“Never Forget!”

By Doc Bass

Special To

THE CALL

“Why America may go to hell” is the sermon Dr. King never preached. Had he lived 72 hours longer with all he knew of its egregious sins, it would have been quite clear why the “non-violent” Dr. King his enemies preferred to hear planned to preach it on Sunday, April 7, 1968.

These days, frantic soccer moms would have moved earth and sky to ban that speech and bleach school curricula so that redacted and sanitized versions of those sins would go down as the truth of American history. Then there’s that whispering, serpentine voice constantly nagging children of the slaughtered to “Let it go!” “Get over it!” “Quit playing the victim!” All of it sounds eerily like that hissing noise a viper makes while recoiling for another strike at its victim.

Seventeen years into a new millennium, and as it coiled around Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, the embodiment of a new generation of vipers hissed, “Jews will not replace us!” To a teenaged Nick Fuentes, who was proudly bound in that coil, “young white men” were to become “America’s secret sauce.” After striking and killing young Heather Heyer on August 12, 2017, they all slithered back into their dark and deadly dens.

As nearly half a dozen souls ultimately perished in the wake of their attack at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, that new generation of “thugs” and “Bad Boys” took center stage. On May 14, 2022, after driving 300 miles to Buffalo, New York, an 18-yearold “domestic terrorist,” Payton Gendon, slaughtered nearly a dozen black shoppers at a local grocery. With more slaughter on the burner as part of a threatened “civil war,” the media amplified that hissing as the spit hit the fan over the now infamous prethanksgiving “dinner” at the Trump strikeforce headquarters.

A fully grown bigot is at the table, now, where private chatter hisses much like that which warned of “black slaughter” throughout the first half of America’s 20th century. “Uprisings” that scarred up the second half became prologue to a gritty historical narrative that revisionists hope to tweak, if not ban altogether, fearing their fragile posterity might somehow wake up “woke.”

But thought-leaders of a new era are in the fray, now, speaking truth to power and translating the sins of the 1968, “best-seller” Kerner Report into “gen-z” twitter babel. It was published a few weeks before Dr. King’s murder set off uprisings in over 100 American cities. The 426-page Report’s position was that “what the Negro can never forget is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto.” As The Smithsonian’s Alice George put it 50 years after 1967’s “urban American turmoil,” it was “white racism, not black anger” that turned the key to unlock it.

How “bad policing practices,” she wrote, “a flawed justice system…poor or inadequate housing, high unemployment, voter suppression,” and other forms of systemic racism helped ignite a violent uprising in America was the Kerner Commission’s mystery to solve. It had to show how it caused 43 deaths in Detroit, 26 in Newark, and even more in 23 other charred and smoking cities.

San Francisco faded from memory as part of 1919’s “Red Summer” of slaughter, with shooting, burning, and lynching in dozens of cities coast to coast: Remember Bisbee, Arizona? Elaine and El Dorado, Arkansas? How about Omaha, Chicago, Longview, Vicksburg, Ellisville or Pickens, Mississippi? Nah. Maybe Montgomery, Alabama, Bogalusa, Louisiana; Charleston, South Carolina, Lake City, Florida, and seven cities in Georgia? Heard about Norfolk and D.C., Knoxville, Tennessee, Corbin, Kentucky, Wilmington, Delaware, and New London, Connecticut?

Depending on the narrator, we forget that, according to Jeffrey Robinson’s “Chronicle of Racism in America,” before Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” was torched by murdering, white mobs,

it hosted 600 businesses, 21 churches, 30 grocery stores, 21 restaurants, 2 movie theaters, a hospital, bank, post office, schools, libraries, law offices, a bus transit, and 6 private airplanes.

For complex reasons, some victims chose to forget, “destroying records; refusing even to talk about it.” Some prefer “riot” to “massacre,” as if to absolve the guilty of their treachery and to absorb some of it themselves in confession of shared guilt. Whatever informs this awkward paradigm also feeds the notion that America’s sins of racism have somehow all been washed away.

The evil symbiosis in it all, rather, is the infectious legacy of a now deceased thoroughbred segregationist, a former 100-year-old Senator from Edgefield, South Carolina – a “bastion of the most unregenerate slaveholders,” wrote Budiansky (2008), “in the entire

South.” In its deepest and most desolate parts, “paid killers operated with near impunity;” where “Black men were hunted down with dogs and shot like wild beasts,” he wrote, by so-called ‘bushwhackers’. Hissing noises coming from Fuentes, as a racist influencer in his prime, coiled in the “dark corners of the internet,” is a curdling reminder of the devilish sound of baying dogs, “bushwhackers” and such ilk.

The Southern Poverty Law Center cites Fuentes as “the youngest person ever to speak at the annual American Renaissance Conference -a “multi-day orgy of race pseudoscience and white nationalism.” It gives his call for the U.S. military to be unleashed upon black communities plenty of space to resonate with other sympathizers, in the halls of Congress or in the streets of constituent cities. As he edges closer to a seat of mainstream political power, he becomes more of a threat on the mic than on those streets, where, as we’ve painfully learned, gangs of new age “bushwhackers” are coiled, awaiting some ominous signal from headquarters to spring into action.

Just in case we forgot, it’s probable the Reverend Martin Luther King’s muted sermon for April 7, 1968, called out America’s war in Vietnam as “a racist adventure that was taking the Black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.” His fervor would have doubtless been fueled by a range of historical terrors