Cliff Harrington, an African American journalist and editor, grew up during a time when strong factions of proud black men were respected, admired, and loved. Even though the black men around him were not perfect, Harrington eventually grew to understand their thought processes and behaviors. In Just Tell the Truth, Harrington provides an insider's glimpse into the history of the African American men who set high standards, worked hard, and mentored a younger generation. In a time when attending church was required, lying was prohibited, and respect for others was expected, black men knew unequivocally who they were and did not care how the world-particularly white America-perceived them. As Harrington narrates the fascinating history of the men who were smart enough to know they could not change the world but were determined to teach a younger generation valuable life lessons, he shares captivating insight into the daily lives of African American males who intensely believed that all who followed them would live a better life. Just Tell the Truth shares one man's compelling observations about a time when African American men were strong and wise leaders in their homes, neighborhoods, and across the nation.

Just Tell the Truth

A Narrative History of Black Men Told From The InsideBy Cliff Harrington

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Cliff Harrington
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-0949-7

Contents

A view from the inside...........................1The enduring struggle............................14A story with consequences........................32The psychology of dominance......................40A story you can count on.........................48The Depth of the Conflict........................58The myth of 'Acting White'.......................71Understanding and reclaiming.....................77

Chapter One

A view from the inside

I, Cliff Harrington, am in a strategic position to write this book about black men.

I am one.

I also am from the generation who grew in a time when there existed a strong faction of proud Black men who, at least in their communities, were respected.

My generation also knows that most black men are not the societal predators who, for decades, have been highlighted in newspapers, television and on radio.

I'm also a member of the print media. I've worked in newsrooms since 1977. I've been a reporter who gathered facts, and I've been an editor deciding what's covered, how it's written and where it plays in the newspaper. So I understand how the media can, and does, strongly impact the images buried in the public psyche.

Truth is that, in most cases, important information is born in newspaper newsrooms. Newspapers generally have had larger staffs and more skilled fact-finding abilities. While television and radio have, at least until the age of the internet, dominated the moment-to-moment news production, newspapers dominated investigations and deeper, quality reporting.

The phrase "strongly-impact" in an earlier reference is not necessarily a bad thing, or an indictment. In many cases, to most accurately tell a story, facts must be handled in a way that sets proper context and assigns appropriate weight to various facts.

That manipulation becomes negative when facts are maliciously or, through ignorance or conspiracy, used to move an audience away from the truth.

The media gives us facts and context to help readers determine what, or who, is good and what, or who, is bad.

In my career, I've sat in countless news meetings focusing on coverage of topics from racism to horse shows, and often I've inwardly struggled with discussions in which I was engaged. As a black man I've known and been proud of the culture in which I grew up. As an editor, I've known that my background was not familiar. I knew it was not lesser in value, just different.

I learned to live in two social realities to succeed professionally.

I was raised by a black man who stayed married to one wife, was dedicated to one family, worked hard and maintained his dignity in a world that said he couldn't. I grew up in a community where black men, the majority of whom worked hard, adhered to the tenets of Christian faith, respected women and demanded that we, as young men, adopt the approach that had sustained them.

It's not my aim here to devalue the role and history of black women. There have always been strong black women (read the biography of Ida B. Wells or, in a more recent era, Oprah Winfrey). In fact, black women proved to be more resilient than black men from the 1950s to the 1990s. Many black men in that period surrendered to ignorance, thereby helping society cast them in a role that should never have been theirs.

I also should state that this book did not adhere to the strict dictates of academic research. There is much of this work that can be substantiated through existing literature. And it is.

However, there are elements that can only be explained by one who lived among this group of black men, cam to understand them, their thought processes and behaviours, and subsequently came to love and respect them.

I did, and do to this day.

Now is the time that this truth can be told: There have always been good, strong, honourable black men.

The popular belief that black men would one day become extinct is a hysterical cry by those who know only what much of American society has propagated for the past century and a half. And during that period, many in society ignored the strong, honourable, wise black men.

Consider what James Baldwin wrote in 1963 to his nephew, James, in the book "The Fire Next Time:"

It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity.. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest since Homer. One of them said, 'The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.

There was truth in Baldwin's words then and now.

I know.

