Damarius Johnson
Good afternoon, we’re continuing a series of interviews with Picturing Black History. I have with me Dr. Blackman. Dr. Blackman, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about yourself and introduce yourself, your research interests, any professional affiliations you’d like to mention as well.
Dexter Blackman
Great. I’m a history professor, assistant professor of history an African American Studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, an HBCU. Very proud of that. I graduated from an HBCU as an undergrad. I study things like sport and society, Pan-Africanism, the Cold War and civil rights, also the history of the South, so, kind of a traditional social historian. So the essay that I wrote about actually comes from a lot of my manuscript work. My manuscript is about the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which was a Black Power movement to raise awareness of what they called institutionalized racism. Basically, the poverty created in Black communities by racism, there needed to be something done about that. You know, civil rights laws were great, but then how do you come to the socio-economic realization of equality? And so there was further protest movements, and a lot of those protest movements can be termed the Black Power movement.
Damarius Johnson
Absolutely, thank you. Thank you for that introduction. I’m wondering if you could talk a bit about the purposes of studying history. Why it is relevant to us in the present and how it might impact the future?
Dexter Blackman
I think there are probably two things that stand out about studying history. I think that you can really use history to improve people’s critical thinking. I’m a professor who teaches as well. So a lot of my courses, my history courses, focus on improving students’ critical thinking, particularly of society. I think anytime you have a better informed citizenry, right, you basically have a better Republic, or a better state. You want people who are capable of making good decisions, because these are the people who are voting, but also people who are influencing politicians on what to stand for. I certainly think that that matters. Secondly, I think that you can use history just to improve society. I think history provides a number of examples. And if you understand them adequately, then you can just use them to improve society. So I think those are the best two benefits that I can give.
Damarius Johnson
Thank you, absolutely. Just wanted to know if you could talk a little bit about why the lesser known moments of Black history, in particular, is significant in that broader context of what you’ve told us about why history is important.
Dexter Blackman
So I subscribe to this, this argument made by Stokely Carmichael, an activist but also a scholar. If you know Stokely well, that, you know, Black history is a history of resistance. That’s really at the core of Black history. And unfortunately, race and racism are still significant issues in our society. And so, we can learn a lot from my ancestors about, you know, how to survive and how to be successful at combating racism. I think a lot of Black history contains lessons for us that we can benefit from, you know, particularly for those of us who are still trying to do the work of making Black lives matter.
Damarius Johnson
Absolutely, thank you. Thank you, for that context. More specific to your essay, if you can talk a bit about how you chose the photograph, why you decided to tell that story in particular.
Dexter Blackman
That photograph obviously is iconic. Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists at the 1968 games, that photo probably entered my conscious when I was a kid, I was born in the 1970s. And I always wanted to know what those brothers meant. And so, in reading popular literature, you know, it just was a stand-in for Black Power, it was this, you know, stand-in for protests. But, I didn’t know what Black Power meant, you know, I didn’t know exactly what they were protesting. So, that picture kind of motivated me to try to study what exactly were these two guys trying to get across. And what I quickly learned, or what I learned was that they were part of a movement of student athletes and Black students who were trying to raise awareness and attract attention to something. So that photo in itself, just it being iconic attracted my attention. Then my curiosity, and I’ve always had this kind of curiosity about social issues, led me to just research that topic, and I’ve been passionate about it ever since. And, ultimately, like I said, what they would do is try to raise awareness of what they call institutionalized racism – the demeaning poverty that remained in Black communities, even after civil rights laws were passed. When that picture was taken in 1968, that was after the fifth straight year of rioting in Black communities and urban communities in the cities. Some of the most significant riots happened in 1967. And then again, when King was assassinated in April 1968, they protest several months later. And so, what they subscribed to was this argument that the riots meant that Black people and poor people in cities, in particular, were dissatisfied with their conditions, and that the government and the state were not doing enough to rectify those conditions. And so they, instead of rioting, what they did was use an international moment, in particular, a Cold War moment that was benefiting the United States to just attract attention to that concern.
Damarius Johnson
I wanted to know if you could talk a bit about how athletes, in particular Olympic athletes, become representations, typically of their nation, you know, kind of, avatars of a nation. If you could talk about, in this photograph, do you see that these athletes are kind of turning that on its, that notion on his head in the sense that they’re drawing visibility to another cause with, you know, typically, you see kind of it as a proof of American patriotism?
