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Books by C. Eric Lincoln
The Black Experience in Religion /
The Black Muslims in America /
The Avenue, Clayton City /
My Face Is Black
The Black Church in the African-American Experience /
Coming Through Fire /
Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Profile
The Negro Pilgrimage in America /
Race, Religion and the Continuing American Dilemma
Reclamation of Black Prisoners /
A Pictorial History of the Negro in America
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My
Face Is Black
By C. Eric Lincoln
Reviewed by Gayraud S. Wilmore, Jr.
Mood Ebony
Probably no one in America fears and respect
Malcolm X more than does
C. Eric Lincoln. The author of
The Black
Muslims in America presents in this slim volume his most
persuasive polemic against the complex and dissident leader of
the Muslim group. He concludes that Malcolm is unquestionably
“the most powerful and potentially the most dangerous Negro in
America.”
Fear and respect often walk hand in hand. In
his discussion of the Negro’s new solidarity and pride of
race, Lincoln is not unappreciative of Malcolm’s contribution
to the revolution. For all of his sharp critique of racism, the
author, like Louis Lomax,
James Baldwin,
Lerone Bennett and
other contemporary Negro intellectuals, welcomes what he calls
the new “mood ebony” of which the Black Muslims are the
principal exponents.
Ironically, the success of the integration
movement in the ghetto is in part due to a new sense of worth
and power in blackness. The problem Lincoln skirts in
My Face
Is Black is how one walks the tightrope between an
acceptance of being black and a more separatist disposition.
“It [the “mood ebony”] expresses itself as a rejection of
integration. It does not imply a hatred for the white man, but
it does imply a negation of the symbols of his culture, his
power, and his status.” Well and good. But is this willingness
to separate from a culture to which the Negro himself has made a
powerful contribution as inevitable result of discovering
one’s identity—of being able, as one Negro business man
expressed it, to “enjoy ham hocks and turnip greens . . .
without caring whether or not the white man is watching, and
giving a damn if he is’?
Lincoln, a Methodist minister now teaching at
Clark College in Atlanta, is equally influenced by the Christian
integrationist viewpoint—his first chapter is titled
“American Tragedy: Christian Dilemma.” His criticism of the
Negro church, while not as extreme as Joseph Washington’s
almost angry attack in
Black Religion, follows the same
general line. Hence he makes such statements as “The Negro’s
religion is too often superficial, too ego-centered, too
pragmatic and too reflective of the exigencies of the social
milieu,” and “Too many Negroes have prematurely reached the
conclusion that the church has already become . . . a fraternal
order with designated chapters for whites and others restricted
to Negroes.”
A considerable portion of the book is devoted
to what appears to be a hastily pulled together “Negro
history” which reiterates the we-did-not-like-slavery theme of
Bennett and others and is, on the whole, unimpressive. The most
significant sections deal with the area of Lincoln’s greatest
competence—the Black Muslims and
Malcolm X. Lincoln declares
that Malcolm’s new image is only a deception; he does not
believe that his racism was abated by his sentimental journey to
the Middle East.
While in this book Lincoln announces almost
arrogantly “My face is black,” he squarely opposes
Malcolm’s antiwhite bias and in the need acknowledges that
“the Negro needs the white man. He needs him to make his
freedom complete and meaningful.” It may be possible to have
it both ways. We shall see. Source: The Christian Century (January 20, 1965)
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Gayraud Stephen
Wilmore—writer, historian, educator and theologian—was
born on December 20, 1921 in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His mother was a domestic worker and
his father, a World War I veteran, was an office clerk. His
parents were active in the community where he grew up, and his
father founded the first Black American Legion Post in
Pennsylvania. . . . Wilmore has written and edited sixteen books
including Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation
of the Religious History of African Americans, which was
published in 1998, and Pragmatic Spirituality, which was
published in June 2004. He is also the recipient of innumerable
awards and honors. . . . From 1959 to 1963, Wilmore was an
assistant professor of social ethics at Pittsburgh Theological
Seminary. From there, he served as the executive director of the
United Presbyterian Commission on Religion and Race until 1972.
In that position, he helped to organize and train ministers who
participated in boycotts and protests in the South during the
Civil Rights movement. From 1972-1974, he taught Social Ethics
at Boston University School of Theology, and then taught Black
church studies at Colgate Rochester Divinity School until 1983.
