How I Abolished Bigotry and Created the Beloved Community: Part Two

"I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land"
Martin Luther King Jr.

Let me tell you. By the end of my first week on the job, my brand new staff had all but succeeded in totally wearing me out. On the inside, emotionally I had become almost completely drained. Nonetheless, I refused to allow anyone to see any aspect of this at all. It certainly would not have served in my favor to do so. It was at the time of the utmost importance that I maintain the perception of complete control. This was a terrible situation desperately in need of reform.

Nonetheless, this was the end of a difficult week for me. Everyday it seemed as if there was someone else who suddenly had something or other that they wanted complain about. But this was more than just a reasonable widespread fear of the unknown. At times, it was downright childish. Most of this confusion amongst my staff was the blatant manifestation of some latent long-held personal dislike of one sort or another; and only now would it all seem to come rising to the surface within the opportune moment of a new face of leadership that had suddenly come on board. It was not at all difficult to see through all of this. Some of the White servers really did not like some of the Blacks in the kitchen; and vice versa. It really did cut both ways. A couple of the straight cooks had a very low tolerance for a number of the gay servers on the floor. What's more, as strange as it may seem, there was an inconspicuously large sentiment of Black upon Black class warfare that appeared to exist between some of the servers and some of the cooks; and it would not take me long at all to fully discover the actually origins of this bizarre phenomenon. Yet, more than anything else, it was the overall ugliness characterizing this myopic swarm of perceptual class, and social antagonism that was simply being revealed. Often, the winning and bickering grew to a fever pitch, and on numerous occasions I was really forced to put my foot down. This restaurant was needlessly hemorrhaging revenue and it was clearly due in large part to a complete lack of professionalism amongst quite a few members of the staff. This was seriously damaging our brand. Change is always difficult for any organization. However, it is during times like these that individuals are tested at the very core of their personalities; as they are called upon to act with straightforward patience, tolerance, and maturity for the benefit of the greater good. Sadly enough, after seven days constant fighting, more than a dozen employees just had to go.

Second only to Marge, who was the oldest member of the staff and the last remaining server from the original opening team, Eric had been a server there for more than three years. Although initially, I found his frequent nightly spats with his long-time lover Steven, who worked the swing shift behind bar, to be rather disturbing, still Eric was a leader in his own right. With him taking charge on the floor, our brand was never to be compromised. This is what was most important to me. A country boy from South Georgia, Jonathan was a big tall White guy who looked like a football player. He had applied for the chef position three months earlier, only to be told that he didn't have the experience. He was forced to settle for a position on the line. It was clear to me that he harbored more than a little resentment after I had become his new supervisor. Truth be told, he was a racist pure and simple. Of this I was sure. However, it was not my job to punish him for his bigotry, as long as he came to work on time and did his job. Not to mention the fact that he was one of the strongest cooks that I had. Along with Sandra, who was the only cook on the line who actually had a culinary degree, there was no need for me to worry about the restaurant when I was away. Sandra gave me comfort for a number of reasons. She was a natural leader and somehow we naturally seemed to have taken to one another almost immediately. As the only female in the back of the house, she appeared to take a rather calm no nonsense strictly professional approach towards the men who worked beside her everyday. Although she had been employed there much longer than 90% of the entire kitchen staff, still her salary was only 77% of the men who did the same job as her. I would soon discover that on more than one occasion, it seems that she was passed over for promotion in favor of a number of men who had variously come and gone; yet obviously had less experience that she did. Soon, this would all change for her, and that Sunday, I was comfortable enough to take the day off.

This was the very first opportunity that I would have to actually venture out and put my feet solidly on the ground in order really see this city for myself. Coming here, the first thing that truly struck me was the vast variety of classic and contemporary architecture that Atlanta has uniquely on display. You will find here everything from rich Victorian homes to huge brash Art Deco sky scrapers and everything else in between. This would seem to betray the legendary magnetic quality of this city. Sandra had enthusiastically implored me to go downtown and to visit the tomb of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This is what I had in mind anyway, so that morning it became a no-brainier. My house was just two blocks away from the West End train station, which itself is just two stops away from the heart of downtown. It was the spring of 2005 and the air that day was fresh and clear. It was pleasant and sunny outside. Someone had told me that it was a nice little walk just about a mile down Auburn Avenue in order to get to the King Center.

