Dynamite Growing in America

 

 

In concert with the violence being visited upon black people, permitted by the American government…, the ghettos of America are manufacturing men and women who are becoming more pathological, and far more capable of violence, than the system of oppression in which they are being victimized and bled of hope. The nightmare that America has visited upon the lives of these people shall boomerang, and they will be more inhuman, more insane, than all the years of terror and violence that will have produced them. When this happens America will be struck dumb, outraged. Local, state and national militia will be dispatched to the scene but the scene will be everywhere. White men will be at a complete loss to understand why so many black people have gone mad.

Calvin C. Hernton was a writer who contributed to the Black Arts Movement (c. 1960-1970’s). In his essay “Dynamite Growing out of Their Skulls,” Hernton predicts a time when African Americans will become overwhelmed with the violence and discrimination enacted upon them. They are dynamites fueled by anger and pain, and an event will make them spark and explode with violence.

The riots in Ferguson reminded me of Hernton’s essay. African Americans across the country are aware of the discriminatory treatment they receive. One in three black males can expect to go to prison in their lifetime, and black offenders receive longer sentences than white offenders. The killing of unarmed African Americans was a spark for many who were overwhelmed with the anger and frustration of being mistreated by the American system. When blacks in Ferguson felt that the system failed them in enacting justice for the killing of Michael Brown, they were consumed by their rage and entered a state of madness expressed through riots. Their reaction was a glimpse of the madness that Hernton predicted in his essay. He wrote, “Violence, only violence, smoldering within the dark pits of the psyche, will at once be the tool of liberation as well as the experience which will recreate a sense of manhood and human worth within the souls of black folk.”

Do you feel that the riots in Ferguson were justifiable? Not morally justifiable in the way that western thought teaches us. But that after enduring centuries of oppression and still being haunted by the remnants of social and institutional racism, African Americans are reaching their level of tolerance; and the anger that they are harboring needs a release. If social, political and economic changes are not implemented that anger will explode into violence.

 

“Nothing will stop the blacks, except to kill them. Freedom will not appeal to them, for it will be an irrelevant thing—everything you might offer them will be irrelevant, for how do you give a people back their manhood, their souls? These things must be taken back in the same way that they were lost—they have to be taken back!”

Do you believe that Hernton's prediction for America will come true, even if it is in a less extreme form? How do we prevent that outcome?