Black people still like to reminiscence about the comradery, the entertainment, the vendors, and all of the other really great times they enjoyed at the 1984-92 Harambee II Black Arts Festival in Pittsburgh. But they often overlook what is probably the most important legacy of the festival. And this point is equally important to the everyday lives of Black people.
The festival was a product of thousands of Black people “working together to achieve a common goal.” In other words, the Harambee II Black Arts Festival was a product of black unity, African American unity.
Everyday Black people all across the United States work together to achieve common economic, political, and social goals. In every case, the specific goal they seek dictates how they will work together, unite, to achieve it.
The popular notion of total Black unity is utopian. It has never occurred and never will in the real world. It’s not necessary. Unity here is a means toward an end. So, what you need is the quantity and quality of people working together required to achieve your goal.
Black people worked together to elect Harold Washington mayor of Chicago, and later Barack Obama president of the United States. Black unity played a key role in both of these high profile examples.
Black unity is obvious in all-black events like a family get-together or a small social club. It also takes place in multi-racial and multi-ethnic endeavors like Harold Washington’s and Barack Obama’s victories.
Without question, all of the social progress the black community has made in this country from the very bottom of Hell to part way up and out of Hell has been an epic struggle and a product of Black unity.
Paul Robeson was acutely aware of this. “What is important,” he said,” is to recognize a meaningful fact that is so often denied: Negros can and do band together and they have accomplished remarkable works through their collective endeavors.” Robeson pointed to the historic Montgomery Alabama bus boycott.
- E. B. Du Bois said some 80 years ago that Black people are criticized for not banding together to improve their lot, and criticized for “segregating” themselves when they do band together. Damned if they do; damned if they don’t.
Some Black people vehemently argue, and they are wrong, that black unity is impossible because of an alleged class conflict between “middle class” and poor Black people and also an alleged conflict between light-skin and dark skin African Americans. There are progressives, moderates, conservatives, and reactionaries in each of these four groups of Black people. A lot of Black folks in of these groups embrace mainstream America’s insane individualism. They strut around with an “attitude” and, so to speak, with “their behinds on their shoulders,” But that’s about all.
What none of these groups have is any group-power over the black community. American white state-power absolutely forbids that. And, as Lloyd Hogan teaches, so-called middle “class” Black folks are for the most part middle income wage earners, not a “class” based on the exploitation of black labor.
Middle income Black people who moved from majority black inner-city neighborhoods, say Pittsburgh’s Hill District, to the suburbs, say a Monroeville, have been severely condemned by some cynics for betraying inner-city black folks.
But after WWII when millions of middle income European Americans moved to the suburbs from their inner-city ethnic enclaves, they were not condemned but were praised as living proof of America’s “upward mobility.” This is a racist double standard.
Some Black people oppose black unity. For example, Bayard Rustin, a strategist of the 1963 March on Washington, said later that black unity was the most dangerous notion he had ever heard. Bayard Rustin also supported the United States’ imperialist wars in Southeast Asia and apartheid South Africa’s invasion of Angola.
Black people very often band together but do not achieve their goal. Over 90% of the national black vote was against Trump in 2016. That was unity. It was also the morally and politically correct thing to do. Still Trump won the White House. Even so, the unvarying entrenched black opposition to Trump has the potential to compel the black community to organize itself, with its own resources, to be able to wage higher levels of struggles in the very difficult days ahead.
Pittsburgh’s black community, like its national counterparts, has its share of ego-maniacs, opportunists, internal power struggles and what seems at times like a million internal obstacles to black unity. This cannot be denied.
But go out and look around. Everyday Black people are working together in endeavors from religious events to motor bike clubs to community organizations, and on and on. Don’t deny this.
Instead join with Paul Robeson. Recognize and praise black unity when you see it. Heed the lessons it teaches from its victories and its setbacks. Give black unity the black recognition it demands.
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