Randal Maurice Jelks's Blog

I can still recollect the cold December day I heard Donny Hathaway joyfully singing This Christmas. For a kid who played trumpet through elementary and junior high school the big horn arrangement that opens and accompanies the song thrilled me instantaneously.  I was on East 71st Street and Jeffrey Boulevard in Chicago and the record store nearby blared the newly released song from its outdoor speakers. And Donny sang gloriously:

Hang all the mistletoe

I’m gonna get to know you better

This Christmas

This was my very first Christmas season in the city of Chicago. It felt so different from the warmth of my family’s environs in New Orleans at Christmas. However, Hathaway’s and Nadine McKinnor, a postal worker, co-written melody, momentarily eased my homesickness and brought me elation. It not only brought me happiness, it brought joy and togetherness to the entire Black Chicago–Southsiders, and Westsiders, hustlers and strivers, activists and politicos, which was no easy feat. In a matter of days, This Christmas blasted across Black America through the sales of 45 rpm records and R&B radio stations in one city after the next. It was a song that made its way up to the pantheon of great Christmas recordings–Nat King Cole’s version of the Christmas Song,  Eartha Kitts’s Santa Baby, and Charles Brown’s Merry Christmas Baby. 

 This Christmas premiered almost a year to the date of the first anniversary of the predawn political assassinations of Chicago Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. As the song hit the airwaves public outrage boiled at President Nixon’s secretive invasion into Cambodia, which spurred the killings of four Kent State University students and two Jackson State University students all protesting the President’s disastrous skullduggery. It is history to many of you, but I watched on the television news the violent rampage of New York City construction workers beating up nonviolent anti-war protesters, infamously labeled as the  “hard hat riot,” which the Nixon administration condoned.  And most scandalous was the revelation that the U.S. Army had suppressed news that soldiers committed mass murder in a Vietnamese village called My Lai in 1968. Horribly the death toll continued for Vietnamese civilians, soldiers, and U.S. soldiers alike.

Our environmental habitat was also in the news. In April of 1970, there was the celebration of the first Earth Day. It was understood then, what we most clearly know in light of climate change, that the maniacal dimensions of the industrial order that fossil fuels uses were irreparably harming our earthly abode.  Congress enacted legislation and agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency that year, but entrenched interests paid off scientists and congressional representatives alike to support coal and oil over the development of safer forms of energy.

And sadly there were the deaths of the people who brought us music—Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died within three weeks of each other, both aged twenty-seven. 

When This Christmas hit the airwaves it radiated joy. The song didn’t change the rates of impoverishment in Black communities. Roughly 25% or more were broke and living in substandard housing. Drug addictions and inner-city violence was a menace. Police brutality and incarceration was even more so. This Christmas did not put an end to suffering or eradicate pollution.  

What it did do for the four minutes and nine seconds was to put a smile on a lot of faces. It reminded us that amid struggles there was joy, a joy that could be shared one to another. And with joy comes hope. Joy fills us with the courage to fashion a better world. Joy builds our stamina to endure the dogged routines that may grind us down. Joy is the key to living with and through struggles. 

This is what the Gospel writer Luke highlights in his telling of Jesus’s birth narrative. A baby born with issues of paternity was not unusual in the ancient or the contemporary world. It is commonplace.  A baby born in desperate circumstances in an alley or manger is sadly not exceptional either. It happens daily. Nothing is unusual about a lowly birth of a child anywhere in the world. What is notable is that an angel gives testimony to this pedestrian birth.  Perhaps a sign for all of us that there is something absolutely glorious about our daily lives.

 Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

This infant bears hope. And where hope derives from is always a surprise. This is why the angel says not to fear. We are called to embrace one another in and through our struggles. Remember to say:

Merry Christmas

Shake a hand, shake a hand now

Wish your brother [sister] Merry Christmas

All over the land, yeah

The post This Christmas first appeared on Randal Maurice Jelks.

Stay Woke!