Dexter Blackman
Absolutely. So you have to think of, well, you have to know a kind of history of the Olympics, they were regenerated in the 1890s. And the 1890s, we can call that the age of imperialism. And part of what’s going on is not just that European nations are subjugating other nations, it’s that they’re also competing against one another, right, for the right to subjugate other nations. So for instance, France, England, Germany, Portugal, Spain, they all had empires across the globe, including Africa, and at times, they went to war with one another to control the territories. So you have this competition about imperialism. Because imperialism means money, it means who’s going to control resources in certain places, who’s going to control labor in certain places, who’s going to control markets in certain places. So you have this heavy competition during the Age of imperialism. And that influences the start of the Olympics in the 1890s. The person, Pierre de Corbin, who basically he started, who led the charge for the restart of the Olympics in the 1890s, one of the reasons that he did it was he felt that the French needed to jolt what he called their masculinity, or their manliness, their manhood, right, and one of the ways that they could do that was train year round and compete against other Europeans. This idea of patriotism and international sport, they’re tied together, they always have been since the 1800s. And so very quickly, even though individuals come through their state, and they’re supposed to be individuals when they get to the games, you notice that they wear the colors of their country. So very quickly, they become representations of their countries. The same is true with boxing. By the time you get to the 1870s, the 1880s, boxers are representations of their country’s manliness or their quote, unquote, “manhood”. And so, that’s even heightened when you get to the 1940s with the Cold War, when Russia enters international sport in the early 1950s and the 1952 games, it takes on even more significance for the United States and the West. And there’s an argument to be made, that whoever wins the most medals or the most points in the Olympics, even though it’s an unofficial team score, it’s considered the society with the better system that produces, you know, a better stock of people. This certainly influences what John Carlos and Tommie Smith are doing. There’s a lot of evidence, and I’m working on it in my manuscript, that the federal government COINTELPRO, the FBI, all tried to stop Tommie Smith and John Carlos from even getting to the Olympics. They were part of a larger group called the Olympic Project for Human Rights, and they were trying to orchestrate a boycott that fell through. But even when the boycott was finished, there was an understanding that some Black athletes might use the Olympics as a world stage to protest, and so there was some hinderance to try to prevent that from happening as well. The argument was that if the Black athletes boycotted, then the United States team would perform poorly, the Russians would outscore them, and that would lower the morale of American society. That sounds crazy. But when you understand these ideas of manhood and manliness, and how much they’re attached to patriotism, it absolutely made sense in the 1950s and the 1960s when black athletes first began to protest.
Damarius Johnson
Yes, thank you. Thank you for that context. I know some of your other work, read some of your work before this conversation, just to add context. If you can talk a bit about the influence of Pan-Africanism in the late 60s in terms of inspiring this actions, and also what this visibility signals to a broader, kind of, anti-colonial movements.
Dexter Blackman
So there’s several ways to approach it, but, but the short story is, is that you know, poverty was a consequence of racism, right? If you, if you understand racism in America, what it really did was limit, you know, Blacks’ access to many of the good things that other Americans, particularly white Americans, had access to. Everything from education, to health care, to loans to be able to buy a home or start a business, and essentially, it made the Black community poor. And you had World War Two come along, and you had the great migration of African Americans and people from the Caribbean and other places going to urban America. and actually getting jobs and fair wages for probably one of the first times in American history. But that comes to an end in the 1950s. And in the Black community, you have this kind of recession that begins to set in. And this poverty is renewed all over again. And so one of the things that you see happens this, this kind of anger and frustration, you have this Black, you know, even in places like California, like Oakland and LA, where Black folks are moving in large numbers for the first time, by the mid 1950s, not only are they poor again, and have limited access, they’re actually being repressed. You know, it’s very good literature on how the police began to repress this alien population in California after the 1950s. There’s an anger and frustration there, that leads to an increase in black nationalist sentiment that Black folks need to control their own community because democracy really doesn’t work. And what Pan-Africanism does is that by the time you get to the 1950s, you have these examples of these African and third world countries that are uncompromising in pursuit of their liberation and freedom. You know, the, the extreme examples would be the Mau Mau in Kenya, right, where they take up arms. But you also have in Ghana, a kind of peaceful transition to an end of colonialism, but nevertheless, a persistent want, need, and battle for colonialism. And so what Pan-Africanism begins to do in the 1950s, it begins to affirm a more nationalist Black struggle, right? You will have the pursuit of integration, Martin Luther King Jr. was very wise, he understood that the United States government was the biggest change agent on the face of the earth. So you know, if you were going to have an into say, separate but equal, you needed to have the government on board to enforce the change. But he also understood that that could not be the end of it, something had to be done about poverty in the Black community. So you do have a fight for integration that was needed. But then how do you go about equalizing the access and the conditions across America, particularly for Black people. And so the government seemed very reluctant to do that. In fact, when the nationalist voices began to emerge in the late 1950s, and early 1960s, they were called communists, even though they really weren’t, they were nationalists. Which is not necessarily fully exclusive from Communism, but nevertheless, they were. And so with the Cold War being used to repress, kind of, Black radicals and Black nationalism, Pan-Africanism just kind of reaffirmed it. You know, people like Malcolm X, even Martin Luther King, to a lesser degree, the young activists like Stokely Carmichael, even John Lewis, their heroes were these African nationalists, who argued that they were fighting for independence and self control of the, quote unquote, “African countries away from imperialism”. So I really think that it just reaffirmed the kind of radicalism and self-determination that was occurring in Black communities in the 1950s and the 1960s. And you see a lot of activists beginning to work together with African and third world people. Malcolm X for instance, went to the second annual meeting of the Organization of African Unity, and asked them to condemn Jim Crow in America, and they did, and that embarrassed the United States. Stokely Carmichael went abroad and tried to make alliances with a number of African nationalists and so forth and so on. So I think the big part was it was just very affirming. But I think secondly, you saw some, kind of, political relationships come from it. That’s an old article that I wrote on Pan-Africanism. You must’ve really did some research, because I haven’t posted anything on Pan-Africanism for like, 12 years.
