Two Different Directions, Never the twain shall meet?
We have all heard of Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride. Revere’s ride was iconized by the Longfellow poem self-titled as “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Some historical listings of the other Midnight Riders have no mention of Wentworth Cheswell, the son of a former slave Hopestill Cheswell. His mother was a white woman named Katherine Keniston. Paul Revere Rode west, and Wentworth Cheswell rode north. They took two different paths. One became a beloved figure in American folklore, and the other became another Black hidden figure.
“Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”
The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders
The white man goes west, and the black man goes north, never to be heard of again and ‘Never the twain shall meet’.
In 1967, as a result of the racial unrest across the country, The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders was established. The report is best known as the Kerner Commission Report, named after Governor Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois.
Guess what America, we are here. The Kerner Report spoke of an increasing divide. One of the report’s critical components of the division would come from demographic geography. In essence, the report identified that many cities would become majority Black and surrounding (ring) suburbs would be majority white. The list below highlights the current majority African American cities of over 100,000 people.
Places with over 100,000 people
- Atlanta (54.0%)
- Augusta (54.7%)
- Baltimore (64.3%)
- Baton Rouge (50.2%)
- Birmingham (73.5%)
- Cleveland (54.3%)
- Detroit (82.70%)
- Flint (56.6%)
- Jackson, Mississippi (79.40%)
- Memphis (61.4%)
- Miami Gardens, Florida (76.3%)
- Montgomery (56.6%)
- New Orleans (60.2%)
- Newark (53.5%)
- Portsmouth (50.6%)
- Richmond, Virginia (57.2%)
- Savannah (55.0%)
- Shreveport (50.8%)
- St. Louis (51.2%)
Many of the cities on this list are some of the poorest and least educated. Cleveland and Detroit lead the nation in population loss. Other cities above, are also on the list, not to mention Flint, Michigan, with its Water crisis.
Decades after the Kerner Commission Report, Two Americas could not be more pronounced. Whether law enforcement, criminal justice, mass incarceration (Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow“), racial health, and wealth disparities. The racial wealth gap hovers over America as a ghost from the past and harbinger of the future from the foundations of chattel slavery of Africans through the transatlantic slave trade, along with indigenous subjugation and Genocide.
“The two dominant non-European populations, Indigenous and Africans, were subjected to various coercive forms of labor that would be distinct from the experience of indentured European servants,” said Muhammad, who is also the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. “And as such, racism became an economic imperative to harness land and labor for the purpose of wealth creation, and that did not change in any substantial way until really about the 1960s.” https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/06/racial-wealth-gap-may-be-a-key-to-other-inequities/
The two societies articulated in the Kerner Commission Report are, divided by the same bewitchment that moved a nation to implode into Civil War. The shadow mission of the American story of meandering racism, white supremacy, and nativism has historically found safe harbor in the hearts and minds of both of the major political parties throughout different times in history.
One went North, and the other went West. and “Never the twain shall meet?” The question remains, can Two Americas ever merge into one? The only hope is for sober and grounded Americans from all sides of the ethnic divide to coalesce. This bridging happens by marginalized communities of color and their allies finding refined ways of speaking truth to power. The refinement must be threefold; Legislative, Economic, and Spiritual. Unity appears as the Powerful reconcile to the fact that power for power’s sake alone accomplishes nothing more than mutually assured destruction, therefore ending that power.
Kevin Robinson Executive Director of Accord1 and
Founder of Three-Fifths Magazine threefifths.online
accord1 