PIERCING THE SILENCE* ON: THE HATE U GIVE 4 $$$

On the 8th of March 1971, “The Fight of the Century” was taking place in Madison Square Garden in New York City between undefeated heavyweight champions Muhammad Ali and Joe Fraizer. Fraizer held the title but Ali hadn’t lost it by defeat, he was stripped of his belt and had his boxing licence suspended. This followed his refusal to register for the military draft in 1967, claiming exemption as a minister of the religion of Islam; Ali had yet to convert to Sunni Islam (later holding an appreciation for Sufism) and was still a member of the Nation of Islam.

Founded in 1930, by 1964 the NOI had over 300,000 members and distributed 500,000 copies a week of its newspaper, Muhammad Speaks; the most widely circulated,Black-operated newspaper in the U.S. in the late 1960’s. Combining community-oriented investigative journalism and Black nationalist views on racial upliftment, the paper earned a reputation as a viable news source among community leaders such as mayors, city councilpersons and grassroots organisers. The NOI preached maintaining one’s health through proper diet, self-discipline and economic self-sufficiency. As anti-integrationists, the NOI insisted that African-Americans have control over their own businesses, schools and community organisations; this message was expressed through the NOI’s slogan of “Do-For-Self.” According to the politico-religious movement, this could only be achieved through Islam—the African-American community needed unshackling from the so-called Judeo-Christian establishment that had enslaved their ancestors, continued to mistreat them, and the NOI claimed to provide a path of salvation in what they described as the “hells of North America.”

The imagery of this terminology is further pushed by the now-heavily-memed NOI mythology of Yakub, a Black scientist responsible for creating the white “race”—commonly referred to by the organisation as the white devil; Yakub’s consistent association to the Biblical Jacob, the father of the tribes of Israel, falls in line with the rife antisemitism of the NOI. The conflation in the doctrine of the organisation continues with the Quranic Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad, leader of the NOI, as the latter takes the position of Messenger of Allah (rasul Allah). According to former Editor-in-Chief of Muhammad Speaks, John Woodford—an atheist raised Christian—within the racialised landscape of the modern US, NOI followers felt “if the followers of the Arab Muhammad could accept their spiritual leader as the Messenger of Allah, they could accept their [African-American] leader as a successor to that role and title with just as much right and logic as Muslims in the Middle East had asserted for themselves.” A similar line of thinking can be assumed to exist in Southern Africa among followers of the Nazareth Baptist Church (lbandla lamaNazaretha)—more popularly known as kwaShembe—or the Zion Christian Church (ZCC) or its splinter church, the International Pentecost Church (IPC); whose foundations are built on the colonial import of Christianity, within the segregated system their leaders found themselves in, but expanded upon from a perspective of traditional African spirituality.

It’s no surprise that Ali’s exemption was denied and he was charged with 5 years in jail and a $10,000 fine, along with being required to surrender his passport. Only 25, Ali was approaching the years we associate with an athlete's peak, not only losing out on competing at the highest level but also potential millions of dollars. Known for their warm and upbeat disposition, there were little moments that revealed the pain of this loss. In April 1968, Ali appeared on his iconic Esquire cover, taking on the role of St. Sebastian—the patron saint of archers, those who desire a saintly death, and most relevantly, athletes. The legend of ol’ Bash is that he was a captain in the Roman emperor's army who was discovered to be a Christian and had converted many soldiers, leading to the order for him to be killed by arrows. Ali appreciated the symbolism but photographer Carl Fischer had had to urgently call the boxer's manager, Herbert Muhammad (son of Elijah), to receive consent to be portrayed as the Christian martyr. In a Rolling Stone interview after Ali’s death in 2016, George Lois—one of the influences behind Mad Men’s Don Draper—gave insight, as then-Esquire art director, of “the Greatest” on set. He claims Ali “took his right hand out from behind his back and pointed at each of the arrows. And then he’d say the names of the people in this world that were out to get him. He’d point to one arrow: ‘Lyndon Johnson.’ The next one: ‘General [William] Westmoreland [who led the Vietnam operation].’ Then: ‘Robert McNamara.’ Each of the arrows [was] a person in the government that had hurt him.”

