On the Shoulders of Giants

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  Most scientists today discount the practice of race categories as a phony distinction used by one group of people to justify dominating another group, just as Adolf Hitler used Blumenbach to justify his persecution of those he considered “racially inferior.” While discarding the crackpot idea of race might seem a step in the right direction for dispelling racial stereotypes, first society has to want to know the truth. Yet, in some ways society hasn’t changed that much since those “Yassir, Mr. Bones” minstrel days. The publication in 1994 of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve was one of the more recent pseudo scientific “proofs” of black inferiority. What’s significant here isn’t that The Bell Curve proposed such scientifically outdated ideas at the close of the twentieth century—people will never stop trying to justify their prejudices. What’s significant is that the book was a major best seller in America. A lot of people wanted to believe it.

  So, while it may be of some comfort that scientists say there is no such thing as “race,” it’s not scientists that have to be convinced. It’s the average white person walking down the street, clutching his wallet when a black teenager approaches; sitting on a jury a little more certain the defendant is guilty because he’s black; waiting in a hospital hoping the black doctor approaching isn’t going to be his. To overcome these automatic reflexes of perception, as quick and thoughtless as blinking when a fly approaches the eye, requires a Herculean effort from both sides: one side to mount convincing propaganda, the other side to open themselves up to being convinced.

  That is what the writers of the Harlem Renaissance faced every time they sat down at their desks. Behind them stood the 10 million African-Americans anxiously awaiting their opportunities at the American Dream; before them stood the 90 million whites wondering what was in it for them if they changed their attitudes. As if writing wasn’t hard enough, each novel, each essay, each poem, each word, carried the hopes of an entire community. Under such circumstances, it was an act of heroism to write anything. But write they did, producing some of the greatest works in American literature.

  Black by Any Other Name

  I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.

  Muhammad ALI

  I used to be Lew Alcindor.

  Now I’m Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The change isn’t just in name. It signifies the change in me from how I perceived myself as a boy who was unwittingly influenced by white perceptions of who I should be—and how I perceived myself as a man who had abandoned those perceptions. I can trace the genealogy of my change in name—and change in heart—directly to the Harlem Renaissance. Writers know how important words are in manipulating an audience. Choose one word and the audience weeps, choose another and they are angered, choose another and they are thoughtful. One of the words that the Harlem Renaissance concerned itself with was what to call black people. Blacks had a long history of being called by words meant to hurt, humiliate, and subjugate. So whatever they chose had to project an image of respectability, capability, and intelligence, not just to whites, but also to blacks who could feel pride in such a word. W. E. B. Du Bois argued in favor of Negro, as long as the word was capitalized. As a result, the Harlem Renaissance promoted what they called the New Negro: an educated, disciplined, talented black person whose example whites would admire and blacks would emulate.

  Richard Moore strongly disagreed. Moore was a respected Harlem Renaissance soapbox orator and civil rights activist, whose beliefs and example led the way for many African-Americans during the civil rights push of the 1960s. He was involved with the Harlem Education Forum, which organized debates and lectures, and the Associated Colored Employees of America, a job opportunity organization. In 1919, he joined the African Blood Brotherhood, a national secret organization that promoted self-defense, race pride, and self-determination for African-Americans. He founded the Afro-American Institute and owned the Frederick Douglass Book Center in Harlem for thirty years. Moore also led the fight to use the term Afro-American. In his popular book, The Name “Negro”: Its Origin and Evil Use (1960), Moore rejects the word Negro because of its sinister origin. He argues that negro can be traced back through Spanish and Latin to the Greek word necro, which means “death.” This connection stems from when the Greeks went to Egypt to study their advanced civilization (including writing, medicine, science, and religion) and mistakenly thought the many temples honoring dead ancestors meant the Egyptians were preoccupied with death. Hence, necro. “So there you have it,” Moore writes, “the negro—a race of dead people with a dead history and no hope for resurrection as long as they remained ignorant of their past. This was a triple death—the death of the mind, body, and spirit of the African people.”

  What’s in a name? Everything.

  Were W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Charles S. Johnson, and some of the other geniuses of the Harlem Renaissance wrong? Was their use of the word Negro compounding the problem of image? Not at all. History is a series of causes and effects. There is no sudden overnight change from Injustice to Justice. Du Bois and the others knew the audience they were addressing and approached them with words that wouldn’t automatically close their minds. And it worked. White people listened, rallied, supported them. Black people from across the country were inspired to achieve more, to walk among whites a little prouder. Du Bois and others made it possible for Moore and others to find another name that more effectively addressed their target audience, for whom the word Negro had lost some of its former power. The time was then right for the next step, for a new name. As Moore said, “The name that you respond to determines the amount of your self-worth. Similarly, the way a group of people collectively responds to a name can have devastating effects on their lives, particularly if they did not choose the name.” So the black community itself debates: black or Black? Afro-American or African-American? People of color or colored? The name selected is less important than the fact that it’s the community itself choosing their own name. Moore emphasized how important it was that black people name themselves because “dogs and slaves are named by their masters; free men name themselves!”

