The story (and history) of the Mayflower ship has always been associated with, among other things, positive human mental strengths such as courage, persistency, and heroic ingenuity. The ship arrived in Plymouth in 1620 and carried one of the earliest European settlers. But there is another story that is often overlooked and not heard as much although it could represent equally well, if not better, the human mental strengths mentioned above. It is the story of another ship called San Juan Bautista. It was a Spanish ship that carried slaves from Angola, pirated, and then some the slaves transferred to Plymouth in 1619. Those slaves became one of the first Black Americans in North America. Their journey, a very long journey, and survival are more fascinating to me.
The history of Black America is about a distinct group of modern people that evolved and progress in the last 400 years in a very fascinating way. I remember sometime ago I heard a profound speech from Sonia Sanchez in one of Tavis Smiley’s shows commemorating the 400-year of Jamestown settlement. Tavis was bringing up the question what would America be without the Negro people and asked her “what does it mean to you, for you that we have in fact survive?”.
And she replied very passionately and firmly that, “we have not only survive, we have moved to another level to this place called America... this country said that black people would not survive, we didn't have the smarts, we didn't have information, we didn't have the go getter to survive, but looked at us we did survive...but the point to me, is that through out the 20th century, what we showed the world is that, against great odds we not only survived, but we taught America how to survive also, we taught America and the world: culture, good manners, humanity. We taught America that indeed you can enslave someone physically but you don't enslave them always mentally, you don't enslave the spirit also too. And so we continue to produce not only music, not only dance, not only literature, but we also put something else into this ballgame called America. We said in the 1960s, what does it means to be human, we threw that out into this mix, if you want to be human you got to do the followings…”
What a speech!
During that same period when I heard her in the radio, I was also reading and thinking about Karl Marx a little bit. I was just wondering why Marxism could still be so popular and effective in almost all intellectual fields while at the same time it is a well-known failure in every single social and political experiments in the modern history. Then the two things coalesced together in my mind at that point. I realized that the history of Black people in America is actually what a successful Marxian revolution would be. It is the alternate Marxian revolution, one which ends with the true triumph of the proletariats but achieved without the rigid and dogmatic rhetoric of the theory. So, I think the history of Black people can be used to revise Marx’s theory.