In the accompanying profile—titled The Passion of Muhammad, written by Leonard Shecter — while driving around Chicago with the writer, Ali reveals that a delegation of well-known Black athletes had come to persuade him to change his stance on military service. In giving a summary of what he told them, Ali says, “I love my people. The little Negroes, they catching hell. They hungry. They raggedy. They getting beat up, shot, killed, just for asking for justice. They can't eat no good food. They can't get a job. They got no future. They was nothing but slaves and they the most hated people. They fought in all the wars, but they live in the worst houses, eat the worst food and pay the highest rent, the highest light bill, the highest gas bill. Now I'm the one's catching hell, too. I could make millions if I led my people the wrong way, to something I know is wrong. So now I have to make a decision. Step into a billion dollars or step into poverty. Step into a billion dollars and denounce my people or step into poverty and teach them the truth. Damn the money. Damn the heavyweight championship. Damn the white people. Damn everything. I will die before I sell out my people for the white man's money.”

Those next 3 years were spent appealing the federal offence, while Ali enhanced his skills as an orator to provide a source of income speaking on the college circuit. As former New York Times journalist—who covered Ali for 52 years of his life—Robert Lipsyte explains, his speeches “changed radically from the boring dogma of [the NOI] to a really informed understanding,” continuously developing from his conversations with college students after his speeches, garnering him support as an anti-Vietnam War icon. Ali became the symbol of the “counterculture movement,” the term encompassing the various political and anti-establishment protests and revolts of the era; such as those for the civil rights of racialised peoples, the anti-war and anti-nuclear movement or the women's rights movement—however, for years the objectives of the movement had been focused on well-to-do white women. On the 28th and 29th of May 1851, the Ohio Woman’s Rights Convention was held in Akron, this was during a time white women were organising and protesting for the right to vote. Mrs.Frances D. Gage opened proceedings as convention president, their address went as follows; “Are not the natural wants and emotions of humanity common too, and shared equally by both sexes? Does man hunger and thirst, suffer cold and heat more than woman? Does he love and hate, hope and fear, joy and sorrow more than woman? Does his heart thrill with a deeper pleasure in doing good? Can his soul writhe in more bitter agony under the consciousness of evil or wrong? Is the sunshine more glorious, the air more quiet, the sounds of harmony more soothing, the perfume of flowers more exquisite, or forms of beauty more soul-satisfying to his senses than to hers. To all these interrogatories every one will answer: No!”

The following day, a formerly enslaved Black woman and abolitionist by the name of Sojourner Truth addressed the convention; despite protests among attendees who felt she’d draw attention away from voting rights to emancipation. An attempt to convey Truth’s message in full was published in The Anti-Slavery Bugle on the 21st of June, Truth’s speech reads:

“May I say a few words? I want to say a few words about this matter. I am a woman’s rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal; I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now. As for intellect, all I can say is, if a woman have a pint and man a quart—why cant she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much,—for we cant take more than our pint’ll hold. The poor men seem to be all in confusion, and dont know what to do. Why children, if you have woman’s rights give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they wont be so much trouble. I cant read, but I can hear. I have heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again. The Lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right. When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love and besought him to raise their brother. And Jesus wept—and Lazarus came forth. And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and woman who bore him. Man, where is your part? But the women are coming up blessed by God and a few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.”

The most famous version of her speech was published in the New York Independent 12 years after the fact, this version reads:

“Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about? That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman? Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [member of audience whispers, "intellect"] That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full? Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him. If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them. Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say.”

Written by convention president Gage, a false southern slave dialect had been attributed to Truth, who spoke with a Dutch accent, having learnt English after being sold by their Dutch enslaver. Marius Robinson had written the Bugle speech; a good friend of Truth’s, they went through the transcription and she gave approval for publication. Despite this, the refrain “Ain’t I a woman” became an important descriptor of the double oppression that Black women had experienced; plagued by sexism and racism, it could not be separated and had to be acknowledged.

The history of slavery in the U.S. had an institutionalised-like pattern of rape (Sojourner herself a victim), for which activist Angela Davis describes in her book Women, Race and Class, “as a weapon of domination, a weapon of repression, whose covert goal was to extinguish slave women’s will to resist, and in the process, to demoralise their men.” The abolition of slavery didn’t end this institutionalised violence against Black women, the post-Civil War period introduced its new form amongst white supremacist organisations, turning to gang rapes of Black women. In 1944, 24-year-old Recy Taylor was a victim of this violence in her small town in Alabama, having been abducted by 6 white men; Taylor and her father reported the assault to the local sheriff. one of the men would confess to the rape, naming the others that been involved but no arrests would follow.

