No one needed to speak for Malcolm. The media sought him out not only because he was the brother of one of the victims, but because he was an articulate former politician, someone who spoke the truth. After the tragedy, Malcolm and I talked many times, usually after a panel we were both on. We talked about our anger and we talked about our frustration.
“What made me even angrier,” he told me, “was not that my loss or someone else’s loss was any greater, but it was other family members who said two days after the shooting that they forgave this killer. I was just beyond angry that here it is two days after this guy did the most hideous thing in the world, that they forgave this man.”
He understood the media, and therefore he knew that the “forgiveness” sound bite would be transported nationally and across the globe, and people would confuse forgiving the killer with a community coming together, celebrating the lives that were lost and understanding humanity.
He also knew that “turning the other cheek” had a religious element to our older generations. Malcolm understood that families had a right to that response, but it offended him. Recalling conversations he had with his sister about race and justice and discrimination, he says, “Cynthia would have been like ‘No, hell no. We can’t forgive this right here. We got to prosecute this thing. Because what happened at that church was not only a crime against those who were there and those who were killed, that was a crime against a race of people, a crime against humanity and a crime against the Christian church. Those things just cannot be forgiven.’”
Malcolm and I made a connection because he knew I also used my voice to continue telling my father’s tragic story and that of the victims of the Orangeburg Massacre. He knew I understood his point. Malcolm believed he came across sometimes in the moment as an angry black man, but, he says, “Bakari was able to articulate it in such a way that when I saw him on television talking about the incident, then and now, I say ‘Yeah that’s what I meant. That was my point.’”
He believed I understood the complexity of the situation he was struggling with, the anger that bubbled up. And I did understand why he was angry, but I didn’t have any better of a hold on my anger than he did.
I always tell people that President Obama may have had the dreams of his father, but I inherited the anger of mine. And if anyone had earned the right to be angry, I’d always thought, it was certainly my dad. Anytime I got angry as a child, or even as an adult, I would call my father to vent—and he always reminded me that anger, even when justified, is not enough.
It’s never a substitute for a plan.
* * *
My father and I did an interview outside Mother Emanuel with Melissa Harris-Perry for CNN. “I’m thirty and my father is seventy,” I said. “We shouldn’t be sharing the same experiences, burying our loved ones. It’s traumatic and has to change. We must redirect history.”
The shootings traumatized me and angered me, which I think was reflected in my interviews with Al Jazeera America and with Melissa Harris-Perry. I was angry about the situation, angry about where we were, and angry that someone took Clem from his family. The tragedy made me realize that when someone asks about how far black people have come, politically and socially, the answer is, Not fucking far enough—we’re not where we need to be. We are very far away from any mountain top. That doesn’t mean that my dad’s work in the 1960s was in vain, but that the ground plowed then was probably harder than anyone imagined.
Ten days after the shooting at Mother Emanuel, I was interviewed by Martha Raddatz, who was that day hosting ABC’s This Week. I sat outside in front of the church with South Carolina state representative Carl Anderson and Martha. The conversation quickly moved to the Confederate flag.
“Our good friend Clementa Pinckney is going to be lying in state in the rotunda of the state capitol thirty yards away from the Confederate flag as it will fly high and wave in the slightest hint of wind,” I said. “And that banner, that flag, it may not have killed Clementa, but it gave his shooter and others like him a banner under which to justify their actions. And for me, that’s maybe even worse.”
After the interview, I got a cup of coffee, and then I got a private call from CNN asking whether I’d do commentary on race and legal issues for the rest of the year. Humbled, I knew I had an opportunity to fulfill my purpose in life, to be a voice for my community. I am a politician and lawyer, but I became a commentator that day. I began to do hits on the issues I care about, during all times of the day and night, sometimes with Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo, and Alisyn Camerota.
CNN’s international stage allowed me to give Clem’s words power and to present his vision and speak for him and for so many others. An example of that is when I got tapped to be anchor buddies with Don Lemon on the day the Confederate flag came down in South Carolina. We were positioned right where it would be removed from the statehouse grounds.
People always get taken aback when I say it was an act of political courage by then–Governor Haley, who led the effort to take down that flag. And it was her efforts, along with activists like Bree Newsome, that the General Assembly, after a passionate debate, voted to do the right thing and remove the flag from the statehouse grounds. But the real truth is, the day before the Charleston massacre, you would have been a fool to believe that the Confederate flag was ever going to come down. It took nine deaths to remove that flag, but the governor and the rest of my colleagues did the right thing, though others put their heads in the sand. For one, Henry McMaster, my opponent for lieutenant governor, was nowhere to be found.
On the day the flag was to come down, July 10, 2015, people of all races started to converge on the statehouse grounds in Columbia that morning. By 9:30 a.m., thousands of people packed the streets for a ceremony that would take only minutes. I felt proud as I looked over to see my former colleagues, all legislators, line up with their families on the statehouse steps. I appreciated the candid remarks of Senator Larry Martin and Senator Tom Davis, who said they only recently had come to understand how offensive the flag was to so many people.
