May 1803 – Treacherous waves crashed against the jagged rocks on the shores of St. Simons Island, Georgia. A ship sailing across the rocky shore was tossed back and forth, desperate not to topple over. Just another day, right? Not quite. On a normal day, it would be the sheer force of the waves that would cause a ship to struggle to maintain its balance. But on this day, the cause had been a struggle onboard. It had been so loud that the sound reverberated across the entire United States. After a while, the ship came to a halt. But the sound didn’t stop. To onlookers, it had sounded almost like… singing. Could it be that Homer had seen sirens after all?
Only, these Sirens did not resemble those from The Odyssey. The color of their skin was an assortment of browns, and underneath the sun, they shimmered like gold. As their singing got louder, people started going overboard. Those had been their captors, sent to recover them from a distant land. It was after the last pirate went overboard that the brown-skinned singers did the unthinkable. They began to jump into the water themselves. Those currents were too treacherous to swim to shore, and they must have known that having had sailed on the water. It begs the question – why did they jump to certain death?
The answer lies in who these people were and where they came from. This was the story of Igbo Landing. It had not been called that before, but the actions of the singers that day – the Igbo people of West Africa – demanded recognition from the force of nature we call history. They had been abducted from their native lands to be made slaves, and not only slaves in the sense history had known them to that point. They were made out to be chattel. Property, that could be bought or sold at will. But they would not have it so. It was their dignity that compelled them to jump that day, and they carried a dignity that transcended generations, across those who, even if they were not direct descendants or related, shared the same hues. They include names such as Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey, two men who were never going to cross paths. Indeed, the latter had been killed years before the former met a similar fate. What they shared was that they rebelled. Despite knowing that they would not live to see their people in their entirety free, they rebelled to free those they could. It was a risk Harriet Tubman took decades later as the brainchild and conductor of the Underground Railroad, and while she survived to tell the tale, and to see a world in which her people were free, she did so at tremendous personal cost. Struck in the head by a two-pound weight by a plantation overseer, Tubman persisted the rest of her life dealing with a condition resembling temporal lobe epilepsy or narcolepsy.
This is the story of the ancestors of the people we today call African Americans, or Black Americans. These were people who never passively nor begrudgingly consigned themselves to the existence of chattel slaves. Indeed, these ancestors were fighters against oppression, and fight against their oppression they did, even under the sting of the lash, and worse, under the threat of death. Dr. Cornel West is fond of saying that Black Americans taught the world about love and how to love. But what if I told you that for as eloquent as Dr. West is, his words only scratch the surface of this group of people’s greatness?
Black Americans have historically been and are one of, if not the world’s most downtrodden people. And yet, despite the sheer oppression they have been and continue to be confronted with, they have always offered humanity its greatest hope at the seemingly illusive prospect of world peace. So often, when asked if they think world peace is possible, many are quick to shoot down the idea of it on the altar of “human nature,” and in so doing, they unknowingly deny themselves their own humanity. These are people who believe that without incentives, human beings will naturally destroy their environment, one another, and themselves. Black Americans, however, ever solution-oriented and not defeatist, know a different way. Consider what Martin Luther King had to say in his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community (1967):
The wealthy nations of the world must promptly initiate a massive, sustained Marshall Plan for Asia, Africa and South America. If they would allocate just 2 percent of their gross national product annually for a period of ten or twenty years for the development of the underdeveloped nations, mankind would go a long way toward conquering the ancient enemy, poverty.
Dr. King’s proposal would represent a constructive use of the United States’ vast and unearned resources, and it is indicative of the type of work people operating in good faith and in good conscience should be striving for in the modern day. Martin Luther King was more than a nonviolent preacher. He was a political and social scientist who saw the bigger picture. He knew that racism against Black Americans could never be defeated without restorative justice, justice which restored not only the poisoned soul and blackened heart of America, but of everyone the world over America helped to suppress. That is why he spoke out against the war in Vietnam, cognizant of the fact that decision would cost him dearly. It is why he had been planning to wage an aggressive war against American poverty, only to have been murdered before he could see it through to the end.