News of the incident reached the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) office in Montgomery, Alabama, to find out why there’d been no arrests, the office sent their best investigator: 31-year-old Rosa Parks. After the sheriff chased Parks out of the town, she launched the Committee for Equal Justice on their return to Montgomery; the committee was focused on helping Black women reclaim their bodies against the widespread sexual violence at the hands of white supremacists. Black activists across the country signed onto the committee, providing publicity to the heinous crime on a national scale. Reported in the Chicago Defender, the lawyer representing the rapists in the case had offered $600 to Willie Guy Taylor to silence his wife, quoted saying “[N-word-er] — ain’t $600 enough for raping your wife.” A grand jury would refuse to indict the men, causing outrage as letters protesting the decision flooded the Alabama governor's office. After he ordered another investigation into the assault, in February 1945, a second grand jury refused to indict and the men were never prosecuted.

10 years later, while visiting family in Mississippi, 14-year-old Emmitt Till is dragged from his bed and out of his uncle’s home by 2 white men. He was beaten to disfigurement, then shot and thrown into a river; weighed down by a cotton-gin fan tied to his neck by barbed wire. Till he had been accused of flirting with the wife of one of the men, she said Till had come onto her while she worked as a clerk at their grocery store; years later, at the age of 72, she admitted this was a lie. The men were found not-guilty but 4 months later admitted to the murder in a magazine, they were paid $4,000 to glorify the killing. Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted on an open casket funeral, exposing the overt violence of the Jim Crow South in a country that was built on its acceptance of racism. In their book, Black Women in White America, women’s historian Gerda Lerner writes, under the subtitle Black Women Attack The Lynching System, “The myth of the black rapist of white women is the twin of the myth of the bad black woman—both designed to apologize for and facilitate the continued exploitation of black men and women.”

However, in the late 60’s, an united front became harder to maintain as Black women activists felt unheard in the larger Black organisations; especially during a period in which the vocalisation of a triple oppression was being made. Gay and trans people have existed for as long as they’ve been persecuted: Forever; in some societies they were accepted, but in many—like the U.S.—were forced into the shadows and labelled “perverted.” Mid-1800’s correspondence between Addie Brown, a Black domestic worker, and Rebecca Primus, a Black school teacher, gives evidence that African-American women, like white women, have long shared in these lively, loving, erotic “friendships;” amidst heterosexual dominance. Following the Civil War and Reconstruction era, US ideals on sexuality and gender took on the Victorian era doctrine of “separate spheres,” believing men and women were different and meant for different things; claiming men belonged in the public sphere, while women belonged in the private sphere. Meaning men were meant to participate in politics and in paid work, while women were meant to run households and raise families. How this affected queer Black women is illustrated in a 1913 study of an all-girl institution that experienced same-sex acts of intimacy, in which a relationship between a Black girl and a white girl is problematically described. The Black girl, already racially categorised, is sexually categorised as “the man” of the relationship. As James Martin explains, in their journal article A Different Kind of Closet: Queer Censorship in U.S. LGBTQ+ Movements since World War II, “In reassigning the African American girl’s gender identity, white America is redefining black queerness and assuming that she must take the role of the ‘man’ in the relationship because of her skin color;” which recalls the refrain “Ain’t I a woman?”

As the U.S. banned alcohol in January 1920, this ultimately made a criminal out of everyone that drank, resulting in a general disregard for the law; the profitability of the alcohol black market gave rise to organised crime, as well as secret bars and clubs known as “speakeasies.” These hidden spaces brought together a diverse range of people and flourished in the New York City neighbourhood of Harlem. The Harlem Renaissance describes a period when the neighbourhood became, not only a Black cultural mecca but, the epicentre of U.S. culture and defined “what’s cool” for people around the world. Harlem had become a popular destination during the “Great Migration”, of Black families from the U.S. South to the North and West, from 1910.

In describing this golden age, from the early 1920’s until the mid 1930’s, in African-American culture—which manifested in literature, music, stage performance and art—literary critic and professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. points out the Harlem Renaissance was “surely as gay as it was Black, not that it was exclusively either of these.” The birth of drag balls came in Harlem in 1869, and they developed as a safe space for queer men to meet, but their mainstream. visibility came in the 1920’s, during the so-called “Pansy Craze” and the accompanying “Sapphic Craze.” The stock market crash of 1929, which ushered in the Great Depression (1929-1939), and repeal of the alcohol ban, in 1933, reintroduced the ideology of “separate spheres” as the U.S. returned to its conservative default.