Wilmore served as the dean of the divinity program at New York
Theological Seminary until 1987
before becoming a teacher of church history at the
Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta. In 1990, he
became the editor of The Journal of the ITC, and he
remained in that post for five years. From 1995 to 1998, Wilmore
was an adjunct professor at the United Theological Seminary in
Dayton, Ohio. Wilmore has written and edited sixteen books
including
Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the
Religious History of African Americans, which was
published in 1998, and
Pragmatic Spirituality.—Historymakers
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C. Eric Lincoln—born 23 June
1924 and died 14 May 2000— wrote
The Black
Muslims in America, the first scholarly examination of
the movement, and was a co-author of
The Black Church in the African-American Experience, a landmark
study of the political and social influence of religious institutions in
black America. Dr. Lincoln, professor emeritus of religion and culture
at Duke University in Durham, N.C., where he taught from 1976 to 1993,
wrote or edited more than 20 other books, including
The Avenue, Clayton City, a novel published in 1988, for which
he won the Lillian Smith Book Award for Best Southern Fiction, and a
series of books in the 1970's called the C. Eric Lincoln Series in Black
Religion.
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An ordained United
Methodist minister, his friendships and expertise were truly
ecumenical. He was a friend of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr., Malcolm X and Alex Haley, and in 1990 was cited by
Pope John Paul II for ''scholarly service to the church.''
Charles Eric Lincoln
was born in Athens, Ala., on June 23, 1924. He was abandoned
first by his father, then by his mother, and was brought up
by his maternal grandmother, Mattie Sowell Lincoln. . . .
Dr. Lincoln's last book,
Coming Through the Fire: Surviving Race and place in America,
published in 1996, was a distillation of his thoughts on
race. In the book, he calls for ''no-fault
reconciliation—the recognition that we are all of a kind,
with the same vulnerabilities, the same possibilities and
the same needs for God and each other.''—NYTimes |
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Malcolm X
artifacts unearthed—Police docs and more found among
belongs of 'Shorty' Jarvis—1 February 2012—Documents
outlining the crime that landed Malcolm X in prison in
the 1940s are among some 1,000 recently unearthed items
purchased jointly by the civil rights leader's
foundation and an independent collector of
African-American artifacts. The documents and other
artifacts belonged to late musician Malcolm "Shorty"
Jarvis, who served in prison with Malcolm X and was one
of his closest friends. Jarvis' 1976 pardon paper also
is part of the collection, which was recently discovered
by accident. The items had been in a Connecticut storage
unit that had gone into default, and were initially
auctioned off to a buyer who had no idea what he was
bidding on. The Omaha, Nebraska-based Malcolm X Memorial
Foundation, which oversees the Malcolm X Center located
at his birthplace, will house and display the
just-arrived archives. It split the cost with Black
History 101 Mobile Museum, based in Detroit—the
birthplace of the Nation of Islam.—Mobile Museum founder
and curator Khalid el-Hakim declined to identify the
original buyer or the price the two organizations paid
for the trove. Still, even after splitting the cost, he
said it's the largest acquisition to date for his mobile
museum, which includes Jim Crow-era artifacts, a Ku Klux
Klan hood and signed documents by Malcolm X and Rosa
Parks. . . . The collection also reveals an enduring
connection between the two Malcolms after their
incarceration, Malcolm X's conversion to Islam and his
rise to prominence. There's a 72-page scrapbook of
Malcolm X's life that was maintained by Jarvis until
after his friend's 1965 assassination. One of the civil
rights era's most controversial and compelling figures,
Malcolm X rose to fame as the chief spokesman of the
Nation of Islam, a movement started in Detroit more than
80 years ago. He proclaimed the black Muslim
organization's message at the time: racial separatism as
a road to self-actualization and urged blacks to claim
civil rights "by any means necessary" and referred to
whites as "devils."—TheGrio
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The Avenue, Clayton City
By C.Eric
Lincoln
The Avenue in
C. Eric Lincoln’s fictional town is the principal
residential street of the black community in Clayton
City, a prototypical southern town languishing
between the two world wars. Unpaved and marked by
ditches full of frogs, snakes, and empty whiskey
bottles on one side of town, it is the same street,
though with a different name, that originates
downtown. Only when it reaches the black section of
Clayton City do the paving stop and the trash-filled
ditches begin. On one side, it provides a
significant address for the white people who live
there. On the other, despite its rundown air, it is
still the best address available to the town’s black
population. Some of them, in fact, are willing to go
to any extreme, including murder, to get there.
In this novel,
originally published in 1988, Lincoln creates with
deft skill the drama that rises from the lives of
the people of Clayton City. In turn amusing,
disgusting, enraging, wistful, and, as one hears the
secrets hidden deep in their hearts, shocking, they
exist in a place whose vibrant personality is itself
a unique configuration of geography, relationships,
patterns of behavior, and events. It is also a place
whose unspoken and hidden power lies in its crushing
compulsion to maintain itself as it already is—a
power that forces everyone to succumb to an
inflexible social order.—Duke
University Press |
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The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. Gil uses Lennon's violent end as a brilliant parallel to Dr King's assassination and as a biting commentary on the constraints that sometimes lead to newspapers getting things wrong. —Jamie Byng, Guardian / Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio) / Gil Scott-Heron
& His Music Gil Scott
Heron Blue Collar
Remember Gil Scott- Heron |
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost |
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update
24 April 2012
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