The Digging Up of the Past...

Preface: For the quoted material, the word “Negro” and “Negroes” are exchanged with Native Black American...

This is not to change or diminish the work of Schomburg or the contributing authors of the book, “The New Negro”, from which the quotes are derived, but from the vantage point of empowerment that gives less credence to archaic words that describe Black Americans but also have limiting and negative connotations. 

“Though it is orthodox to think of America as the country where it is unnecessary to have a past, what is a luxury for the nation as a whole becomes a prime social necessity for the Native Black American. For him, a group tradition must supply compensation for persecution, a pride for race and antidote for prejudice.” (Schomburg, 1925)

Where does the past go for those who deem it unnecessary? Is it forgotten to the point of creating an unmoored future? Are those who see the luxury of not having a past doomed to pay the steep cost of reliving it in the future? At what point are connections made so that the karmic destinies are not experienced, which are born put of the inability to learn from a past they feel unnecessary to have, let alone remember? 

The Native Black American does not have the luxury of letting go of the past because it is such an integral part of their present condition. It offers the reasoning for their socio-economically deprived existence on this iteration of the American plantation, and offers the blueprint to the future dynamic they will be forced to endure. How, then, can we expand the understanding to look to the group tradition to supply compensation for persecution? How can this lead to pride of race, and can this be the antidote for the unyielding prejudice they continue to experience? 

“History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generations must repair and offset… Gradually as the study of the Native Black Americans’ past has come out of the vagaries of rhetoric and propaganda and become systematic and scientific, three outstanding conclusions have been established: 

1. The Native Black American has been throughout the centuries of controversy an active collaborator, and often a pioneer, in the struggle for his own freedom and advancement. This is true to a degree which makes it the more surprising that it has but been recognized earlier. 
2. That the virtue of their being regarded as something “exceptional,’even by friends and well-wishers, Native Black Americans of attainment and genius have been unfairly disassociated from the group, and group credit lost accordingly. 
3. The remote racial origins of the Native Black American, far from being what the race and the world have been given to understand, offer a record of credible group achievement when scientifically viewed, and more important still,. That they are of vital general interest because of their bearing upon the beginnings and early development of human culture. 

-Yogabrofessor

Locke, A. L. (1925). The New Negro: An Interpretation. Cosimo Classics.