However, the start of WWII would find the ideology once again being challenged; the mass deployment of men to the war front required many women to leave their homes and join the workforce. Black women had always worked and needed to work because of the economic disadvantage caused by slavery and racial discrimination. In fact, in the 1960’s, the idea of a Black “matriarchy” being the cause of the social ills and cycle of poverty that afflicted Black America had become a popular theory. The white women that did work usually did so in the clerical and service sectors and this is where many found employment during wartime. Before WWII created employment opportunities for women in heavy industry and wartime production, as well as other industries, Black women typically worked as domestic workers or sharecroppers. Those new opportunities had to be fought for because employers regularly refused to hire Black women; it took an Executive Order, banning racial discrimination in the defence industry, for Black women to be hired.

Once hired, Black workers found themselves within the wider “separate sphere” project of segregation; using separate cafeterias and restrooms; entering work through separate doors and living in separate, often inferior housing. Black workers were usually assigned more menial jobs, denied the chance for advancement and paid less than their white counterparts; women in general were paid less than men, highlighting the double jeopardy faced by Black women. For some white women newly entered in the workforce, the experience liberated them from the idea of a “successful” woman being a married woman; in conflict with the cultivation of the nuclear family being the all-American ideal. There was a feeling amongst men that women's participation in physically demanding and skilled labour was encroachment on a “man’s job;” which led some to respond with resistance and harassment towards their women colleagues. An insecurity about their masculinity already existed amongst these men of the homefront because they had not been selected in the draft, were disqualified or exempted from service for any number of reasons; having to live in the shadow of the WWII soldier: the ideal American man manifest.

The military banned queer people from being drafted using “medical or psychological testing” to assess sexuality but these screenings were very brief and relied on stereotypes like how the person walked and talked; 4,000 - 5,000 men were denied entry this way. This doesn’t mean queer men didn’t make it into the military, there are countless stories of queer men and women finding one another while serving in WWII and forming discrete communities. The “macho” masculine image of the WWII soldiers gave room for the popularity of male drag shows; as James Martin writes, in their aforementioned journal article, “Men were given the liberty to demonstrate their masculinity in a feminine way, where they could maintain their perceived heterosexual image in a comedic light – because, surely, it was too ridiculous for two men to become sexually attracted to each other.” The homefront was also experiencing something of a coming out, as men and women moved to new cities and had new experiences, none more so than those that made their way to or through the Bay Area, where San Francisco earned the moniker “Sodom by the Sea.”

As more young queer people found each other and became more visible, the U.S. public was once again disturbed by the “perverts.” In 2020, Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell released a labour of love that had been more than 20 years in the making, the book LOVING: A Photographic History of Men in Love 1850s–1950s, offers us a look into 300, of the couples 3,000, photographs amassed. It feels apt that it ends in the 1950’s because of the witchhunt for gays that was to follow. McCarthyism had taken hold of the U.S., as the “Red Scare” drove a campaign to eliminate enemies of “American values,” it began with communists but soon queer people would find themselves under the spotlight. The “Lavender Scare” refers to the moral panic the US public had about queer people in government, which ultimately led to the signing of an Executive Order which deemed queer people a threat to national security because they were vulnerable to blackmail and were considered—backed by no evidence—to have weak moral characters requiring their systematic removal from any government job. Queer people were being severely repressed and found very little space to exist in society without masking their true identity; the burgeoning gay publications, magazines, and penpal clubs offered a chance to feel seen. The US Post Office played their role in persecuting the community by screening mail for any pro-gay content, categorising it as “obscene” the queer communities explosive fightback would begin in 1969.

The Stonewall Inn opened as a gay bar in 1967, forming part of a network of Mafia-controlled illegal gay clubs and bars in Greenwich Village in New York City. In 1966, the New York State Liquor Authority overturned their ban on establishments serving alcohol to known or suspected queer people but same-sex relations were still illegal. The Stonewall was cheap to enter and one of the last gay clubs in the village where customers could dance, drawing a young clientele that included runaways, homeless youths and drag queens, who were bitterly received at other gay clubs and bars. Although gay clubs were regularly raided, it was usually for show because staff would’ve usually been tipped off by corrupt cops—who were subsequently paid off—giving them a chance to warn patrons to stop any open displays of affection, slow dancing, or use of drugs.

