LITTLE RICHARD

Ignoring all the false sentiment and forced support for being aligned with saluting feminine men Little Richard came up in a time of crisis in the Negro community deep in a struggle (once again) to reconstruct manhood. The demons of white sensibilities towards Colored peoples had hard deep feelings about what the law allowed to happen to Black men.

The law allowed itself to be used as white men saw fit, and the law also forbade Negro men from protecting their families from the violent whims of white men and white women and white children. The men struggled with this internally and many defied those men's inclination killing some white men here and there. They escaped north, assumed new names and disappeared into another America.

Little Richard was a great contradiction. He came up in that struggle and pushed his feminine manhood into the face of white people, who fear a power he never identified as power, but led them to acceptance because the sexual nature of Richard's music tantalized listener's contradictions around sex, and sex appeal. Black people were afraid of many things, but proud of any 'Member', as we called one another back then; who succeeded in the entertainment world. Little Richard acquired so much personal power he was spared the severe beatings he would have received from men had he not being so powerful a force and successful. His achievement was so important the African within was exalted, somehow, and perceived by Black folks one way without fear, but pride and by whites with wonder, awe and a reckoning of their own fundamental flaw: inferiority before true genius of the dark melanin and African spiritual powers Little Richard evoked, used and understood.

I remember this clearly. Little Richard was a sissy. In those days Blacks made a choice about men like him: beat him, kill him, accept him, ignore him or try to understand. 


- Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 10/9/17