Born to Battle Bigotry

Birthday Hobbservations!

Happy Birthday to Me!

Today I celebrate my 49th birthday, and I am so very grateful that God gifted me to my parents, Charles and Vivian Hobbs, early that Sunday morning in 1972!

I was born at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, a facility that had only fully integrated following the closing of the Florida A&M University Hospital in December of 1971. When I recite this fact, some are amazed by the reality that the vestiges of segregation still remained in Florida's Capital City only months before I made my debut!

Chuckie Hobbs circa ‘72; Chuck Hobbs last week

Another trivia tidbit is the fact that today is also “Emancipation Day” in Florida. On May 20, 1865, the Emancipation Proclamation was read to enslaved Blacks on the steps of the Knott House—about two miles from the very hospital that I was born in 1972.

Thus the pride that I always take when my mother says that I was born “with a head full of hair, yelling loudly” with my tiny fists balled up; I suppose I was born ready to fight—and so I do in my advocacy of the truth within my articles, blogs, and podcasts!

Another Black man lynched by cops

Barely a day after I posted video footage of Andrew Brown, 42, being lynched by the police, I arose this morning to watch footage of Ronald Greene, 49, being lynched by the state troopers in Louisiana back in 2019. State troopers, I remind, who lied about Greene's cause of death in their reports and quite likely would have gotten away with the lies but for body cameras.

I will continue to push for the end of qualified immunity for police officers across America. Trust me when I declare that if officers know that they or their insurance carriers will be held personally liable in civil court for excessive force, I truly believe that the "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality that finds so many unarmed Black men, women, and children killed by cops will drop precipitously!

So, my hope is that we will all continue to use our voices locally and nationally to call for this reform measure, and may we continue to press the point that the police are hired to "protect and serve," not harass and kill at will. 

UNC axes professor over 1619 Project

It has been quite the spring for journalist/author Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize winning writer who was one of the leading voices of the New York Times “1619” history project. First, she was formally announced as a new professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill right before earning an honorary doctor of humane letters from Morehouse College this past Sunday.

Professor Jones at Morehouse College

Yesterday, UNC announced that Jones would not receive tenure appointment, a move that came after conservatives on UNC's campus and within state leadership decried Jones's work on the history project.

Let's call this for what it is—systemic white supremacy in full effect mode! Show me an American who has problems with the 1619 Project, and I will show you an American who prefers the sanitized, white-washed version of American history that fails to call into full account the legacy of systemic racism and global white supremacy on the development of this nation. Most of these detractors have not read one full page of any of the 1619 articles, but white privilege is such that those who exercise it don't feel the need to read anything that they "heard" disparages their ancestors in any way, shape, or form. Which is interesting, I contend, because not one 1619 article—or any Hobbservation about the past, is "revising" history. Rather, the project, and I, seek to tell the whole truth about events that are usually written and taught in a very skewed manner.

For example, it is not enough to laud Thomas Jefferson's words in the Declaration of Independence about God given "inalienable rights" to seek "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" without delving deeply into the nearly 500 enslaved Blacks that he owned who were wholly incapable of pursuing any of the above. A number, I remind, that included his enslaved mistress (and half-sister by law) Sally Hemings, with whom he fathered several children. Similarly, it is not enough to recount Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation that freed enslaved Blacks without also providing evidence in the form of his letters and news accounts that prove that Lincoln found Blacks to be "inherently inferior" to whites, and that the so-called “Great Emancipator” wanted all Blacks deported to Cuba or Africa!

While the above are but two examples, far too many Americans lack even a basic comprehension of these simple historical truths to have a credible conversation—let alone a debate! Thus when the opponents of these truths are powerful politicos who prefer Blacks to be meek and docile "Yessa Massa" or "America shole been good to meeeee" types, then the suppression of truths about what was in America leads to suppression of truths about what is in America at this very moment!

Professor Jones would have been a marvelous addition to the UNC staff, but methinks she would be an even better addition to the faculty at North Carolina A&T, North Carolina Central, or any number of America's Historically Black Colleges and Universities where truth remains the primary aim in teaching and research in every field of human endeavor.

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