Sent: Sat 7/7/2007 6:54 PM
To: Gregg, Perry
Cc:
Subject: Am I My Brother's Keeper?
Perry,
For the sake of historical perspective,
I have occasionally shared some inspirational
tidbits with African American undergraduates at
Harvard and other persons I consider sensitive to
same. The following tidbits are my reflections
on a speech by a visitor to my school in rural
Arkansas when I was in seventh or eighth grade.
Our visitor revealed some statistics
about Black History that were awe-inspiring and
quite relevant to the rôle of educated African
Americans today. He revealed to us that there
were probably no more than fifty African
Americans with college degrees in the United
States when the Civil War ended. Moreover, there
were almost five million newly-freed slaves who
were, for all practical purposes,
illiterate. Notwithstanding these overwhelming
odds, this handful of educated men and women (and
their descendants) worked a miracle over the
seventy years following the War and "saved a
race." Frankly, they "saved a nation" because
the United States could not have withstood the
economic and political burden of more than
4,000,000 nomadic, unskilled black refugees.
With the help of Northern missionaries,
sympathetic Southern whites and philanthropists
such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and
Julius Rosenwald, they founded more than 200
historically black colleges and thousands of
schools during that period. This was
accomplished in the face of monstrous brutality
including widespread lynching. I've read that
between 1890 and 1910 upwards of 4200 blacks were
lynched. That computes to a black lynching every
forty-one hours for twenty years!
Our visitor reminded us that those fifty
or so educated men and women could have remained
in the North or migrated to Canada or Europe and
enjoyed relatively comfortable lives. They chose
instead to look into their conscience, their
religion, and into the future. They knew that
without skills and organization, all that the
ancestors had endured would have been for naught
and chattel slavery would have been replaced with
economic and political slavery.
He ended his talk with the daunting
question raised in Genesis 4:9, "Am I my
brother's keeper?" He said that those few
educated Black men and women in the 19th Century
nobly answered that question and he urged all of
us to contemplate it every day of our lives.
That visitor's speech resonates today
with even greater urgency especially among the
statistics about black males and it suggests
that: We must either keep our brother or he will
assuredly keep us. He will keep us in debt,
e.g., state correctional system budgets run into
billions of dollars with California topping them
all at $10,000,000,000! He will keep us in fear
(many homes in our communities look like jails,
with their locks and bars). He has already
driven too many Americans to believe that we can
imprison our way out of the problem even if it
renders African Americans an ethnic group without
functional males between fifteen and forty. Lest
we think this is a problem afflicting only the
black "underclass," we need only observe the
growing male/female imbalance in college,
graduate and professional schools. Could this
portend a single-gendered black middle class in our future?
The following quotation that I first
heard many years ago in Sunday School almost leaps out at me:
"As I approached the mountain I thought
I perceived a monster, but as I came closer I saw
that it was not a monster but a man, and as I
came even closer, I saw that he was my brother."
"I sought my friend and my friend forsook me.
I sought my God and my God eluded me.
I sought my brother and found all three!"
Best regards,
David