Author: THE HISTORICAL MEMORY RECOVERY CHANNEL

Boxing legend Muhammad Ali, who died in 2016, explained how he used to ask his mother about white representation in an interview with Michael Parkinson in 1971. In this interview, Ali remembered posing the question to his mother: “Why is everything white?” He recalled being curious about Jesus being white. He pontificated as to why all angels were white—why Angel food cake is white while Devils-food cake’s the chocolate dessert. He talked about all the products of his time that were labeled “white” like White Swan soap, King White soap and White Cloud tissue paper. Oh, and where does the president live? The White House. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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The Tuskegee Experiment (1990)

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, also known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the African American Male, U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee, or Tuskeegee Experiment, was a clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The purpose of this study was to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis; the African-American men in the study were told they were receiving free health care from the federal government of the United States.

This story is an example (one of numerous historical examples) of why Black Americans do not trust the US Medical system. In late 2020, the American medical system has produced a COVID 19 vaccine for distribution in 2021, and the majority of the front line (essential) workers are people of color. Will there be another ‘experiment’ on essential workers like there was on essential field workers in the South in the early 20th century? History has a way of repeating itself.

This is an edited version of the controversial documentary, “The Liberators: Fighting on 2 Fronts”, released in 1992. It was met with criticism almost immediately by white pundits, historians, and even Jews, because of alleged inaccuracies about Black soldiers being among the ‘liberators’ of Buckenwald and Dachau concentration camps. This documentary tried to show that Jews and Blacks had a common enemy, racism, especially during WWII, but it turned out that white american racism was too much for this documentary to stand, thus in early 1993, it was ‘recalled’ (withdrawn from public viewing). I was fortunate to record it on VHS in 1992, when it first came out, and I edited out all of the parts pertaining to the holocaust, and left the meat of the documentary, which was: Black Americans facing brutal racism in the military, and at home during World War II. Black Americans fighting for American freedom, and yet the very people they are fighting for……are the ones who want to restrict their freedom.

The Last Poets are several groups of poets and musicians who arose from the late 1960s African-American civil rights movement’s black nationalism. The name is taken from a poem by the South African revolutionary poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, who believed he was in the last era of poetry before guns would take over. The original users of that name were the trio of Abiodun Oyewole, Gylan Kain, and David Nelson. The Original Last Poets formed on May 19, 1968 (Malcolm X’s birthday), at Marcus Garvey Park, and they came together as a group at the 1969 Harlem writers’ workshop known as East Wind. E. Pluribus Unum was from their 4th Album, Chastisement, in 1972. The lyrics tell a pretty deep story/background about the AMERICAN DOLLAR BILL.

I made a YouTube video using the Star Spangled Banner version by LeAnn Rimes. The American Flag flying in the background…..And what is happening to Black People ‘in the land of the free, and the home of the brave’ is shown in the foreground..

As Frederick Douglass stated in his 4th of July, 1852 speech: “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony…”

In my quest for Black history, I’ve been listening and reading primary source material to know exactly what the authors and narrators are saying in their own words, and not through the filter of textbooks or orators who take snippets of the original out of context.

In Malcolm X’s famous April 12, 1964 speech, ‘The Ballot or the Bullet’, all we heard was the part about how ‘black nationalists’ are going to ‘allegedly’ start a war with white people if we are denied our rights to vote. When I listened to the whole 53 minute speech, this context was no where near the truth. I will be taking important clips out of this speech in upcoming posts, but I thought that this particular clip was very interesting because if one is familiar with the late Rev. Billy Graham, he was a so-called white christian who preached about Jesus Christ but did or say nothing about the plight of Black people during his tenure. Malcolm X called him out in this speech, and this is the actual speech.

This is a short video of how white people are using a word that was an identification of a dance among Black folk, and they are now using it for racist propaganda and deadly mischief. There is no shame in white american misappropriation of black/brown culture.

From the 1950s, until the late 1980s, Television stations signed off between 2am to 6am generally. They played a collage of American Exceptionalism and/or a glorification of our military, with the Star Spangled Banner played in the background. I used one of these collages and added the ‘real history’ behind several scenes shown to be ‘American History.’ The truth be told, these collages were nothing more than glorified white male american history….History that conveniently left out important people from the narrative due to racism. This was my attempt to point out some of those whitewashed moments. And for the record, I believe that the Star Spangled Banner should not be the National Anthem. It does not represent ALL Americans….the author of it said so himself. In this age of COVID 19 and the TV murder of George Floyd, I believe that this song will be next to be put into the museums and become a historical footnote in American History from here on.

This is another 1968 short clip from an interview conducted by Dick Cavett with the great James Baldwin. I would HIGHLY ENCOURAGE the reader to look up Baldwin’s writings, books and magazine articles, and full length videos of his speeches and dissertations on Race in America. Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to the ‘spiritual’ aspect of change in America, but Baldwin appealed to the intellectual and deeply historical aspect of American racism. This short clip is just a small taste.