At 10:08 a.m., state Highway Patrol troopers began lowering the flag, and the large crowd burst with applause and cheers of “USA!”
When the flag came down, Don Lemon and I were right there, just twenty-five yards away. We shed a tear and high fived. Adding a little humor to this serious moment, I quoted the great American poet and rapper Flo Rida: “It’s going down for real.”
I saw the removal of that flag clearly as a moment of civil rights triumph. It wasn’t quite like my dad sitting in a chair near Dr. King and LBJ after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed, but it was still historical. I felt like I could breathe again.
Hate took away nine lives at Mother Emanuel Church but transformed a community and a state. However, it’s infuriating to think that we still have so many issues to deal with in South Carolina. People want me to say the flag is down and so we made it, but from educational woes, to lack of clean water, to women dying at the hands of their domestic abusers, I have much more work to do to change the political culture of South Carolina—because we are not there yet.
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Why Are the Strongest Women in the World Dying?
For black folk, here is our burden. We have to love our neighbors even when they don’t love us, which is such a difficult weight to carry. When we live under these systems of oppression, watching injustices infiltrate our communities, knowing our people are being put upon, spat upon, degraded, we still have to fight back, but we must love those individuals who are part of this system of oppression. You must do it, even when they don’t love you. That is why we cling to our religion because we must have some sense of hope. I think that if we were to substitute that love for hate, then it would simply eat away at us. We would never survive as a group.
If carrying this burden of not being loved by your neighbors requires strong arms, no one carries the weight like black women.
First, let’s define strength. When I try to break
down what a strong woman looks like, I think of my great aunt Jennie Marie Sellers, the matriarch of our family. Born in the early part of the twentieth century, she was an educator at Voorhees College, trained in the Booker T. Washington school of philosophy and instructed in the idea of elevating self through hard work, farming, and craft. She taught men how to use their hands to make a living and women how to be dieticians and caretakers.
Resourceful and a brilliant cook, she used the “goober,” a boiled peanut and an African culinary staple, in everything from cheesecakes to oyster soup. In South Carolina, if something is unbelievably delicious, we say, “So good you wanna slap you mamma.” Her mamma-slapping sweet potato and her coconut pies were always seductively waiting on the window ledges, so that the waft of nutmeg and vanilla hit you before you even walked in the door.
Aunt Jennie always sat in the front row at church. She dressed to the nines, wearing a big hat and enough perfume that when you hugged her you would smell like Chanel the rest of the day. She was fiercely independent, still driving a car in her late eighties and early nineties. I remember my father having to go over to her home and have “the talk” with her, the talk that should have happened many years earlier because she wasn’t able to see after dark and was bumping into everything.
When I think of my aunts Jennie and Florence (the Aunt Florence who taught me how to shave), I think of dignity, pride, and self-care. They were never afraid to watch over you, whether it was saying a prayer in church or holding you when you cried. My father often observed that in the civil rights movement, for him, it was Emmett Till’s mother who was the change maker, the brave one, showing the world what bigotry and hate looked like with the open casket that held the brutalized body of her son.
My father was very conscious in teaching me about strong individuals who may not get all of the notoriety but who are the backbone of a movement. The women in the civil rights movement were the ones making things happen. For instance, activists had to go through a women’s board at a church if they wanted to persuade a (male) minister to galvanize the masses.
Fannie Lou Hamer, a middle-aged sharecropper from Mississippi, didn’t look like the brilliant strategist that she was. Although she was severely beaten with other activists while traveling through Mississippi in 1963, she remained a thorn in the side of the power structure. In fact, her widely broadcast speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City scared President Lyndon Johnson so much that he interrupted it. His actions only raised her profile as a major powerbroker in the fight for voters’ and women’s rights.
There would not be a Hillary Clinton or a Barack Obama if it were not for the bravery of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, who ran for president in 1972 under the slogan “Unbought and Unbossed.” Yet during that run she watched women and old-line black Americans abandon her because they never believed she could succeed.
I think about such women, these treasures in our lives, our North Stars. They are the strength of our communities; they feed you when you need sustenance, and they hold you when you cry. God knows I cry enough.
* * *
As I write this, I think about my own sister, who recently stayed with me and kept me strong as my wife Ellen was near death shortly after our twins were born. I think about how months earlier Ellen, determined to have our babies, calmly prepared me for hard times that surely would come.
The Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston famously described black women as “the mules of the world.” Speaking through her character Janie Crawford, the protagonist in her classic 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston was not insulting black women by any means but planting a kiss on the collective foreheads of her fellow sisters. The mule is “worked tuh death” and “had his disposition ruint wid mistreatment” and yet was able to carry immeasurable loads—like the black woman.