By noon, just like millions of other people from around the world, who today are seemingly so eager towards making this determined pilgrimage of virtue, which has made Dr. King's Tomb such an enormous attraction to the entire world, I too began my sojourn in earnest on the corner of Peachtree Street in front of the huge rolling wall of water at Woodruff park. It is here that the journey truly begins high upon the rich summit of a hill that peers down inquisitively into the deep valley of Auburn Avenue.

Two blocks along, I came upon the Atlanta Life Building, which I would quickly discover houses the officers and hosts the activities of a number of the nation's core Civil Rights organizations. These were groups that for the most part would come to be headed by the professed loyal lieutenants of Dr. King. Truth be told, I had always considered them to be altogether a rather strange and conspicuous cabal. During the last days of his life, King had largely been abandoned by those who had once faithfully stood by his side. Amazingly though, this legion of his so called professed lieutenants would only seem to swell remarkably in number the very moment that he transitioned. Today, this group can arguably be called the New Talented Tenth.

Nonetheless, as I traveled along this road now made so famous to the world, as so many do consciously venture here 365 days a year in order to make their pilgrimage in homage of a modern day Prince of Peace; just one block away at Piedmont Ave, I came upon a huge mural featuring an array of historical Black leaders proudly titled 'The Wall of Respect'. Ironically, and to my utmost dismay it was here that I was also to come upon what must have been some of the most aggressive and obnoxious crack dealers in the world. There they stood selling their poison out in the open air to a large and desperate horde; obviously seeking relief from whatever misery that may have been a part their lives. Oddly enough, this was in fact an area that is less than two blocks away from a police station, which stands directly in the shadow of today's Civil Rights establishment. Right then and there I thought to myself: "One can surly judge a preacher by the condition of the neighborhood just outside of their church.

All of a sudden, my mind became somewhat transfixed as I stood for a brief moment simply glaring at this huge mural named The Wall of Respect. It fronts the west side of a restaurant in the heart of Auburn Avenue. Out of the blue, as my eyes quietly surveyed the huge images before me, somehow I was stolen into a deep cinematic trance and was quickly taken away amidst a brilliant flickering montage featuring many of the spectacular highs and lows that had come to accentuate many of the intimate details within the fascinating lives of these half a dozen or so great Black giants in the epic struggle of Africans in America. Soon, I found myself recalling the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey's first few steps in the United States (1914 -1916), as he came to warn his people early on to be mindful of enemy within; that dark caricature of themselves that he would ultimately call: "The Negro's Greatest Enemy". In time, the memory of Paul Robeson's riotous siege at Peekskill New York came to mind. Within the richness of that scene was the memory of him standing tall and defiant while informing the entire world that "An artist must make a choice between slavery and freedom!" Then of course, it must be mentioned, there came to my mind the image of Dr. King expressing that fatal admonition in the year 1961, "I really had no intention of creating a Civil Rights Movement. It has always been my desire to build a [Rainbow] Human Rights Coalition'!" In due course, as I remotely viewed this collective witness in the world, my mind began to aggressively search for hidden clues that just might betray in some way even the slightest evidence of the covert activity that had somehow clandestinely stolen itself into the lives of these great men. Something had surrounded their careers and worked earnestly to silence their voices, only to ultimately arrest the true psychological and economic liberation of Black people.

It was then that something more immediate would come to startle my senses. It was a strong and awful odor which reeked with the profound and commanding stench of death and decay. It reminded me of the smell that is destined to emanate from onions that shall often rot even under the most favorable of climatic conditions; after being left for far too long at the bottom of a pile. The ones at the top are fine of course, yet one needs to be reminded to dutifully attend to the rot below; least it affect the whole bunch. Nonetheless, with a lot of patience and just a little skill in the use of a knife, carefully carving through the multiple layers of decay, one can easily discover that which is left to be salvaged; the rest is of absolutely of no use at all.