A couple of things are noteworthy. For one, Dr. King’s words, while relevant, were not ideas unique to him only. His contemporaries had said similar things. Consider what the criminally underrated Ella Baker, the founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an organizer beyond compare, and a King ally and critic, had to say in the clip below:
One of UConn Law’s very own, Professor John C. Brittain, thought as Dr. King did as he traversed the scourge of school segregation in the landmark Connecticut state case Sheff v. O’Neill. A brilliant article was published in The Century Foundation by then-senior fellow Richard D. Kahlenberg on Professor Brittain’s admirable exploits, stating
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. championed both racial and economic justice during his lifetime, and in the five decades since King’s assassination, no one has pursued that dual agenda more faithfully than and consistently than civil rights attorney and law professor John C. Brittain.
The article details how, two decades after the 1996 Sheff Connecticut Supreme Court decision that struck down de facto segregation as illegal, the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation’s filing suit to dismantle the integrated school system in Hartford was stymied by Professor Brittain’s emphasis on poverty concentrations during litigation of Sheff to “shift the student assignment algorithm to consider socioeconomic status.”
In a deeply broken country and world, all Black Americans have done is build under immense pressure with extremely limited or no resources. This is evident from Frederick Douglass teaching himself how to read and write after escaping slavery, to Booker T. Washington’s entrepreneurial and organizational genius and George Washington Carver’s scientific genius building up the Tuskegee Institute, to the Black Panther Party pioneering both free school breakfast and the first national sickle cell anemia screening program. Still, there exists the tendency to shut up, shut out, and drown out Black voices that come across as “too Black.” Dr. King’s “revolution of values,” which saw him abandon incrementalism in favor of “massive” federal aid program for Black people – less than the annual U.S. defense budget – and both domestic and global societal restructuring, made him deeply unpopular. Held up today as the quintessential American, Dr. King had been assassinated with a disapproval rating of nearly seventy-five percent. And it is the same writers of history who paint who paint Dr. King as a foil to Malcolm X. They say Malcolm X wanted violence where Dr. King wanted peace.
But the truth is much more complex than that. Their philosophies intersected at critical points, and at some points, Malcolm was even more comprehensive and forward-thinking than King. He recontextualized the Black rights struggle from one of civil rights to one of human rights. He thought by doing so, the struggle would be “internationalized,” the world would serve as the court of law, Black people as the petitioner, and America as the respondent, as opposed to America, the criminal perpetrator, serving as the court. He was a pioneer in what is known as People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHR), which is defined as “those non-oppressive rights that reflect the highest commitment to universal human dignity and social justice that individuals and collectives define for themselves through social struggle.” Unfortunately, he died reviled by the mainstream media and White society, his message falling on deaf ears from those unwilling to hear it. Malcolm was a firebrand by nature, and he was unwilling to change his message or the way in which he delivered it for anyone’s comfort. In his 1963 speech “Message to the Grassroots,” he compared himself to black coffee:
It’s just like when you’ve got some coffee that’s too black, which means it’s too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won’t even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep.
