“They tell us in these eager days that life was joyous to the black slave, wrote E.E.B. DuBois in the Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903. But the truth, said DuBois, could be found in the “Sorrow Songs,” the Negro spirituals: They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world.”
For centuries, black Americans lied to white Americans. It was a matter of simple survival. Slaves did not speak in anger to their masters. Yes, America saw slave rebellions – the most famous was led by Nat Turner in Southampton, Virginia, in 1831. But rage was generally held deep within. So most whites, during the years of slavery and for decades thereafter, believed that blacks were content. “They tell us in these eager days that life was joyous to the black slave,” wrote W.E.B. DuBois in the Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903. But the truth, said DuBois, could be found in the “Sorrow Songs,” the Negro spirituals: “They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world.’
Blacks could not forever hide their anger in spirituals and whispered resentment. In 1940, as the war against Fascism in Europe threatened to engulf America, Richard Wright published Native Son, the story of a black man, Bigger Thomas, who is filled with rancor and rage. After World War II, as black Americans increasingly equated Jim Crow with Nazism and black soldiers who had fought for whites’ freedom abroad were humiliated at home, black anger spilled fully out into the open. Ever since then, whenever African Americans have spoken in public about our experience in this country, anger has been a recurrent and dominant theme.
“There are…as many ways of coping… as there are black men in the world, but no black man can hope ever to be entirely liberated from this internal warfare – rage, dissembling, and contempt having inevitably accompanied his first realization of the power of white men,” wrote James Baldwin in Stranger in the Village in 1953. He returned to the theme in 1955 in Notes of a Native Son. “There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood – one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it,” he wrote.
Black Americans are no longer fuming – or at least, not anything like we once were. The angry black man – Bigger Thomas and his ilk – has become marginalized, irrelevant, passé. In this era, public anger (fringe kooks notwithstanding) rarely has an explicitly racial edge. We are witnessing, in short, a fundamental shift in the nature of the black-white relationship in America, undergirded by a major evolution in some core American assumptions. As white racism has become unacceptable, unremitting black anger has become inappropriate – a huge change from where things stood only a generation or two ago.
As psychologist Linda Anderson observed, fifteen or twenty years ago I think our own ambivalence and anger – built-up rage – really was more prominent than it is now. I think we’re at a place where those of us who are positioned… to make change and acquire wealth, to a certain extent – there’s no time for it. We are working so hard to take advantage of the window of opportunity [created by] being in this culture where we have Obama in place.
In Black Rage (1968), psychiatrists William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs argued that anger was a natural and pervasive reaction to the condition of blacks in America. “Aggression leaps from wounds just four months after Martin Luther King’s assassination. It grows out of oppression and capricious cruelty… People bear all they can and, if required, bear even more. But if they are black in present-day American society they have been asked to shoulder too much. They have had all they can stand. They will be harried no more. Turning from their tormentors, they are filled with rage… We believe that the black masses will rise with a simple and eloquent demand to which new leaders must give tongue. They will say to America simply: GET OFF OUR BACKS!”
In December 1993, Colin Ferguson emptied two clips from a semi-automatic pistol into commuters on a Long Island Rail Road train, killing six people and injuring nineteen others. Notes found in his pocket explained his action as a result of the rage he felt as a black man. A month or so later, I returned from an overseas trip to scores of phone calls from reporters seeking my comments on the bloodbath. To my astonishment, they informed me that Ferguson’s attorney, William Kunstler, had cited me as an authority on his “black rage defense” and urged them to call me. My credential was having recently published the Rage of a Privileged Class. The book had nothing to do with demented gunmen, but it did speak to an anger – rooted in racial slights, lack of respect, and generally shabby treatment – that was rarely voiced but often felt by middle-class black Americans.
Vernon Baker was one such American, though I was not familiar with him when I wrote Rage. At a White House ceremony in January 1997, the former second lieutenant received the Medal of Honor from President Bill Clinton. The award was for heroics during World War II. During an epic battle on a hilltop in northern Italy, Baker took out four nests of enemy soldiers. Of the 1.2 million black soldiers who served in the military during World War II, Baker was the only one to receive the medal while still alive. Six others were honored posthumously at the same ceremony during which Baker received his medal.
Shortly before accepting the honor, Baker, who was living in Idaho, spoke with Washington Post columnist Milton Milloy and confided that the white commander of his segregated unit had fled from the battle, saying that he would return with reinforcements. Instead, he abandoned the black battalion on the hill and told his superiors that the men had been “wiped out.” That commander, reported Milloy, was recommended for the Medal of Honor, while Baker’s unit was written up as “sluggish.”
“That was the story of our lives,” said Baker. “We used to call ourselves the ‘promotion pool’ for white officers.
