Beequin

Open Letter to a Young Negro (by Jesse Owens)

All black men are insane…. Almost any living thing would quickly go mad under the unrelenting exposure to the climate created and reserved for black men in a white racist society…. I am secretly pleased about the riots. Nothing would please the tortured man inside me more than seeing bigger and better riots everyday.

Those words were spoken by Bob Teague to his young son in Letters to a Black Boy. He wrote these letters to “alert” his son to “reality” so that the boy wouldn’t be caught off guard—unprepared and undone.

Are his words true?

Does a black man have to be just about insane to exist in America?

Do all Negroes feel a deep twinge of pleasure every time we see a white man hurt and a part of white society destroyed?

Is reality so stinking terrible that it’ll grab your heart out of your chest with one hand and your manhood with the other if you don’t meet it armed like a Nazi storm trooper?

Bob Teague is no “militant.” He’s a constructive, accomplished journalist with a wife and child. If he feels hate and fear, can you ever avoid feeling it?

Whether it’s Uncle Tom or ranting rioter doing the talking today, you’re told that you’ll have to be afraid and angry. The only difference is that one tells you to hold it in and the other tells you to let it out. Life is going to be torture because you’re a Negro, they all say. They only differ on whether you should grin and bear it or take it out on everyone else. But National Urban League official, Black Panther leader or any of the in-betweens all seem to agree on one thing today: “We must organize around our strongest bond—our blackness.”

Is that really our strongest bond? Isn’t there something deeper, richer, better in this world than the color of one’s skin?

Let me tell you the answer to that. Let me prove it to you so strong and deep that you’ll taste it for all the days to come. Let me throw my arm...