Where did

Where did

black pride go?

It wasn't that long ago that black pride was evident everywhere black people lived, worked or played. It was read about, songs were sung about it, poems were written about it and expressions of it were commonplace in the black community.

Unity of purpose solidified the local ideas for the enrichment and betterment for quality-of-life issues that the black community was denied because of segregation and discrimination.

Black religious leaders of different beliefs, within the black community, joined in an alliance that perpetuated the ideals of moral servitude; they crossed the borders that had separated them in the past from becoming a unified people with a common bond — the belief in black pride. While there are many, the likes of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party come to mind as movers and shakers in the black community, at the moment.

Like so much of black history, black pride has become a thing of the past, as though, the song "say it loud I'm Black and I'm Proud" never was sung. Does the suppression of black history play a vital role in black achievement in mainstream America? Is Black History Month the sum total of history of a people that have been part of America since its inception as we know it today?

Did political ideology replace "black pride" with "multiculturalism pride" or with the "pride" of other movements, as if they could "feel your pain"?

Today, Black America is for the most part shackled to a political ideology that keeps it poor, illiterate and segregated.

Gone are the days of self-determination, which produced better-educated black people who lifted themselves out of poverty faster than after the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Black pride, where and when did it go, if it existed at all?

"We do not live in the past, but the past in us." (U. B. Phillips)


New Bedford