“The main feeling I had during that time was anger. I was an angry, angry young man,” said Baker. He repeated the sentiment in numerous interviews, including one with a New York Times reporter: “We were all angry. But we had a job to do, and we did it.”
In his 1997 memoir, Lasting Valor, Baker writes scathingly of the military’s disdain for black soldiers, who were considered “too worthless to lead ourselves. The Army decided we needed supervision from white Southerners, as if war was plantation work and fighting Germans was picking cotton.” Elsewhere in the book he observes: “Our commanders made it clear that they considered black soldiers failures, no matter what we did, and that they
For centuries, black Americans lied to white Americans. It was a matter of simple survival. Slaves did not speak in anger to their masters. Yes, America saw slave rebellions – the most famous was led by Nat Turner in Southampton, Virginia, in 1831. But rage was generally held deep within. So most whites, during the years of slavery and for decades thereafter, believed that blacks were content. “They tell us in these eager days that life was joyous to the black slave,” wrote W.E.B. DuBois in the Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903. But the truth, said DuBois, could be found in the “Sorrow Songs,” the Negro spirituals: “They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world.’
Blacks could not forever hide their anger in spirituals and whispered resentment. In 1940, as the war against Fascism in Europe threatened to engulf America, Richard Wright published Native Son, the story of a black man, Bigger Thomas, who is filled with rancor and rage. After World War II, as black Americans increasingly equated Jim Crow with Nazism and black soldiers who had fought for whites’ freedom abroad were humiliated at home, black anger spilled fully out into the open. Ever since then, whenever African Americans have spoken in public about our experience in this country, anger has been a recurrent and dominant theme.
“There are…as many ways of coping…as there are black men in the world, but no black man can hope ever to be entirely liberated from this internal warfare – rage, dissembling, and contempt having inevitably accompanied his first realization of the power of white men,” wrote James Baldwin in “Stranger in the Village” in 1953. He returned to the theme in 1955 in Notes of a Native Son. “There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood – one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it,” he wrote.
Black Americans are no longer fuming – or at least, not anything like we once were. The angry black man – Bigger Tho-mas and his ilk – has become marginalized, irrelevant, passé. In this era, public anger (fringe kooks notwithstanding) rarely has an explicitly racial edge. We are witnessing, in short, a fundamental shift in the nature of the black-white rela-tionship in America, undergirded by a major evolution in some core American assumptions. As white racism has become unacceptable, unremitting black anger has become inappropriate – a huge change from where things stood only a gen-eration or two ago.
As psychologist Linda Anderson observed,
Fifteen or twenty years ago, I think our own ambivalence and anger – built-up rage – really was more prominent than it is now. I think we’re at a place where those of us who are positioned. . . to make change and acquire wealth, to a certain extent – there’s no time for it. We are working so hard to take advantage of the window of opportunity [created by] being in this culture where we have Obama in place.
In Black Rage (1968) psychiatrists William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs argued that anger was a natural and pervasive reaction to the condition of blacks in America. “Aggression leaps from wounds just four months after Martin Luther King’s assassination. It grows out of oppression and capricious cruelty…. People bear all they can and, if required, bear even more. But if they are black in present-day American society they have been asked to shoulder too much. They have had all they can stand. They will be harried no more. Turning from their tormentors, they are filled with rage…. We believe that the black masses will rise with a simple and eloquent demand to which new leaders must give tongue. They will say to America simply: GET OFF OUR BACKS!”
In December 1993, Colin Ferguson emptied two clips from a semiautomatic pistol into commuters on a Long Island Rail-road train, killing six people and injuring nineteen others. Notes found in his pocket explained his action as a result of the rage he felt as a black man. A month or so later, I returned from an overseas trip to scores of phone calls from reporters seeking my comments on the bloodbath. To my astonishment, they informed me that Ferguson’s attorney, William Kun-stler, had cited me as an authority on his “black rage defense” and urged them to call me. My credential was having re-cently published the Rage of a Privileged Class. The book had nothing to do with demented gunmen, but it did speak to an anger – rooted in racial slights, lack of respect, and generally shabby treatment – that was rarely voiced but often felt by middle-class black Americans.
Vernon Baker was one such American, though I was not familiar with him when I wrote Rage. At a White House ceremony in January 1997, the former second lieutenant received the Medal of Honor from President Bill Clinton. The award was for heroics during World War II. During an epic battle on a hilltop in northern Italy, Baker took out four nests of enemy sol-diers. Of the 1.2 million black soldiers who served in the military during World War II, Baker was the only one to receive the medal while still alive. Six others were honored posthumously at the same ceremony during which Baker received his medal.
Shortly before accepting the honor, Baker, who was living in Idaho, spoke with Washington Post columnist Milton Milloy and confided that the white commander of his segregated unit had fled from the battle, saying that he would return with reinforcements. Instead, he abandoned the black battalion on the hill and told his superiors that the men had been “wiped out.” That commander, reported Milloy, was recommended for the Medal of Honor, while Baker’s unit was written up as “sluggish.”