On the 24th of June 1969, the Stonewall was raided but this time without warning, it had been organised by the NYPD's First Division, rather than the local Sixth Precinct. The club opened back up after a few days and on Friday, 27th of June, the police returned with the intention to shut down the club for good, roughing up and manhandling the people in the establishment. Rather than just disperse, the queer patrons were tired of the constant harassment and discrimination, demanding those that had been arrested to be released; it unfolded into a full blown uprising as the police barricaded themselves in the Stonewall for protection. According to gay rights activist Arcus Flynn, inmates of the Women’s House of Detention set fire to their meagre possessions and threw them out the windows in solidarity with the uprising outside, shouting “Gay Rights! Gay Rights!”

The illegality of being queer meant many queer women found themselves imprisoned there; their prevalence would be mentioned by activists Angela Davis and Afeni Shakur, who both spent time in the prison. In the early hours of the morning, the fire department and a riot squad were able to rescue those inside the Stonewall and disperse the crowd; but protests continued for the next five days, sometimes involving thousands of people, chanting “Gay Power!”

In July, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was formed, a gay rights organisation demanding liberation in the spirit of the national-liberation and anti-capitalist struggles around the world.

The organisation was made up of a diverse group of queer and over time served as an incubator of the new gay and lesbian mass political movement. Larger than life individuals such as Black drag queen and transgender woman Marsha P. Johnson were a part of this growing movement; she founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in 1970, an organisation dedicated to sheltering young transgender individuals who were shunned by their families. Other groups born from the GLF are the Third World Gay Revolution and the Salsa Soul Sisters, groups for queer people of colour, vocalising a triple oppression of their race, sexuality and class. Between Christmas and New Years, 1969, the G.L.F helped organise 24-hour-a-day protests at the Women’s House of Detention; Afeni Shakur, a prisoner at the time, is said to have “[begun] relating to the gay sisters in jail beginning to understand their oppression, their anger and the strength in them and in all gay people.”

In 1970, Shakur attended a GLF workshop at the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention, organised by the Black Panther Party in Philadelphia, and recounted that experience. The goal of the convention was to draft a new version of the constitution that articulated a united vision of a just and free society, inviting organisations from the Black Power movement, Asian-American movement, Chicano movement, Native American movement, Anti-war movement, Women's Liberation, and Gay Liberation movements. Shakur helped formulate a list of demands to bring to the floor of the convention, and believed that Huey P. Newton’s speech on gay and feminist liberation would be the beginning of the end for homophobia and misogyny within the Black Power movement.

However, in the 70’s, former members of the Black Panthers and other nationalist and anti-racist movements would go on to create their own Black feminist organisations led by Black lesbian feminists; such as the socialist Combahee River Collective, founded in 1974. In their landmark statement, the group coined the term “identity politics,” explaining, “We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression. In the case of Black women this is a… revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.” The term was never meant not to be exclusionary but inclusionary of the various oppressions that are experienced by an individual based on their identity, so they as they put it, “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”

This was a call for solidarity amongst all the oppressed which recognised the ways in which a group is oppressed; the way in which white feminists fought for abortion rights but completely ignored the plight of the many racialised women that had forcibly been sterilised in the 20th century, showed the lack of this sort of solidarity. Being that the group consisted of Black lesbians such as Barbera Smith and Audre Lorde, the plight of Black queer people was brought to the fore, giving greater credence to their boundary crossing view of solidarity. The revolutionary queer New Afrikan Anarchist and Black Liberation Army soldier, Kuwasi Balagoon also provides an image of what this looks like from a Black man, someone who rejected white supremacy’s construction of Black masculinity, expressing theirs through the love of people. Balagoon died of AIDS in 1986 while incarcerated, the Reagan administration considered the lives of queer people disposable and their lack of response to the epidemic proved that.

The path taken by these revolutionaries laid the blueprint for Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 paper, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique ofAntidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics; and their 1991 follow-up, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women ofColor. In these papers, Crenshaw researched, developed and coined the term “intersectionality,” which described how systems of oppression overlap to create distinct experiences for people with multiple identity categories; and how focusing on a single form of oppression perpetuated discrimination, because everyone is part of multiple social categories, which include gender, social class, sexuality, (dis)ability and racialisation.