Damarius Johnson
Wow. Yes, yes. Well, you know, I wanted to be prepared. So.
Dexter Blackman
Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Damarius Johnson
I just wanted to shift to a few questions about Black History Month more generally. If you could talk a bit about kind of your earliest memories of Black History Month, your involvement or participation in it.
Dexter Blackman
I think probably my earliest memories of Black History Month are reading Ebony and Jet magazine, which my grandmother subscribed to religiously. Of course, they had their celebrations. I kind of grew up with Black History as a regular occurrence in my, kind of, immediate environment. So it didn’t necessarily take me by storm, but it did make me curious, and it did help me to understand that I think other people didn’t have access to Black History, or a Black view of the world. And so, you know, I grew up in the South, I grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Went to a predominantly Black institution. Schools were probably very mixed until I went to an HBCU in college. So I grew up celebrating it regularly. What it made me aware of is that Black History is missing from most people’s consciousness. But it’s never been missing from mine. And I can’t understand why people don’t pursue it because I find such a joy in it, but I’m an academic, which makes me a strange bird anyway.
Damarius Johnson
Yes, thank you. And I wanted to know if you can talk a bit about from those early moments, if you celebrate the holiday today and you do anything particular to commemorate it? Because I know you’ve indicated it was tenuously engaged in that study. But is there anything in particular about February that you do?
Dexter Blackman
I’m always happy when my students get excited about it, and they invite me to things on campus. Again, I think Black History has a history of resistance. While we do celebrate, I do take it as a moment to remind people that we are still in a struggle. That we should celebrate our survival, but we’re also celebrating our resistance, because if we don’t resist, we will lose even more Black people that we have. I know a lot of people accuse African American history of being feel good. I don’t. Again, I celebrate it as resistance, and a much needed resistance. And just to give you an example, I had a discussion with some colleagues about Trump being elected president. Their kind of solace was that we will survive, we as a group of Black people will survive. And I said, no doubt we will survive, but how many thousands will we lose to these kinds of retrenchment policies that conservatives want to put in place. They kind of didn’t understand what I was talking about. But then the pandemic hit, right, and we saw how just a terrible response we had from the federal government in terms of dealing with the, with the pandemic. And we also combined that with the fact that Black folks generally have a lack of access to health care. So far more people, but also Black people died from the pandemic, than probably necessary or had to die. And so, although we do resist, and we should be happy about that, right, we haven’t resisted enough that we’ve made things equal. And as a result of that, we continue to suffer. So, we’re not only going to celebrate our survival, we’re also going to educate ourselves to continue to resist it more effectively than we have in the past. So I’ll always show up to what my students plan, I always show up to community events, I always show up wherever they asked me to, but I’m not just celebrating. I’m reinvigorating, because, you know, that’s Fred Shuttlesworth, one of my most inspirational mentors, has ever said to me, the struggle has only just begun. And that’s, that’s what I take those moments as an opportunity to remind people that the struggle is still going.
Damarius Johnson
Yes, and I wonder Dr. Blackman, if you could talk a bit about in, in terms of struggle and in resistance, maybe some examples or indication of what folks are imagining or aspiring towards, in terms of what compels folks to resist. When you think about Black History as resistance.
