army, murdered ordinary people in Vietnam.
***
In 1967, Vincent authored the first draft of Martin Luther King’s memorable speech against the Vietnam War given at the Riverside Church on April 4th. It was a choice Martin made – being on the road 300 days a year, he asked Vincent to write it – as an alternative to a fairly banal speech, and Vincent wrote words – listen here<http://www.mixcloud.com/kymonefreeman/april-4-1967-mlk-revisited-by-the-author-of-beyond-vietnam-with-dr-vincent-harding-on-we-act-radio/> or read it here <http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm> – which will live as long as American English is spoken. For that speech is as true today of Obama’s drones, of CIA and Joint Special Operations Command secret activities – 12 raids in 70 countries every night – as the day it was written. For the militarized economy is “a demonic destructive suction tube” which steals resources from ordinary people, black, brown, red and white, which could be used for a common good (for an economy which works for all of us, as Bernie puts it) – and funnels them into crazy imperial, and losing wars in the Middle East and a gigantic $1.7 trillion a year war complex/militarism (short for military-industrial-corporate media-most politicians-academic-American trained and aided foreign militaries, and the like complex).
President Johnson and the commercial media then condemned and ostracized King, a central cause of King’s murder 1 year to the day later, April 4, 1968, in Memphis. Vincent spoke with many people, including me, of the guilt he felt that he wrote the words for which his dear friend was murdered. James Lawson helped to lift the cross of this somewhat from Vincent who had asked him whether he felt guilty for inviting Martin to come to Memphis, and he said: no, it was Martin’s decision.
***
From the age of 26 on in Montgomery, assassination attempts had been made against King; he told Coretta then that he would not reach the age of 40….
***
In a conversation with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez on Democracy Now on this speech in 2008, Vincent spoke of King’s magnificent craziness, of which there is something, as I saw in being with nonviolent village protestors in Palestine, in Dr. Harding also:
“I think Halberstam was very, very much on the point there, Amy. I think that it is impossible to stand with the poor, to speak on behalf of the poor, without getting the kind of responses that people gave to Martin’s speech. He became a voice that was considered to be an alienated, out-of-his-arena kind of speech. And this was only natural in light of the commitment that he made. When you decide that you must go and stand and work with garbage workers, even though you have a Ph.D. in philosophical theology, it is only natural that many people who are accustomed to hanging out with Ph.D.’s in philosophical theology will say that you are crazy for hanging around with garbage workers. But Martin had a magnificent craziness about him that made him very uncomfortable for some people to understand and to live with.
But, Amy, what I want to remember is not simply what Time magazine said or what the Washington Post said, but what I want to remember is what Nina was remembering in her song, “The King of Love is Dead, What Should We Do Now?” What I also want to remember is that great Jewish rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, who said, just about ten days before Martin was assassinated, Heschel said, “Martin Luther King is a voice, a vision and a way, and we must all engage with him in his way, because,” Heschel said, “the whole future of America depends upon the impact and influence of Dr. King.” I believe that. And I think that that is part of the reason why so many people were so uncomfortable, because they knew that he was calling us to a way that was very difficult, a way beyond racism, a way beyond materialism and a way beyond militarism. And those are not easy ways to go.” See here<http://www.democracynow.org/2008/2/28/former_king_speechwriter_dr_vincent_harding>.
***
As an historian, Vincent also wrote the lyrical There is a River, the most powerful historical account of black people and the fight for freedom and decency in America up to the new opening, the hunger of poor, newly free blacks for reading and learning at the end of the Civil War. I had the privilege of going with Vincent to the meeting celebrating the 30th anniversary of its publication at ASALH (the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History) in Richmond in 2011, and saw at a Chapel at the Virginia Theological Union, stained glass designed with the picture of a black woman reading against a fence (see here<http://democratic-individuality.blogspot.com/2011/10/vincent-harding-and-lerone-bennett.html>).
***
Vincent’s writings will live as long as people consider the struggle against the long American genocides and its corrupt, imperial – and self-destructive – wars. This epic poem is part of the journey which Vincent made in writing these other works.