Black women never had true allies. White women sacrificed and fought hard in the civil rights movement too, but they were just a handful. Black women have also fought against the oppression of black men, but where are the black men in the fight for black women?
After fifty-some odd years, the country is finally starting to understand that African American women dictate the possibilities of who our elected officials are or who they can be. What we witnessed in 2016 is that more than 95 percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton, who could have been the first female president, but 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump, someone who clearly doesn’t stand for women’s rights. I don’t have the audacity to know why that is; in fact, I wouldn’t dare make assumptions. But I will say that black women always vote in their own interests where other groups may not. They hold people accountable, whereas other groups do not. They are the reason we achieved civil rights, and the reason we were able to elect Barack Obama.
Black women help put white men in office too, like Alabama’s Doug Jones, but the favor is rarely reciprocated.
The Benefit of Their Humanity
Despite the importance of these women, no one seems to care about their health concerns. We have lofty conversations about Medicare for All, universal health care, and the Affordable Care Act, but nobody is ensuring that black women have access to physicians who understand them.
The maternal morbidity rate in the United States has been rising. According to a 2015 editorial from the World Health Organization, between 1990 and 2013 that rate more than doubled, moving from twelve to twenty-eight maternal deaths per one hundred thousand births. And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, black women are three to four times more likely than white women to die of pregnancy- or delivery-related complications in this country.
There could be many reasons why black mothers are dying at such high rates in the most powerful country in the world, such as previous lack of medical care and poverty for some. But what can’t always be explained is why black women with access to good health care are still dying at higher rates from pregnancy- and childbirth-related difficulties. In fact, per the CDC, college-educated black women are more likely to die during childbirth or pregnancy than non-college-educated women of any other race. Could obesity be a factor? Black women who are an “average” size are more likely to die during childbirth or while pregnant than women of other races who are obese. What about the communities they live in? Could that be a factor? But black women living in the wealthiest communities are more likely to die in childbirth than poor women of any other race. So, what’s going on?
Growing research is showing that doctors don’t perceive a black woman’s pain the same as a white woman’s pain. In too many cases, a black woman’s pregnancy complications are just not completely addressed.
In February 2019, Virginia governor Ralph Northam resisted resigning his position after a 1984 yearbook photo allegedly showed him wearing blackface and standing next to a person in a Ku Klux Klan robe. A day after admitting the photo was of him, he denied it and then said, oddly, that he had worn black face to imitate Michael Jackson. What was especially traumatizing for me and many African Americans is that Northam is a physician, and the photograph appeared in his medical school yearbook.
Jake Tapper at CNN asked me to be part of a panel to discuss all of this. I said we need to set a standard whereby racism is not tolerated, but I thought people were missing the point. Northam is a medical doctor. “We talk about systemic racism all the time,” I said, “but the fact that you have doctors dressed up in black face—how do you think they are caring for African Americans in their care when they do not even look at African Americans or give them the benefit of their humanity? This is why racism is pervasive and why we have disparities in health care. This is a larger issue than Governor Northam.”
Sadie and Stokely
January 7, 2019. My wife, Ellen, is on the edge of death.
Postpartum bleeding is the number one reason why women across the world die during and after childbirth. And it’s the reason why Ellen was hanging on for dear life after giving bi
rth to our twins.
We arrived at the hospital at 3 p.m. Our son Stokely, of course named after my “uncle” Stokely Carmichael, was born at 5:28 p.m. Sadie was born at 5:32 p.m.
By 11:15 p.m., Ellen was nonresponsive.
I was handed two tiny babies while my wife was dying. It was just me and the babies for three hours.
That day started off busy and exciting, but there was a feeling of anxiety in the air. Still, everything had been planned to perfection. We knew the genders of the babies, we had their names picked out, but a few things still made us nervous. Our daughter would be named Sadie, after Ellen’s great aunt who never had grandchildren. Ellen and I were very well aware of the high mortality rate of pregnant black women, regardless of socioeconomic status, which led Ellen to switch her OB/GYN team to a group of black female physicians who looked like her and would understand and respect her concerns.
Despite all the preparation, nothing went as designed. We sent text messages that everyone coming to see the babies should get flu shots, though Ellen’s large loving family didn’t all follow through. My sister, who has two small children, called to tell me my father was pacing back and forth in her house. He wanted to come down and have a talk with us before the birth. We were not going to deny him that, but we had errands to run, things to do. Ellen wanted to have her lashes done, a ritual for most women I know. I needed to go to the gym. Kai, my thirteen-year-old stepdaughter, was at school.
I called my sister Nosizwe to ensure she’d be in the room with us when Ellen went under anesthesia (she was scheduled to have a C-section), but she didn’t have the heart to tell me that she didn’t have the authority to be in the delivery room with us just because she was a doctor. She’d be sitting in the lobby like everyone else.
However, after how everything turned out, she wondered whether I had sensed something that no one else had.
My Vanishing Country Page 15