This post is probably not going to be about what you expected.
For reasons that don’t matter, I got myself thinking about Curtis Mayfield, who died on this day, December 26, 1999.
Sometimes I’m just overcome when I think about it. He was just an artist, a performer, writer and music producer. He wasn’t important like a civil rights leader, like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. Or was he?
He is credited with first infusing the power of the civil rights message into black popular music coming out in the 60’s. And he wasn’t a musical phenomenon like Stevie Wonder or a bona fide preacher like the Rev. Al Green, or whatever comparisons you want to make. He was unique.
But the latter part of his too short life was filled with tragedy. He was paralyzed from the neck down in an accident in 1990, and lived for ten more years, having various parts of his body amputated from diabetes and declining health before finally passing in 1999.
His last album, “New World Order” was released in 1996. Somehow he managed to produce it, despite his paralysis.
The thing that messes me up is when I ponder the total waste and tragedy of the 60’s and the way the whole thing has been chewed up and digested and barfed back into our mouths like the applesauce baby food so called recollections of conventional wisdom like “Forrest Gump” and “The Greatest Generation” make it out to be. You forget how much hate there was out there, how they played dirty, and used every tool in their toolbox to discredit and destroy any leader who came up to challenge the way things were. And if they couldn’t scare you into quitting, and if they couldn’t destroy your credibility, they just killed you. You can pick and peck about this one and that one, but just step back and look at how many poor bastards somehow wound up dead. Civil rights workers found dead. Churches burned down. Car accidents. Plane crashes. Its hard to figure, but it sure seems like a lot of the assassinations and mysterious deaths involved people of a particular persuasion.
The twist is that some of the ideas that were revolutionary back then are commonplace or even coopted today. Civil rights for all races. Equal rights for women. Environmental consciousness.
And while we still have work to do on all these fronts, no one any longer even tries to deny the objective. You don’t have no more Maddox or Wallace barring the doors to schools to keep the blacks out and down. Some might say the struggle has moved to a more abstract and cynical level, where as King said “they wrap themselves in the garments of love, and say that they’re loving, when they’re really hating.” And I’ll come out and say it: Haley Barbour and Pat Robertson are no different from Maddox or Wallace, just craftier liars with even less integrity, if that’s possible.
But in the end Mayfield remained or at least seemed hopeful. “It’s a new day,” he said, and his voice calling for “a change of mind of the human race” just breaks my heart, thinking that he was singing, laying there in his hospital bed.
“Right on brother, Right on for the darkness.”