***
Until Sean found this poem in The Negro Digest, I had not known that Vincent wrote poetry. Published in 1966, it traces four hundred years of violent oppression, celebrates Nat Turner but avoids his bloody hands, satirizes whites who murder blacks humming “John Brown’s body” (for reasons we never discussed, Vincent had a hard time coming to admire John Brown), comments sadly on blacks fighting in settler wars against indigenous people (to be slaves on the land seized) and ends on a vision of hope (Vincent founded the Veterans of Hope…)
***
For Vincent, the way to his measured and profound nonviolence – mass nonviolent resistance – was through an anger which once sometimes sympathized with violence against the oppressor, even where he thought it unwise. His profound nonviolence, to force oppressors to submit or hopefully change through nonviolent resistance and not to kill, a matter of spirituality and political judgment, was hard won and learned from and influenced many people, here and abroad (for instance, the courageous Bassem Tamimi – they called each other brothers – whom Vincent stayed with in Nabi Saleh).
***
Vincent’s poem cries out against a country which oppresses and throws away black people, uses them against native americans, celebrates them only when they “are gallant” and together with poor whites burn Vietnamese villages thousands of miles away, as King’s speech says, but will not let them live together in East Chicago or Detroit, a country which will not even bury Jimmy Williams in the lily-white cemetery in Wetumpka…
***
Wetumpka is still sick. There is no clear mention of Jimmy Williams even on webpage of the new Black History Museum, opened in 2015 here <http://elmorecountyblackhistorymuseum.org/> in Wetumpka…
***
Or only black,” Vincent writes
and dead,
and gallant
and slaves?”
***
And yet even this poem soars at the end toward Vincent’s (and Martin’s) vision of a common place where everyone is recognized – who owns the water? Martin asked in 1968 – or a genuine democracy as Vincent would speak about in recent years…
For King’s vision of black and white and native american and asian – all of us united in an anti-racist, multiracial democracy is the only one way forward against increasing, day by day, economic oppression and unjust wars.
***
The racist grave yards of the South – in Philadelphia, Mississippi, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner, whose parents wished them to be buried beside each other after being murdered by the Sheriff and a reverend, leading a mob, could not be buried together…
In response to the murders at Mother Emmanuel in 2015, the Confederate flag in Louisiana was taken down from public buildings – Governor Nikki Haley nonetheless, deserves credit for responding to these murders – but the journey to make the South a decent place will yet take a long time…
***
Here is Brother Vincent wrestling as a poet with America. His dignity, and that of the great movement of which he spoke, contrasts utterly with, though it is a hope of, the America in which we find ourselves. For America is, and remains an opponent, giving way but glacially at best, as Black Lives Matter heroically and tragically, shows (yesterday a 16 year old young man was gunned down in Utah for holding a stick – see here<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BnXW2Uxqqc>). How can Freddy Grey and Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and Walter Johnson and Trayvon Martin and so many others have been murdered, here and now, in America by officials as depraved and obtuse as those of Wetumpka, how can buildings still be named for the Klan-lover, segregator Woodrow Wilson at Princeton or University Presidents and other officials just not care that black folks are sometimes subject to derogatory howls in the night?
***
Dr. Vincent Harding
November 1966, Negro Digest
“Pentagon officials are praising the Negro as a gallant, hardfighting soldier. New figures show that proportionately more Negroes have died in Vietnam than military personnel of other races.”
– Atlanta Journal, March 10, 1966
“U.S. Marines and South Vietnamese troops attacking under a murderous barrage of artillery and searing napalm Friday trapped and crushed an elite communist force… Killing an estimated 522 of the enemy… Heavy artillery and flaming napalm bombs… took a savage toll among the communist troops…”
– Atlanta Constitution, April 23, 1966
This poem was written in response to the refusal of city officials in Wetumpka, Alabama to bury to body of Jimmy L. Williams, a fallen black soldier, in the local military cemetary.
