Imagining an alternate Black American history

Get the Point!

Last Friday, I posted the following American history related stream of consciousness on Facebook:

Channeling my old friend and Morehouse Brother Ayinde Waring's "I wonder as I wander" sentiments, sometimes I wonder:

1. What economic shape would the Black community be in today had Reconstruction lasted for, say, 100 years, instead of the 12 short years that it did exist from 1865-1877?

2. How much stronger would Historically Black Colleges and Universities be today had "separate" and 'un'-equal" not been the legislative appropriation customs throughout the Jim Crow era and, in many respects, still today?

Morehouse College circa 1925

3. How powerful would Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma have become if angry white lynch mobs hadn't killed hundreds of Black people, or bombed/razed the wealthy Black district during the 1921 Race Massacre?

Tulsa—before the 1921 massacre

Tulsa's “Black Wall Street” after the massacre…

4. How much further along would intergenerational Black family wealth be today had Black people been able to benefit from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Depression era "Alphabet Soup" programs that put people back to work in the same way as whites? Or, had Black World War II vets been allowed the exact same benefits from the GI Bill as their white comrades in arms?

5. What if Negro League Baseball franchises had merged to compete with Major League Baseball franchises in the 1940s, like the AFL merged with the NFL years later, instead of the best Black baseball players being plucked from the former for the latter? How many billions of dollars would those Negro League franchises now be worth today--and what economic impact would that have had on surrounding the Black communities?

6. What if a 26-year old Dr. Martin Luther King had taken one of several offers to teach philosophy at a liberal arts college up North in 1955—instead of heading south to pastor Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery—and leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott soon thereafter?

7. What if a 36-year old Dr. King, after winning the Nobel Peace Prize and helping secure the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, left the movement to succeed his mentor, Dr. Benjamin Mays, as President of Morehouse College? Would he still be alive today? Would he have become a U.S. representative, senator, or President of the United States?

Dr. King receiving the Nobel Peace Prize

8. How much better politically and socially organized would the Black community be right now had the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover not used COINTELPRO to disrupt leading Black organizations and kill off their leaders like Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Fred Hampton, and Dr. King?

9. I often wonder why in the Deep South it was always the Black public high schools, like Old Lincoln High in Tallahassee, that were closed down, thus turning Black principals into assistant principals and disciplinary deans at newly integrated white public schools—and Black head coaches into assistant coaches, or out the coaching business altogether?

10. In what is now a billion dollar industry, what if FAMU, Grambling, Jackson State, Morgan State, Southern, South Carolina State, and Tennessee State—the top incubators of Black football talent throughout the Jim Crow era—been invited to join the SEC and ACC in the early 1970s, instead of member schools from those leagues moving into the HBCU's fertile Black recruiting grounds like sharks in the water, this only after spending years avoiding playing Black Colleges that maintained vastly superior talent?

The 1961 Black College National Champion Florida A&M Rattlers averaged 51.3 points per game on offense—and gave up an average of 3.0 per game on defense. Pictured in the Miami Herald sports photo above is my dad, #64 Charles Hobbs, a guard/linebacker for the Rattlers…

11. Had he not been slain in 1968, what type of impact would a Dr. King led poor people's campaign have had if the majority of poor and lower middle class white folks in the South realized that they had far more in common with poor and lower middle class Black folks—than they had in common with rich whites and white politicians who used them as pawns in their armies to agitate, berate, beat, and kill Black men, women, and children?

Indeed, sometimes, I wonder...