Sixty-two years ago Martin Luther King, Jr. was invited by his mentor Benjamin Mays, president of Morehouse College, to address the 1959 graduating class of his alma mater. The title of his address was “Remaining Woke Through a Great Revolution.”  King wanted to make sure that the Morehouse graduates understood the era that they were living in was extraordinary because the civil rights movement and African decolonization occurred together changing a three hundred racialized history with African peoples and black Americans; it was a sea change in world history, he believed. To get the graduates to understand the enormity of the moment he made reference to Washington Irvin’s short story published in 1819 some thirty-six years after the cessation of the American Revolution in 1783. King depicted Irving’s character Rip Van Winkle sleeping for twenty years through the American Revolution.  King describes Van Winkle sleep as almost deadening. When Van Winkle fell asleep “the wall had a picture of King George III of England.” When he awoke there was a “picture of another George, George Washington.” As King tells it, “Rip looking up at the picture of George Washington was completely lost.” He woke up unaware that the United States was no longer “under the domination of the British Empire.” When he awoke “she was a free and independent nation.” King then urged the Morehouse to stay awake because “[t]his world shaking revolution which is engulfing our world is seen in the United States in the transition from a segregated to an integrated society. The social revolution which is taking place in this country is not an isolated, detached phenomenon. It is a part of the world-wide revolution that is taking place.” And this is precisely been the intent of those young people who use the phrase “stay woke.” 

Just imagine if the former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, a person who knew first-hand the experience of terrorism with the bombing of the 16th Street in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, had been woke enough to advise former President George W. Bush of the racist orientalist consequences of U.S. Cold War foreign policy throughout the Africa and the Middle East. Might Bush sought an alternative to our twenty-year stay in Afghanistan? One wonders why Dr. Rice was not shaken out of her sleep and walked through the bad choices the Bush administration made in Afghanistan?

Imagine all the conservatives who feign outrage at young people for wanting to be aware of how their neighborhoods are economically divested in ways similar to that of African countries who are impoverished as natural resources can be extracted so cheaply.  Shouldn’t these young people wish to be “woke” and know that there is an interconnection between their struggles on the mean streets of Chicago and that of an African teenager in Eastern Congo where cobalt is extracted? Shouldn’t these young people be aware as to why the former mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emmanuel hid damming evidence about Laquan MacDonald’s murder? Will his word be his bound to our Japanese allies? Should not young people stay woke and aware that Donald J. Trump before he ever considered running for president called for the death penalty of the Central Park Five without a shred of evidence presented before the courts? Shouldn’t they make a direct correlation between his actions then and how he as president permitted the tear-gassing of Black Lives Matters protesters who peacefully assembled near the White House? And shouldn’t conservatives be chastising their own violent reactionaries for the January 6, 2020 desecration of the capitol in an attempted coup d’état? Or were they asleep like Rip Van Winkle in their house seats as a lynch mob violated the Constitutional order of the United States? Those who criticize the phraseology “stay woke” are doing so because they do not wish to be scrutinized for their political narcolepsy. They distract their constituencies with brazen half-truths using scare tactics like segregationists did calling Dr. King a communist. 

I say “stay woke” to young people because there are interconnections that they must be aware of for the fate of democracy at home and abroad. Stay woke to matters of climate change, chronic diseases, and lead poisoning throughout older core city neighborhoods where black and brown persons live. Stay woke to the multiple ways people are denied access to necessities of life, labor, and love. Being “woke” is fundamental to democracy and living democratic lives. Dr. King’s charged Morehouse graduates to stay awake because our existence depends on it! He observed:

First, we are challenged to rise above the narrow confines of our individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. The individual or nation that feels that it can live in isolation has allowed itself to sleep through a revolution. The geographical togetherness of the modern world makes our very existence dependent on co-existence. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. Because of our involvement in humanity, we must be concerned about every human being.

To this, I say,  “stay woke!”

The post Stay Woke! first appeared on Randal Maurice Jelks.