Hell First
"He ... traveled the earth like history and its biographer. He reported, criticized, made beautiful, analyzed, cajoled, lyricized, attacked, sang, made us think, made us better, made us consciously human." — Amiri Baraka
"He" — the great writer James Baldwin — was forced to travel the earth in large part because American racism dealt so harshly with him. Like many African-American artists before him, Baldwin felt the need to take the vastness of his literary talents to France. Fortunately, Jim Crow America did not stifle his literary mission.
Baldwin's works, which are as prolific as they are compelling, continue to inspire and deeply move people all over the world. He wrote a long list of soul-stirring novels, including Go Tell It On The Mountain, Giovanni's Room, and Another Country, as well as endless streams of essays such as "Notes of a Native Son" and "The Fire Next Time".
According to Africana, the Encyclopedia of African and African-American Experience, Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924. Shortly after his out-of-wedlock birth, his mother married David Baldwin, a factory worker and Pentecostal minister. Baldwin was raised in their home along with seven younger half-siblings.
Nowhere in the encyclopaedia do I find even a hint of Baldwin's homosexuality. In my opinion, that is as it should be. When theatre patrons went to see his plays on, or off, Broadway — The Amen Corner or Blues for Mr Charlie — I suspect that few, if any, cared about his sexual orientation.
In a recent article entitled "In denouncing gays, black ministers align with bigots who oppressed them", Earl Ofari Hutchinson, the author of The Disappearance of Black Leadership, reports, "In an 'open letter' a group of Los Angeles ministers demanded that California's black state legislators oppose four bills they brand a 'homosexual agenda'."
Hutchinson points out, "The bills were nothing of the sort. Three merely mandated that public schools develop and promote materials teaching tolerance among all groups. But the fact that the bills described discrimination based on sexual orientation as unacceptable raised the ministers' hackles."
This is a growing trend these days among some "prominent black ministers". They seem hell-bent on proving themselves to be as bigoted as Hitlerites toward homosexuals, in particular, and blacks in general.
If we change the phrase "prominent Black ministers" in their open letter to legislators to "Ku Klux Klan", the motive of that California group of ministers would be easier to understand.
Hutchinson wonders, "how blacks — who have suffered as much as any group from bigots and hatemongers — could look and sound so much like those same bigots and hatemongers?"
Good question! I have been asking it for years, especially as it relates to young black rappers, many of whom use racist and misogynic lyrics that would make an Aryan sailor blush.
I do not mean to promote or criticise homosexuality here, on the contrary, what I am promoting is tolerance.
African-American ministers, and the laypeople who kowtow to them, who cloak themselves in the self-righteous vestments of pseudo-piety with the self-serving intention of using the spiritual force of religion to bully those who do not share their myopic views, are, in my opinion, little more than head-scratching, feet-shuffling lackies who promote the very same racist and sexist concepts that embody the evils of so-called "white supremacy".
I applaud Earl Ofari Hutchinson for having the courage to openly attack them.
My hope is that those California ministers in question represent only a minority of African-American communities. To the religious majority, I address the following plea:
Please be more vocal regarding the intra-cultural prejudice, misogyny and bigotry routinely being practised by an extremely vocal minority. For if they grow, unchecked, those future James Baldwins of our communities — in order to have their budding literary voices heard — will have to die and go to hell first.
BY BRANDON ASTOR JONES
[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He welcomes letters commenting on his columns (include your name and full return address on the envelope, or prison authorities may refuse to deliver it). He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G3-77, Georgia Diagnostic & Classification Prison, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA, or email <BrandonAstorJones@hotmail.com>. You can visit the author's web site at <http://www.BrandonAstorJones.com>. He is seeking a publisher for his autobiography, Growing Down. Please notify him of any possible leads.]