“That was the story of our lives,” said Baker. “we used to call ourselves the ‘promotion pool’ for white officers.
“The main feeling I had during that time was anger. I was an angry, angry young man,” said Baker. He repeated the sen-timent in numerous interviews, including one with a New York Times reporter: “We were all angry. But we had a job to do, and we did it.”
In his 1997 memoir, Lasting Valor, Baker writes scathingly of the military’s disdain for black soldiers, who were considered “too worthless to lead ourselves. The Army decided we needed supervision from white Southerners, as if war was planta-tion work and fighting Germans was picking cotton.” Elsewhere in the book he observes: “Our commanders made it clear that they considered black soldiers failures, no matter what we did, and that they would ensure history reflected that. It was difficult to tell who the biggest racists were—the commanders behind us or the Germans in front of us.”
Baker describes a black sergeant, Napoleon Belk, who reminded him of himself:
Under that dandy figure was an angry black man ready to raise his fists at the smallest slight. Luther Hall, the company first sergeant, had joined me in pulling him aside soon after his arrival and counseling him not to follow his fists to a dis-honorable discharge.
“Maybe you don’t get it,” Belk had challenged me. “Maybe a Wyoming nigger don’t know what a Chicago nigger knows.” I got it. Maybe my introduction (to racism) came later in life than his. Perhaps the sources were different. But still I was a veteran of anger and outrage, and the Army had baptized me like nothing else.
Because black soldiers were routinely denigrated by white commanders, it took decades for them to receive their due. Only in 1994, after commission determined that blacks had been systematically denied recognition, did the military initiate a process to set things right. An Army board subsequently recommended Baker and the others for the highest award a soldier can receive.
When Baker died in 2010 at the age of ninety, the Idaho Statesman reported, “When he received a call telling him he was to receive a Medal of Honor, at first he was astonished, then angry. ‘It was something that I felt should have been done a long time ago…. If I was worthy of receiving the medal in 1945, I should’ve received it then.’”
When Baker received the medal and when he died, the stories did not focus much on his anger. Instead, they celebrated the fact that he had finally been given his due and remarked on his grace, dignity, and lack of bitterness. No one specu-lated on the cost, to Davis and his fellow soldiers, of carrying their largely silent anger for so many years. But Davis’s quiet secret was the norm for men of his age, color, and accomplishments, as it was for many who followed. And that silent anger stemmed almost totally from coming up at a time in America when black people were routinely subjected to the most humiliating forms of disrespect.
The inspiration for Rage came to me during a seminar I had organized for a mixed-race group of newspaper managers. During that session, when the conversation turned to career opportunities, it became clear that the white and black man-agers had a very different take: without exception, the blacks felt that the deck was stacked against them and as a result they were frustrated and angry. I discovered that what was true for those black managers in the newspaper industry was true for blacks throughout corporate America.
Rage was a revelation to many readers. But its central message should not have been a surprise to readers familiar with the thinking of those who had chronicled the African American experience. Writers from Baldwin to Richard Wright to Grier and Cobbs had already laid the foundation for a work that made the point that material comfort and status did not elimi-nate rage if one still felt powerless in the face of discrimination and racist assumptions. And until very recently, that sense of powerlessness was palpable – an inevitable consequence of the conviction, rooted in custom and history, that America was a white man’s country.
Stephen Douglas, who debated and beat Abraham Lincoln in the Illinois Senate contest of 1858, spelled it out during those debates: “This Government was made by our fathers on the white basis…. Made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.” The signers meant “white men, men of European birth and European descent and had no reference either to the negro, the savage Indians, the Fejee, the Malay, or any other inferior and degraded race.”
In “The American Dream and the American Negro,” published in the New York Times Magazine in 1965, Baldwin wrote,
It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of its population is beneath them. Until the moment comes when we, the Americans, are able to accept the fact that my ancestors are both black and white, that on that continent, we are trying to forge a new identity, that we need each other, that I am not a ward of America, I am not an object of missionary charity, I am one of the people who built the country – until this moment comes there is scarcely any hope for the American dream. If the people are denied participation in it, by their very presence they will wreck it. and if that happens, it is a very grave moment for the West.
Well, the people did not wreck the American Dream. Instead, the civil rights movement picked up steam and forced Amer-ica to grapple with, and eventually embrace, the notion of real equality. And now we have arrived at that moment when black hopes, once held in check by the weight of prejudice and discrimination, have begun to soar free and when black rage – corrosive, hidden, yet omnipresent – is ebbing. We have arrived, in short, at a pivotal and defining moment in his-tory, one that has far-ranging implications for virtually every aspect of America’s future – and particularly for the dialogue about social mobility and equality.