The lesson here is that it doesn’t matter how the message is packaged, too Black is too Black. Therefore, we who are Black students shouldn’t be concerned with respectability and fitting within a mold predetermined for us. Many of our greats, past and present, do not fit within such molds. Names such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Chris Smalls come to mind, who fly in the face of what most people would consider to be “eloquent,” or “well-spoken.” It is important never to underestimate anyone for how they speak, sound, look, dress, wear their hair, or for their level of education, for brilliance comes in all forms. Fannie Lou Hamer received only a sixth-grade education and yet she became one of the most formidable and underrated leaders in the Civil Rights Movement, building a robust agricultural cooperative for Black Mississippians to own land and farm collectively with no federal assistance whatsoever. Chris Smalls captivated the nation in 2022 by leading a union crusade against Amazon, unprecedented in its scope and success. He was labeled as not smart or articulate by the Amazon general counsel, and critics derided his durag, baseball cap, hoodie, sunglasses-laden appearance. Smalls simply told The New York Times that if he were running for president, he would dress just the same. That very Amazon general counsel underestimated Smalls, pushing to make him the face of the union organizing campaign. In doing so, he created the corporation’s biggest problem in its history. Yet, Black Americans remain underestimated, and the harsh truth is that for as many Chris Smalls as there are, there are many more whose potential is never allowed to flourish in an anti-Black society. As someone who had been incarcerated before he entered his name into the annals of history, Malcolm X in his autobiography recounted one fellow inmate of his, “West Indian Archie,” who was among the best “numbers runners” in his day for his ability to file people’s numbers in his head without ever writing them down or even acknowledging that he heard them. Malcolm notes that, had he lived in a different society, or if he had not been Black, his math genius might have been put to better use.
For as much as we talk about Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and others, and for as universally recognized as their names are, we know so little of who what they really did, what they really stood for, and who they really were at their core. Their stories have been consumed but not digested. Heard, but not listened to. Told with style, but lacking completely in substance. Now, politicians threaten to take their stories off the menu entirely. Now more than ever before, it is important that these stories are not only told but told as accurately, correctly, and viscerally as possible. We can and should be critical of them where their ideas no longer stand the test of time, but it is only by respecting and showing reverence for our heroes of the past will we ourselves be able to achieve greatness in the present. They suffered so that we today can have hope for something better.
This clip is from a 1992 lecture delivered at Florida International University by Kwame Ture. If you don’t know him by that name, you may know him by his original name, Stokely Carmichael
But knowledge without action is meaningless. It is for that reason that this blog is titled as it is, for a lyric in Kendrick Lamar’s song “Pray for Me.” In these turbulent, uncertain times, as Black students, we often find ourselves stuck, looking for our own generation’s version of the civil rights fighters to emerge to lead us into brighter times. But the harsh reality is that no saviors are coming. Every person touched on in this post made their names doing what they did not because they wanted to, but because they were left no choice, because they knew their work needed to be done to build a better future for generations to come. The hero you are looking for is in the mirror. You need only see it.
The late Attorney Kiah Duggins did just that. She graduated from Harvard Law in 2021, where she had been the President of the school’s Legal Aid Bureau, as well as a member of Harvard Defenders – the only legal service in Massachusetts representing low-income for people for free in criminal show-cause hearings – and the school’s chapter of the Black Law Students Association. She had been primed to assume the role of professor at Howard University before her life, along with sixty-six other souls, was tragically cut short in a plane collision with a helicopter over the Potomac River. The clip below is of Attorney Duggins speaking on TEDx about a program she created and spearheaded to empower underrepresented high school girls through college readiness, the Princess Project, and the challenges she faced in trying to bring it into existence. As you will find in the clip, Attorney Duggins, with the help of her parents and trusted counsel, persevered through what she perceived as her blind spots to enjoy great success with the Princess Project:
This Black History Month, the Black Law Students Association at UConn Law affirms that Black Lives Matter. All of them. Men, women, children, the elderly, cisgender, transgender, gay, straight, disabled, abled, dark-skinned, light-skinned, poor, working class, incarcerated, etc. The Black lives in other parts of the world who are suffering – in Haiti, in Congo, in Sudan, in Libya, and elsewhere. We account for them as well. We affirm the lived and living experiences of all Black identities as valid. We will strive to measure Black advancement and Black excellence qualitatively, not quantitatively; by the quality of life enjoyed by all of us, not by how many of us do X or Y.
For anyone who has read this, be they Black or be they a genuine ally, all you need do is see the hero in yourself. Can you do it? Now more than ever before, the world will need you to.
About the Author
Kwaku Aurelien is a 1L at UConn School of Law and a member of BLSA.
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