  So, I named myself Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Here’s why.

  When I was still Lew Alcindor, I was influenced by Harlem Renaissance leader Marcus Garvey. Garvey wasn’t one of the in-crowd of the Renaissance; in fact, while Du Bois and Locke were touting the Talented Tenth, Garvey was gathering followers from the working-class blacks who didn’t care about the thinkers and writers and artists who would eventually bring about change; they cared about being treated like human beings right now. The intellectuals of the Renaissance thought Garvey to be something of a clown, with his gaudy marching-band uniforms and elaborate parades and back-to-Africa shipping line. But average black people throughout the United States, the Caribbean, and even Africa felt a surge of pride and hopefulness because of him that they had not felt before.

  Like Garvey, my family was also from the Caribbean. They arrived in New York City from Trinidad in 1917. My dad told me how my grandparents would often discuss Garvey’s ideas at the dinner table. One night while I was in high school, I went to hear Malcolm X speak at the corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. Unfortunately, Malcolm canceled that evening, but the speakers who did show up were from the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement (ANPM). The ANPM, organized by Carlos A. Cooks, were followers of the late Marcus Garvey, who had died in 1940. Their theme for the evening was “Buy Black,” which I found interesting and so decided to stay.

  The orator, Charles Peaker, argued that by patronizing black merchants we would be building a solvent foundation for our children while helping to create employment and independence for all black people. In fact, the preamble to the ANPM Constitution states: “We submit that the Black people of Harlem and all other Homo-geneous African communities, have the same natural and moral right to be clannish in their patronage as all other people ha
ve drama-tised that they are. We advocate as a matter of sound racial economics, the BUY BLACK CAMPAIGN. Patronize the merchants of your own race.”

  Peaker outlined in detail the methods that were used to economically exploit black people. He spoke about the way blacks were the last hired and first fired, and how credit and loans were not available unless the terms were exorbitant. To combat this exploitation, whenever possible black people should patronize black businesses and black landlords and spend their money in the black community. Although the idea was sound in theory, it was hard to practice due to the lack of black business. At the end of the speech, Mr. Peaker heaped praise on Marcus Garvey for being an early advocate of black economic independence. From that night on, I wanted to know more about Marcus Garvey, but I was unable to get any of his published works until Philosophy and Opinions was published in the early or midseventies, when I was in my twenties and playing for the Milwaukee Bucks. Reading his powerful words on the page, I could only imagine the impact he must have had in person.

  I have a vision of the future, and I see before me a picture of a redeemed Africa, with her dotted cities, with her beautiful civilization, with her millions of happy children, going to and fro. Why should I lose hope, why should I give up and take a back place in this age of progress? Remember that you are men, that God created you Lords of this creation. Lift up yourselves, men, take yourselves out of the mire and hitch your hopes to the stars; yes, rise as high as the very stars themselves.

  I have no doubt that Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement was sincere. His entire life was a testament to his commitment to the African-American community. However, Garvey’s program was doomed from the beginning by poor planning and a lack of competent execution. One hindrance was that there was no model for him to emulate in reaching his goals, the problem most pioneers face. It’s always the people who come afterward who benefit by their forbearers’ failures. But Garvey’s visions would have gone a long way to gaining black political and economic power if they could have been executed in a competent fashion. The economic aspect of his plan is something black movements have never fully understood, but which black Americans could still benefit from today. As much as I admired his beliefs and writings, the one area that does not work for me is the attempt to get blacks to leave the United States. Back-to-Africa plans have not worked ever since the time when Liberia was established in 1847. Mostly this is for two reasons: (1) no African country would necessarily want the political or economic destabilization caused by the sudden influx of millions of people with voting privileges and housing and job needs; and (2) there’s a fundamental injustice in people uprooting their lives, even voluntarily, and moving to another country because they can’t secure their human rights in the country where they were born; it’s a form of surrender that seems cowardly.

  Despite this flaw, Garvey’s influence was monumental during the Harlem Renaissance. One person who was affected by Garvey’s teachings was Malcolm X, whose father, Baptist preacher Earl Little, was a member of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. In The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm recalled the price his family paid for supporting Garvey:

  When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night. Surrounding the house, brandishing their shotguns and rifles, they shouted for my father to come out. My mother went to the front door and opened it. Standing where they could see her pregnant condition, she told them that she was alone with her three small children, and that my father was away, preaching in Milwaukee. The Klansmen shouted threats and warnings at her that we had better get out of town because “the good Christian white people” were not going to stand for my father’s “spreading trouble” among the “good” Negroes of Omaha with the “back to Africa” preachings of Marcus Garvey.

