Black History Reading Month

Black History Month is “ridiculous,” Morgan Freeman contends, because “black history is American history.” Black History Month also tends to ignore certain works that merit attention year round. Consider, for example,  Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany, by Hans Massaquoi, son of a Liberian father and German mother.

“In their many bloody clashes for dominance in Germany,” wrote Massaquoi, “the Nazis and Commies were virtually indistinguishable. Both were totalitarians, ever ready to brutalize to crush resistance to their respective ideologies.”

After World War II,  Massaquoi came to America on a student visa and in Harlem, “I saw neighborhoods peopled by active working-class folks not much different from those in my old Hamburg neighborhood. The only difference was that everyone – from the mailman to the barber to the police man to the garbage collector to the occasional big shot in a Cadillac convertible – was black.”

In the U.S. Army, “we black recruits got on well with our white comrades, and many interracial friendships formed.” In a military band, “we and our white buddies were like peas in a pod” and “our new integrated band not only looked like one harmonious ensemble, but it sounded better than either of the two groups had sounded alone.” Massaquoi encountered racists in the United States, but he never equates the United States and Nazi Germany. That is the default position on the left, which upheld the Soviet Union as the promised land.

Black Stalinist Frank Marshall Davis – disguised as happy-drunk poet “Frank” in Dreams from My Father – contended that the USSR had eliminated racism, but he never lived there. Consider the account of Robert Robinson, author of Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union.

Robinson observed the Communist system “not as a white idealist but as a black man who had been well trained by racism in America to judge the sincerity of a person’s words and deeds. I can say as an expert that one of the greatest myths ever launched by the Kremlin’s propaganda apparatus is that Soviet society is free from racism.”

In 1962, Robinson explained, race prejudice against blacks was “worse than anything I recalled in the United States during the 1920s and without question worse than in the United States after the decade of the 1950s.” Robinson was a skilled toolmaker and inventor but the Soviets addressed letters to “Negro Robert Robinson.”

Fans of Richard Wright (Native Son, Black Boy) might check out his contribution to The God That Failed. According to Wright, in the Communist Party, “a man could not have his say,” and the Party, “felt it had to assassinate me morally merely because I did not want to be bound by its decisions.” As Wright recalled, “I knew that if they held state power I should have been declared guilty of treason and my execution would have followed.” Millions did.

Patrisse Khan-Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, is on record that “We are trained Marxists. BLM fans might check out Marx’s letter to Engels on July 30, 1862:

The Jewish n—-r Lassalle who, I’m glad to say, is leaving at the end of this week, has happily lost another 5,000 talers in an ill-judged speculation. . .

It is now quite plain to me — as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify — that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a n—-r). Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also nigger-like.

Karl Marx was a believer in phrenology, which extrapolates mental ability and character from the shape of the head. To become a member of Marx’s inner circle, Wilhelm Liebknecht had to undergo a phrenological examination. So in Black History Month, just follow the science.