I learned from black men who set high standards, and I remembered my lessons.

The black men I grew up around weren't perfect.

There were drunkards and scoundrels. But the stronger black men held enough impact in my neighborhood that the scoundrels both respected and feared the honourable black Men.

They were tough.

As a boy, I thought they were a bit mean. And often when my father went somewhere, I was with him. And I ultimately was around what I thought were a group of grumpy, boring old men.

They fixed things and shared knowledge about their skills. They worked hard, mostly as farmers, mechanics and builders. They believed, and taught the younger boys, that to be valued one must do work that leads to tangible results.

Their productivity sustained their family, so nothing made them waver from their work.

And the hard work sustained them. Many were physically fit well into the age of 70 or older. And medical care was not an option.

You didn't disrespect them because they were physically strong, many no more than two generations removed from the brutality of slavery, peonage and Jim Crow. So, they'd whip you if you did wrong. That's how they had been dealt with. At that time, I thought they were fully capable of killing.

Looking back, I now can see they had a gentle side, and frequently they were teaching us strength and self-discipline when they seemed harsh. They knew what my generation of black men would need to know, if we were to succeed.

You couldn't lie – and get caught. That was an automatic whipping.

You had to acknowledge them when they talked. That meant talking back respectfully, looking them in the eye.

You respected their homes. Many of the men didn't allow you to enter their home if you were drunk; and you didn't use bad language in front of women and children.

I can remember groups of teenage boys walking the rural road in the late evening where I grew up in North Carolina. We could hear them talking a quarter-mile away, but as they approached the yard when my parents were present, the tone and language became increasingly tame.

Attending church was required.

You might not participate after you got there, but you had to go. Black men ran, and in many cases still run, the church. Even today I marvel at how well-organized churches are, how they've endured, and how efficient they were with the money.

You learned to respect God first, then the authority of those men. They had their own ideas of justice.

When I was about eight years old, my dad caught a group of teenage boys outside our barn late one night. They all were from the neighborhood. He heard the noise, went out and confronted them, unarmed. I remember he told them to be back at our house the next morning ... And I remember they all came back. I always wondered why they came back and what would have happened if they hadn't. My dad knew their parents, but, to my knowledge, he never told. They showed up, my dad gave them a stern lecture and sent them home. I still know and see many of those boys, now men. They weren't thugs or gangbangers. They were mischievous boys, but they understood and respected authority.

The justice system we know today would never have afforded them such mercy. They would have been hauled away in handcuffs and processed through what we accept as a criminal justice system.

Most of those strong black men from my neighborhood have died. And my old neighborhood, like many older predominantly African American neighborhoods, has been decimated by the drug culture and poverty due to the lack of jobs.

So the link between those men gets weaker each year. And as it has weakened, many in my generation have lost their identity.

The black men I grew up watching knew unequivocally who they were. And they didn't care how the world, particularly white America, perceived them.

They weren't fancy. I thought they were plain and unimaginative. Truth is they were so proud of their independence, that no amount of glamour or spotlight could make them change.

Yet, they understood the South, where slavery and peonage had dominated and racism still was as obvious as the grit and grease and dirt under their fingernails.

That grit and grease and dirt was there because of hard, honest work. The racism existed because of hard, selfish hearts.

To this day much of white America, and a good bit of black America, under values these older African American men.

And the men, themselves, are too proud to care.

If you want to see them, you must go where they are.

Though few in number, some still can be found. Just look for church leaders, teachers and principals, mechanics, doormen, and a host of other nonglamorus labourers.

The men I'm writing about were smart enough to know they couldn't change the world. They had lived through violence and difficult times, much of the violence aimed directly at them. So, they tried to teach my generation what they knew, give us their ethics of discipline and hard work, and hoped my generation would be the one that made this country different.

The way those men were perceived, and depicted in the media of the mid 60s, created a conflict for many young men of my generation. We were part of them and we knew they weren't all idiots, thugs, thieves and infidels.

Yet, we were so strongly attracted to riches, glamour and power, that many in my generation gave up the principles and conformed to a world that was less moral, poorly disciplined and consumed by making money.

The black men of my childhood did not abide debt and loans. You'll read more about that later. Those men lived within their means. That meant no one was rich. To some degree most were poor, but they had pride in what they owned.