  Earl Little moved his family to Michigan, where he continued preaching the gospel of Garvey. This time, reaction was swift and violent: members of the black-robed Black Legion, a part of the KKK, burned the Littles’ home to the ground. As a young man, Malcolm studied Garvey, whose writings helped form the basis for the teachings of the Nation of Islam and even Stokely Carmichael, leader of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Even the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s got its start following the teachings of Garvey. A group of young high school musicians formed the Jazz-Art Society, which they renamed the African Jazz-Art Society in honor of Marcus Garvey. One of their goals was to adapt the teachings of the ANPM lectures into a jazz form that would be more accessible to the average person wary of rhetoric. They launched their first concert on December 24, 1956, appropriately at Small’s Paradise, one of the leading clubs during the Harlem Renaissance. Just as the writers, musicians, artists, and performers of the Harlem Renaissance had used their artistic skills, whether knowingly or unknowingly, to promote the message of racial equality and the promise of the New Negro, so were these originators of the Black Arts Movement carrying on that same tradition.

  Nobody rises alone. We do it on the shoulders—and sometimes the weary backs and broken bodies—of others. Booker T. Washington influenced Marcus Garvey, Garvey influenced Malcolm X, and in turn Malcolm’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) had a profound influence on me. Malcolm embraced Richard Moore’s attitude about the importance of naming ourselves. He advocated that the “so called Negro” be referred to as “Black.” Perhaps a rose by any other name does not smell as sweet—at least to the rose. And when he submitted himself to Islam and renamed himself Malcolm X from Malcolm Little, I also became a Muslim and took a new name for myself: Kareem (“generous”) Abdul (“servant of Allah”) Jabbar (“powerful”).

  Contrary to what some critics thought, the teachings of the Harlem Renaissance had not become diluted with time, they had become even more potent.

  On the Same Page: Harlem

  Writers Who Most Influenced Me

  Got one mind for the white folks see, another mind I know is me.

  blues song that opens Real Cool Killers by CHESTER HIMES

  The thinkers behind the Harlem Renaissance were on a mission. They realized that white America had a biased view of all African-Americans as biologically inferior. They believed that the only way to convince whites that their entrenched opinion was inaccurate was to excel at everything that the conventional white wisdom said blacks couldn’t do. Conventional White Wisdom said blacks weren’t athletic, so blacks went about competing successfully in sports. Conventional White Wisdom said blacks weren’t smart, so they excelled in medicine, law, and business. Conventional White Wisdom said blacks weren’t creative, so they went about creating dynamic art, literature, and theater. Conventional White Wisdom said blacks couldn’t understand the complexities of music, so they originated the blues and jazz and spun white America across the dance floor. The Harlem Renaissance produced so many successful and popular African-Americans that the Conventional White Wisdom took a serious beating.

  As a result of this revolution in image, several black writers became the toast of the literary world. Two of the most famous and respected of the Harlem Renaissance writers, Claude McKay and Jean Toomer, wrote with great intensity and sensitivity about the struggles of being black in the early part of the twentieth century. Yet, they resented being referred to as “Negro writers.” Both wanted to be judged on their merits as writers, not as symbols of a race, forgiven any imperfections as artists because of the righteousness—or faddishness—of their cause. But people want to see you one way, a way that they are familiar and comfortable with. For years after the Emancipation Proclamation, blacks settled for that Conventional White Wisdom image; some even bought into it themselves. If whites thought they weren’t smart, many blacks figured maybe they were right. But when the Harlem Renaissance produced so many examples of successful black writers, artists, intellectuals, musicians, and businesspeople, the rest of black America could for the first time feel as if they were finally being seen. They were no longer i
nvisible, one lump of dark faces, interchangeable.

  It was the writers of the Harlem Renaissance that shone the light on those dark faces hidden in the shadows—that made America see them, feel them, understand them, on both an emotional and intellectual level. They described the hardships and injustices, the successes and accomplishments, with such precision and passion that black America could no longer be ignored. And these skilled writers articulated the fears, frustrations, and hopes with such poetry and power that they armed black Americans with vivid words to express both their dissatisfaction and goals.

  For many people, literature falls somewhere between candy and medicine: a delicious confection easily forgotten or a bitter tonic that must be endured because it’s good for you. The founders of the Harlem Renaissance saw it as a means to a righteous end—propaganda to demonstrate the talents of the New Negro. Many writers bristled under those restraints and sought to tell whatever stories they thought needed telling, regardless of how white people reacted. For me, literature is much more. You remember those adventure movies in which the hero winds up in a dark cave unable to see his way to safety. He’s surrounded by snakes, bears, genetically altered monsters, magical beasts—things with sharp teeth. How will he survive? He somehow creates a makeshift torch from moss and the femur of the last guy caught in the cave, rubs his zipper along the stone wall to create a spark that fires up the torch, and stumbles forward in his tiny aura of light. That’s literature to me. Each story, novel, poem, and play presents a vision of the world that illuminates the dark cave of life we stumble through. We can see better where we’re going, what sudden drop to avoid, where the cool water is running. Several of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance became particular favorites of mine because they helped me find the words I needed to define myself, and they illuminated the path that helped me go where I wanted to go.