Black Powerlessness

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symbol of Black Powerlessness 2

"I hate this kind of sign. What is that? What did Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and countless other great men and women die for? That sign should say, if you kill one black person, we will kill five of you." - Prince Uma  8.31.14



"There are two kinds of spirit in Black people that don't and cannot live together: one comes from having one's freedom given and the other from having fought for and taken one's freedom..." - Gregory E. Woods 9.2.14

symbol of Black Powerlessness 

"Looking hard upon the life I lived I remember many of the armed and dangerous challenges to my life, and that of my family and how I alone or with others made sure women and their children around us did not have to have a moment like this begging for life. 

It is not from begging one's life is given respect and dignity. It is from action and an unwillingness to beg for life. As a man, Prince Uma, I get no strength from powerlessness, and the sight of a woman holding a dead son, and hearing her grief saying to the killer, "My life matters. Black lives matter." galls me for reasons I might or might not have conveyed well enough. But, as the son of Herbert L. Woods, I could never keep a symbol like this around me unless it propelled me beyond the scope of merely existing. 

When I was a little boy my father kept a picture of two Black men hanging from a noose above his office desk at home. His desk at the time was in the living room where all could see it from the kitchen or the living room. Everyday and many days I stared at it long and hard after reading or hearing something riveting about the Civil Rights struggle, or reading a monthly publication about the number of hangings throughout the country of mostly Negro men, or listening to my father host and participate in strategy sessions about the political and social structure of the time that went squarely against the grain of his employment agreement. 

When I was a man many years later, and not too many back from now, I found that old picture. Daddy told me to put it back up because it was important to remember why... 

As men and sons of my father my brothers, and I feel it deep in our bones what Daddy meant. It emboldened us and made our strength stronger and our ties bound to our ancestors, and commitment to our legacies stronger, more potent, and dealt force to the enemy of who we are and stand for. The actions, and language of men tells their story and has the texture of the type of battle to come in the conflicts with those who would take freedom and power from us. Any symbol, and many things can be symbolic, that doesn't embolden the warrior does not belong amongst the warrior's arsenal. If it is not part of the strategy it is part of the tragedy!" - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 9.8.14