Dexter Blackman
You know, I think everybody has that different moment in their life that leads them to resistance. You know, I was reading the autobiography of Muhammad Ali not too long ago. And Muhammad Ali talks about the poverty that he endured. But then also the day that, you know, his family had a discussion of Emmett Till being killed, and he was the exact same age as Emmett Till. It woke him up and made him realize that those people who treated them poorly, those people who exploited them, wouldn’t just do that, or stop there, they could also kill them. And so he made up his mind that at some point, you know, he would do something to fight racism, to at least lessen the deadly effect that it was having on his family. So I say that to say that I think everybody has that kind of moment, in their particular life. What I think next needs to happen is that, you know, educating folks in resistance, particularly from Black institutions, has to be something that we do regularly. I think, you know, Carter G. Woodson, you know, has been calling for the institutionalization of Black History since the 1920s, but we’re not there. Everybody doesn’t have access to Black History, Black Studies, intelligent Black discussions and debates. And so that’s the next step. If we’re going to educate people in the history of resistance, we kind of have to institutionalize it, right? There is a fortunate development, you have advanced placement just started this, you know, Black Studies AP course, and they’re going to test students on it and they can get college credit for it. So that’s a big step in terms of institutionalizing it. However, I don’t know that Advanced Placement as a corporate company is going to do the kind of resistance history and resistance Black Studies that I think people think is needed. But nevertheless, we know now that schools and public institutions are receptive to it. So perhaps now, you know, other people could come along and institutionalize it as well. That’s what I see. We need to be prepared that when people have that moment, we can capitalize on it and step in and educate them, and we can have serious studies. I think other groups of people have that in their culture. I don’t know why Black people don’t.
Damarius Johnson
Yes. And by way of closing, just the final question in my, kind of, series here. I just wanted to ask in terms of study, if there are figuires, events, uh, moments from Black History, and it could be in the context of, kind of, the 1960s or just, however, wherever that you would direct us to as particularly significant places to start in terms of that ongoing study.
Dexter Blackman
I love the study of social movements, right, but I probably studied them differently. Again, I think we kind of celebrate the Civil Rights Movement, we kind of celebrate the Black women’s movement and things of that nature. That’s fine. I think, I think that we should celebrate the ancestors and their achievements. But I love the study of these social movements, because you often get these kind of great intellectual talks and debates that come out of it. Probably a year or two ago, I discovered a speech by Martin Luther King, and it’s not that it was lost, but I just read it for the first time, a speech by Martin Luther King, where he talked to a group of academics. I forget exactly what it was called, but it was like the American Academy of Social Sciences. And essentially, what he called on them to do was to use their scholarship to make society better, including eliminating racism, and sexism, and other kinds of discriminations. And so I love reading those types of speeches, because they make your mind think and wonder, you know, and question all the things that you love. And so that’s what I would point people’s attention to. You know, just don’t celebrate the fact that there was a Civil Rights Movement, and one of the going achievements was, you know, a voting rights law or a housing law. Those are great things. But I would say get into it and really read the debates, and think about the debates, right? Here’s this group of academics, many of them white, who says that they’re neutral, right, and they just want to, quote unquote, “produce knowledge”, and Martin Luther King says that yeah, you may be neutral, but understand that your knowledge is going to be used to justify something. It’s gonna be used to justify either segregation or integration, right? Or equality or mistreatment of people. And so, it’s not a debate about who’s right and who’s wrong sometimes, it’s about can you understand the whole argument going on there, and its significance in society? And then how does that inform you and how you move forward, right? And so there are a number of different moments where I think you find these, these kinds of great debates, right? You know, Malcolm X versus the United States government, where Malcolm X wants Black people to think of themselves as Africans, when the United States basically tells the NAACP and other groups that your condition in America is separate from the Africans’. You don’t experience racism the way they do. It’s a great debate that Malcolm has with the government, back and forth. Study that. Marcus Garvey, and Marcus Garvey in the 1920s, when, when Black people are really starting to go through it again socio-economically and it makes him angry, and his call for Black folks to join with Africans. I know, I know, he uses that phrase, “back to Africa”, but he’s really talking about making common cause with Africans. And he gets a response from more moderate Black people who basically say, no, we don’t want to go to Africa and join with them, because culturally, and intellectually, they’re not where we are yet, right? We’re in the Western world, and we’re superior. And Garvey goes, no, we need to have a discussion about that. So I love those kinds of debates that go on, you know. James Baldwin, and Nikki Giovanni or James Baldwin and um, and Lorraine Hansberry. They have discussions about the Black family and what’s tearing them apart. And what Black manhood looks like and Black womanhood looks like and how we’re going to deal with sexism. To be a man, even if you’re Black, means to incorporate sexism and is that good for the Black family? Those are the places that I wish people would go and have discussions. You can easily access them, right? I think Black History again, is more than celebratory, I think it’s us looking at it and taking lessons from it. And if you can’t take a lesson from James Baldwin arguing with Lorraine Hansberry, then you’re probably dead because they say some of the most insightful things about the Black family in terms of keeping it together that I’ve ever heard.
Damarius Johnson
Yes, thank you. Thank you. In terms of helping us how to study happiness. Helping us think about how to engage and study Black History and also for educators to teach it.