As I do every year, I woke up and called him to sing “Happy Birthday.” And as has happened every year since June 17, 2015 — I was kicked in the chest by the realization that my annual, joyful-love celebration of his birth, would forever be linked with the painful deaths of the nine people Dylan Roof murdered in my home town at Mother Emanuel. I was there.
Joyful love and immense pain have always coexisted in the lives of Black folk since our unwilling, in-the-boat “immigration” to these alleged, United States of America (Sullivan’s Island is our Ellis Island).
I heard about the murders that June 17 night on the evening news and almost simultaneously, a call to assemble downtown the next day via text, email and social media immediately went out from my friend, the late Black Lives Matter Charleston activist, Muhiyidin D’baha. We all responded. Arriving at the church and met with the yellow, “Police line do not cross” tape designating a crime scene, my heart just broke — so much so, I’ve not been able to write about it until now.
I remember a CNN reporter sticking a microphone in my face, asking me what I thought about the violence that had been visited upon Mother Emanuel. I told him, “White violence has long been visited upon the neighborhood surrounding the church via gentrification — these deaths are just the culmination of all the efforts to bleach the neighborhood, ridding it of all the Black folk whose lives were inextricably linked to it” (needless to say, that quote was never used). Say their damned names today!:
Cynthia Hurd
Susie Jackson
Ethel Lance
DePayne Middleton Doctor
Clementa Pinckney
Tywanza Sanders
Daniel L. Simmons, Sr.
Sharonda Singleton
Myra Thompson
After I’d moved back home in 2014 because I was homesick after nearly 30 years of moving around with the Navy, the husband and I bought a house in North Charleston because we couldn’t afford to buy downtown where I was born (confirming Mr. James Baldwin’s, “Urban renewal is Negro removal”).
Less than a year after that, Muhiyidin and I began collaborating on Black liberation after the murder of Walter Scott. Remembering our Rivers Avenue, Starbucks meetings where we discussed a Citizen’s Review Board (CRB) for the North Charleston police department (because I’d fought and won that battle before in Key West — and no, Starbucks never f*cked with us whenever we met, and no, the CRB never happened while I was still there), I knew this new generation of Black folk had decided they would NOT be shouldering that “Black Man’s Burden” for another damned day. And let me just say — I was then, and continue to be, so damned proud of them!!
October 16, 2015 was our Rivers High School class reunion. It was at once beautiful and painful, because I had a conversation with Tyrone, the father of Tywanza Sanders. After hugging and holding for what seemed like forever, I leaned back and watched the tears roll down his face as we talked about what had happened at Mother Emanuel four months earlier. I was split wide open, Family. I asked his permission to write about what we’d talked about but he said he couldn’t give it right then for a variety of reasons — I understood.
On Tuesday, February 6, 2018 (I moved back to the “belly of the beast” in 2017 when my first grandchild was born), my cousin, a videographer at one of the local TV stations in Charleston, called me — she wanted me to know that my friend, Muhiyidin, had been shot in New Orleans and had died. He was just 32 (at the time, my oldest son was 36 and my youngest son was 33). He was, and forever will be to me — a passionate and often f*ckin’ exasperating, WARRIOR for Black folk. As I scrolled through our text messages in my phone, and re-read our shared emails — I cried like a damned baby.
I’m tired, Fam — so damned tired of white folks’ fear of retribution leading to the continuation of Black death. Our young folk have the answers and I support them 100% — you should too…
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