Congrats to Penn Stater Stephen “Clark Kent” Nedoroscik for his clutch balance beam performance, which lifted the USA Olympic gymnastics team to a bronze medal in Paris. The last time a U.S. men’s gymnastics team medaled Stephen was barely out of diapers. He is one of many Penn Staters at these games.
As of this writing, the USA leads in total medal count. We celebrate the skill, guts and diversity of our U.S. team. Every ethnicity, race, religion and social persuasion of the world’s peoples are represented. Our country’s strength rests on pillars of opportunity, tenacity and cultural diversity. The path to this place of cultural enlightenment was paved by millions of stories.
During the Depression, my father’s uncle, Willie Dixon, emigrated from white supremacy infected Vicksburg, Mississippi, seeking a better life and a new home. He escaped from a prison work camp, where he had been falsely imprisoned for vagrancy. To replace slavery in the South, a brutal system of forced incarceration created a cheap labor pool to harvest cotton, America’s primary cash crop.
After a brief period of reconstruction, Black Americans had been disinherited and disenfranchised. Less than 2% of those eligible to vote in Mississippi were registered. Women had won the vote only a few years before. Black women were doubly burdened by systems of racism and sexism cemented into place by heinous enforcement mechanisms like Jim Crow segregation, share cropping and lynching. Thousands of people, mostly African Americans, have been lynched in the U.S. since the Civil War. Nearly 700 were from Mississippi.
My father left the South because he saw his best friend lynched. I have met five victims of lynch mobs. This brutality is what Uncle Willie fled.
He came North to Chicago where millions had migrated, Blacks from the South, whites from Europe, Asians from the East. They seeded themselves throughout the blossoming nation. They built the railroads and highways, worked the factories, manned the slaughterhouses, tilled the fields, nurturing their dreams of a better opportunity for their children and grandchildren.
Uncle Willie brought more with him than memories of pain. He brought stories of our people’s struggle for freedom and their dreams of a chance to build a better life. He told those stories through music. At Chess Records, Uncle Willie, Muddy Waters and other immigrants — Black and white — birthed into existence a new sound, the Chicago Blues. Midwifed out of country blues, it gave birth to rock ‘n’ roll, which allowed other immigrants to sing their tales of freedom.
We have been invited here to Holy Ground, the International Black Theatre Festival in Winston Salem, North Carolina to witness the retelling of Uncle Willie’s journey, through the saga/play, “Blues is the Roots.” Many sangomas and griots have gathered to sing songs and chant epics about the struggles and odysseys of a lost but found people. We are the children and grandchildren of those who ventured into the swamps of America looking for gardens of possibilities.
Today, we are congregated in this newly created place, where Black girls can hold hands with white girls and cruise down the Seine waving our American flag. Where white boys can embrace Black boys celebrating the mutually earned victory for our country. Where we, as people, an American people, can stand behind/together, a Black/Asian woman, child of immigrants who may/will become President of the United States.
Sisters and brothers, I weep, not out of the pain from the past but from the joy of the moment and the hope of the future. We are a blessed people. We have a ways to go but like the prophet said, “I have been to the mountaintop. I have seen the promised land. We, as a people will get to the promised land.”
Thank you, Stephen. And welcome home Uncle Willie.
Charles Dumas is a lifetime political activist, a professor emeritus from Penn State, and was the Democratic Party’s nominee for U.S. Congress in 2012. He was the 2022 Lion’s Paw Awardee and Living Legend honoree of the National Black Theatre Festival. He lives with his partner and wife of 50 years in State College.
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