I dare say Bernard Madoff would never have succeeded in taking their money. Those black men didn't have MBAs, but they held everyone accountable when it came to money. If they had been in positions of authority, the recession of 2008-09 would have been less likely because both lenders and borrowers would have been periodically required to give an account of how they were doing business.

It's ironic now that our first black President, Barak Obama, is being criticized for demanding accountability. Wise black men have long demanded it. Their demand for accountability was one of the traits that made them appear toughest.

My generation of black men grew up believing we would live a better life. And we do. And, many of us were able to hold to the lessons we were taught, even though it has put us in conflict with a world where those tenets didn't bring quick wealth and success.

We learned to survive in a white-male controlled world that defined us by their standards. The price we paid was that we redefined success, and the values of those old black men got watered down or washed away.

When people talk about "old school" black men now, they frequently are referring to the generation who grew up during the 1960s and '70s. They've forgotten there were times before that when black men were strong, wise and leaders in their home, neighborhood and across the nation.

That makes it even more ironic that successful black men have come full circle back to the values of the old black men who we, as young men, all too readily cast as out of step and irrelevant.

One of the men in the neighbourhood where I grew up was a builder. He built houses, built the church I attended until I left for college, and did other construction for people of all races. He was respected for his skilled work. He also was a Bible scholar.

Now, this may not seem exceptional until you know that he frequently made a point of telling us he had "a second grade education."

He wasn't bragging; He was exhorting us to get a better education. His theological knowledge was independent. I assume he got other knowledge while serving in the U.S. Army.

Still, he could quote scripture word-for-word. Sometimes we would have what we called "Missionary circle meeting" at various neighbourhood homes. He would lead. He would sit in one area of the room with no Bible. Direct us to turn to a scripture and read. Then before we could read, he would tell us what it said. And to my knowledge, he was never wrong. He was respected by everyone. He's no longer alive, but his teachings live on in all who spent time with him.

That includes me.

There is a Biblical parallel for the journey of many black men in America since the late 1950s. Read the books of Deuteronmy and Johsua. The children of Israel wandered 40 years in the wilderness.

Can you imagine being lost that long? Can you imagine walking in the same region, never realizing you're repeating the route to nowhere?

That's what many black men in America have done. We turned our backs on the principles of faith, due diligence and hard work. Many have forgotten, and some have lived their lives never knowing, that those principles sustained our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers through slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, desegregation and even our modern era of corporate corruption, greed, self-indulgence and dishonesty.

Society has for nearly a century, spewed a pernicious venom about black men.

It's been published in print and broadcast on television and radio. In some cases, black journalists and leaders have done more to support the venom than raise voices of truth.

I frequently recall a phrase from my boyhood: "just tell the truth." You would hear that phrase when someone wanted to give voice to a point that may not have been particularly pleasant to listeners, or a point that had been conscientiously ignored. Well, on the topic of black men, it's time for all of America to "Just Tell The Truth."

The true meaning of Justice

Throughout my childhood, whenever adults would gather to talk, someone (man or woman) would, without failure, start quoting scripture.

Frequently, I didn't fully understand. But I did listen.

They would talk about sin, the 10 commandments and how there was no such thing as 'big sin and little sin. Any sin can send you to hell.'

That scared me.

And they always drew a clear distinction between what they called 'man's law' and 'God's law.'

I had to grow up to realize that they had an extremely sophisticated understanding of justice and ethics. And that understanding didn't waver based on any situation.

To this day, I've not found them to have been wrong.

Chapter Two

The enduring struggle

There is a concept of capitalism that says "whoever controls the means of production thereby achieves political domination as a ruling class" (Social Stratification: Class, Race and Gender in Social Perspective by Dave B. Grusky, P. 170).

That concept is significant in understanding a mindset that could lead to slavery, peonage, Jim Crow and constant image distortion, all aimed at black men.

Also, when you understand that concept of capitalism, it becomes more apparent that one of America's greatest conflicts was, and in many ways still is, between white men and black men. While that's not an absolute depiction, it is to a majority extent true throughout history.

The country's founding fathers wrote in the Declaration of Independence "We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights ... life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

(Continues...)

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