Come on People

Some years ago, I heard a voice – a commanding voice, a male’s voice, a Black man’s voice – a voice so sure and reassuring that it immediately got my attention. The man’s message was a call to action. I felt like rising up, almost as if I was being called to war.  I haven’t felt that way since Martin Luther King organized the people of Birmingham to protest in the 1960’s.

It was the voice of Dr. Bill Cosby in Newark, New Jersey, forty years and less than a month after the death of Dr. King. He had written a book called Come On People: On the Path from Victims to Victors along with Harvard psychiatrist Alvin F. Poussaint and was touring communities across American to promote the message and stimulate the people to get “on the path from vicitims to victors.” The point of his message was to encourage African Americans to make a better life for their children, their community and for their future. His message was bold - change the way you are raising your kids and teach them to respect themselves and others.  Most fundamentally, the culture of victimhood must end.

For days, I listened to the news on TV and on radio stations trying to find out where to sign up for the next revolution. The media amped up the negativity spouted by Blacks who either disagreed with him or in the way he presented his argument. His voice soon went silenced.

No one was prepared to pick up the baton in the spring of 1968 when it fell from the hands of Dr. King on April 4, the day he was gunned down in Tennessee.

There was no master plan for the next revolution even though Gill Scott-Heron wrote a poem and song about it in 1970; The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. He said of the song in an interview “That song was about your mind. You have to change your mind before you change the way you live and the way you move...The thing that’s going to change people will be something that no one will ever be able to capture on film. It will just be something you see and all of a sudden you realize ‘I’m on the wrong page.”

Cosby’s call was a leap in the right direction: it brought these issues into the open, confronted taboos, and opened the conversation. Yet the conversation has halted. There remains a void in the Black American experience.  Someone has to set aside the excuses once and for all and pick up the baton. We need to come together, find solutions, and start the next 'untelevised' revolution.