A disunified Black community unity lends to political chaos

Get the Point!

An engaging conversation that I had with my Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity Brothers over a meal following the Sixth Annual James Coleman Back-to-School Bookbag giveaway led me to think deeply about how Black people, in the year 2025, relate to each other.

A Brother holding a sign at a 2023 Tallahassee protest march launched from historic Bethel Baptist Church!

During the conversation, I received confirmation that there are several highly placed Black political figures and lobbyists in Florida who don't have a deep concern about the future of Florida A&M University, the state's sole public HBCU, “because they didn't attend FAMU and are not Rattlers.”

When I was growing up, I naively believed that to a great extent, Black people were mostly the same and cared about the same issues; my naivete was due to the fact that the Southside of Tallahassee, the city where I spent most of my youth, was predominantly Black and contained several middle class neighborhoods that sat adjacent to poorer neighborhoods and three public housing projects. Which meant that our predominantly Black public schools were filled with kids that looked the same, played at the same parks and on the same youth teams, and grew up together with the same basic lessons that as Black people, we had to be “twice as good” as our young white contemporaries to make it in life.

Looking back, there was awareness, to be sure, that some of us came from families with more financial resources than others and on occasion, it led to some cruel jokes during “cracking” sessions about the clothes someone wore, the type of house someone lived in, or whether they paid full fare for lunch or ate at a reduced or free rate. I still cringe at the last part, the lunch tickets, because in a nation that spent and still spends billions on high tech weapons, the idea that all kids can't be fed at school for free boggled my mind then, and still boggles my mind as Republicans, like President Donald Trump, threaten to eliminate funding for such programs on the federal level.

As to the jokes, I remember when my family moved to Tallahassee from Maryland that I was cracked on mercilessly at Jake Gaither Park for “talking proper” or “sounding like a Cracker,” so much so that while I didn't realize that I was doing it, I quickly adapted and adopted both the cadence and form of Southern vernacular so well that I became “bilingual.” Meaning, when my elementary Language Arts teachers asked me to go to the board and choose the correct verb form, I instinctively knew to write “The children should have gone to the store,” while also understanding that outside of the classroom and on the playground, “The churren should have went to the store” was the universally accepted Ebonics alternative.

A few Tallahassee Alumni Kappas and Kappa League mentees following Saturday's Sixth Annual James Coleman Bookbag giveaway at Bond Elementary School on Tallahassee's Southside…

Every now and then, the cracking sessions would lead to some serious fisticuffs but for the most part, the cracks seemed to roll off of our backs. And I use “seem” because as we have matured and engage in “back in the day” conversations at reunions and cookouts, it is easy to see that some of us, even now, still carry scars from childhood that may never truly heal. Which is rather sad when considering that I and most of my friends knew even back in the 80’s that Black people were not the enemy, and that systemic racism, even when we had yet to learn that phrase, was the enemy.

Case in point: my youth league football teams, the Jake Gaither Giants, and our Southside rivals like the Bond Lions, Myers Park Mustangs, and Lee Park Colts, were filled with boys who would grow up to become successful in multiple fields of professional endeavor, including several who eventually became college and NFL football players!

But I will never forget that our helmets and equipment as provided by the Tallahassee Parks and Recreation Department were below standard when compared to the teams from Winthrop Park on the city's wealthy (and predominantly white) Northside. When we would line up for the ritual pregame weigh-ins, 30 or so young Black Gaither Giants, holding what we used to call “suicide” helmets—ones with little internal padding and protection—would stand opposite from 30 or so young white boys mostly holding replica Florida State University helmets and thick thigh and knee pads that indicated they weren't hand me downs!

Pictured here is one of my oldest friends, neighbors, and Gaither Park teammate, Joel Musgray, from one of our team picture days in the early 80’s—with his “suicide helmet” resting in front. Somewhere at some family members house are my old youth league photos that went missing after my Dad died in 2000 👀, so I had to borrow my boy Musgray’s pic to hammer home this Hobbservation point!

While we enjoyed winning any game, there was a particular sense of satisfaction from beating down teams like Winthrop who clearly were far better equipped than we, even though some of us hailed from solidly middle or upper middle class Black homes. We understood, even as 10-13 year old Black boys, that there were rungs on the upward economic mobility ladder that were colored by skin color, and that our focus needed to be on ensuring that we became so successful and so supportive of each other, that our kids would someday have the best equipment that money could buy as well!

That's why I couldn't help but ask myself this weekend where did we, as Black people, lose that sense of collective concern about each other and our institutions? When did, “I got mine—bump yours” become a viable position among our people?

When I was an undergrad student at Morehouse and later as a grad student at FAMU, we cared about ALL of our sister HBCUs and knew that what was impacting one, ultimately impacted us all! So to hear that some Black folks in positions to help repel attacks against FAMU’s autonomy figuratively shrugged their shoulders and exhaled a “meh” because they went to the University of Florida, my law school alma mater, Florida State, or Central Florida, is disconcerting when realizing that none of them would have been able to step foot on those campuses if FAMU alumni like Broadus Hartley and Patricia Stephens Due, and Morehouse Men like Reverends C.K. Steele and King Solomon DuPont, among others, hadn't led the fight to end Jim Crow segregation in Florida!

Yes, I know that even the notion of being “Black” is a form of fiction constructed by Europeans to propel themselves as a higher caste, if you will, over people from Africa, Asia, and the Americas during the Colonial Age. I also know that whether on the Mother Continent or the Diaspora, Black people have never been monolithic in language, customs, religion, or political beliefs.

But I also know that at one point in time, the tie that bound Blacks together was the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, segregation laws and customs throughout the Western Hemisphere, and the fact that white supremacists didn't care whether you were from Jamaica, like Marcus Garvey, or Georgia, like Dr. Martin Luther King, they hated you because of your skin color, and Blacks banded together in large numbers to show that the content of our character was stronger than their vitriol and hate.

And with the Heritage Foundation and Trump administration fueling a return to legal discrimination against our people, I submit that the “I didn't go to FAMU or the HBCUs,” or “I don't associate with Blacks who went to predominantly white institutions” type of skinfolks had better figure out the need for Black unity and alliances with progressives of all races before it's too late to turn the tide against Jim Crow 2.0!