HAVE BLACK LIVES EVER MATTERED?

       An Introduction

      Does the title of this work seem provocative? If so, then good. That’s how it’s intended to be. For if the question is provocative, then what of the answer? Is not the answer, no matter how damning, far more provocative? And yet, who dares answer in any way other than the negative?

      There is an old axiom, especially among journalists and journalism professors, that “today’s newspapers are the first draft of history.” Like most axioms, they hold a kernel of truth, but there is more.

      Here is another axiom: “History is written by the victors.”

      The words printed here were not written by a victor, but by one who has seen and sensed what was happening on the other side of a prison wall, who seeks to convey those impressions with truth, and who has often done so several times a week.

      In a sense, the impressions recorded in the pages ahead are a form of history—Black history—recorded during a particular passage of time. During this particular period we experienced the greatest economic disaster since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the cultural dominance of hip-hop, the nation’s fever over mass incarceration, the Obama presidency, the spread of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the unexpected onset of the Donald J. Trump era.

      True history—what Howard Zinn called “the people’s history”—is the one that ordinary people create through their everyday struggles. And yet for Blacks, much that never makes it to the newspapers—or, if so, only in a distorted form—still leaves scars in the mind, evidence of traumas sustained from simply existing as a Black person in the United States of America.

      The pages ahead reflect the people’s struggles in the invisible sectors of American society, sectors which, by a terrible necessity, are populated largely by Blacks, Latinos, immigrants, the incarcerated, and those with little income. The pages ahead are also, by equal necessity, reflections of insurgent, emergent, radical, and revolutionary aspiration, thinking, and living. For from oppression comes solidarity, resistance, rebellion, and change.

      National movements like Black Lives Matter are manifestations of such solidarity and resistance, and give voice to the eruption of outrage, angst, hopes, and insurgent protest provoked by each new killing. That such a movement was brought into being by three young women of color—Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza—is telling, for throughout American history we have seen how the dedicated efforts of women of color have driven resistance networks and liberation movements. These determined sisters have both studied history and altered it, and continue to do so today.

      The American nation-states began with Europeans brutally dominating and enslaving indigenous people. The lands seized in the “New World” were worked by so-called “Indians,” people whose lives did not matter to the white Europeans who, quite literally, worked the locals to death.

      In his chilling portrait of the “American Holocaust,” historian David E. Stannard quotes from the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Franciscan friar who accompanied Christopher Columbus on his trek to “the Indies”:

      Caring only for short-term material wealth that could be wrenched up from the earth, the Spanish overlords on Hispaniola removed their slaves to unfamiliar locales—“the roads to the mines were like anthills,” Las Casas recalled—deprived them of food, and forced them to work until they dropped. At the mines and fields in which they labored, the Indians were herded together under the supervision of Spanish overseers, known as mineros in the mines and estancieros on the plantations, who “treated the Indians with such rigor and inhumanity that they seemed the very ministers of Hell, driving them day and night with beatings, kicks, lashes and blows and calling them no sweeter names than dogs.”¹

      So savage was the violence that the Europeans waged against the people of the indigenous nations, that before a century passed, approximately 60 to 80 million Native Americans had been killed.²

      Indian lives simply did not matter to whites who arrived on their shores; what mattered to them was getting free land and cheap labor. By 1502 the Spanish were importing shackled Africans to replace the Indian communities they had brutally decimated with abuse and disease. By 1619, the first Black laborers, known as indentured servants, arrived aboard Dutch ships at Jamestown, Virginia, an early English settlement. By 1650, the norm for Black people in the growing colonies would be a lifetime of enslavement.

      For the next 200 years, Black lives mattered as little to whites as had those of the indigenous. From 1619 to the early 1800s, some 100 million people were transported in filth and chains from Africa to the Americas, with a relatively small number,