In time, the deeper historical relevance of this particular locale hit me like a ton of bricks. This was John Callaway Park at the corner of Piedmont and Auburn Avenue. Westward, just a few feet up the hill and on the left side of the street are the offices of the Atlanta branch of the 100 Black Men of America. This group is a surrogate of an organization called the Boulee'. On May 15, 1904 the Boulee also known as Sigma Pi Phi was founded by Dr. Henry M. Minton in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He did so, he would later reveal, in order "to partake of the tenants of Skull and Bones". In other words, during a time when the greater masses of African Americans had come to find themselves literally in the fight of their lives against lynch mob violence and Jim Crow Apart-Hate governance, decades after slavery had officially come to an end, a small portion of their kind who were amongst the highest elite of their community, sought solely to use their position and affluence in order to mimic the profligate culture of the oppressive elite. One year earlier in 1903, it was here as a professor of Sociology at Atlanta Clarke University, that Dr. W.E.B. Dubois borrowed an idea from Henry L. Morehouse and turned it into one of the most powerful concepts of leadership in American history. "The purpose of the education of the Talented Tenth Dubois wrote, is to keep the best amongst us, away from the worst!" For better or worse, this single concept would come to cast a deafening shadow upon the future struggle of Africans in America for more than a century.

Nonetheless, the spot upon which I was standing happened to be one block away from the Atlanta Life Building. Born in slavery in 1858, with but one year of formal education, Alonzo Herndon had reputedly risen to become Atlanta's first Black millionaire. Both Alonzo Herndon and his son Henry Bumstead Herndon would attend the inaugural conference of the Niagara Movement in 1905, and just months afterwards Alonzo founded the Atlanta Life Insurance Company. After more than a century, this institution remains the single largest Black-owned stockholder insurance company in the entire country. Today, this locale is the storied front yard of quite a number of organizations all of which for the most part claim their legacy as the extended fateful coterie of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This collective is a major fraction of an even larger national configuration of the African American elite that are actually today the New Talented Tenth.

Coming back to my senses, I traveled just a little further down the block into the valley, where less than one half of a mile away I suddenly came upon the world famous King Center, and the Tomb itself. That year, in 2005 Dr. King's Tomb became one of the world's most traveled destinations. At the moment it would appear that during such a humbling age of cataclysmic moral uncertainty, witnessed initially in the horror of that fateful day of September 11, 2001, and then in the senseless war in Iraq, the very notion of what it actually means to be an American, had all of a sudden been thrown roughly open to question. In just the last few years, one could surly witness a steady rising cavalcade, as from there up upon the hill came raining down the anxious multitudes of determined souls traveling in earnest. They came as if in search of a true icon of the utmost in moral fortitude; right here on Auburn Avenue. People from every corner of the earth, from lands near and far, began coming to Atlanta in remarkably increasing numbers in order to visit the international city of the American South, for this or for whatever reason. Nevertheless, they were sure to dedicate at least a portion of their stay as if in search for a universal symbol of spiritual probity and selfless love. Without a second though, they made their way down into the valley and through what was until quite recently a modern day Jericho road. So determined were they to visit the final resting place of a leader now newly crowned by their very own solemn efforts as a true saint of this remarkable age.

The horrendous smell that had so awakened my senses moments earlier at the Wall of Respect, was none other than that which had been nurtured out of the now deeply ingrained collective self-utterance of a concentrated social detritus. It had obviously sustained itself throughout the political missteps of Civil Rights integration, forged multiculturalism, spurious racial harmony, individualism, selfishness and greed. Sadly enough, it had come to conquer a fragile battered community that had finally after decades of neglect given itself over to economic and social decay. Afterwards for months, I came back to this same area only to watch as a shopkeeper nearby would spend an hour or so each morning fatefully dousing the concrete sidewalk in front of his shop with gallons and gallons of water, detergent, and bleach, in an altogether fruitless attempt to remove this commanding stench from his property. No matter how hard he scrubbed, all of his efforts were in vain. The odor had seeped permanently into the pavement deep underfoot, sentencing the pores of granite and rock to an enduring reminder of moral, social, economic, and political blight. This park, which is but a tiny seemingly inconsequential half acre at a discrete intersection of this amazing American city, actually betrays a profound historical metaphor. For African Americans, it remains a rather active intergenerational crime scene.

Over the years it has become the sordid common-ground for the illicit co-mingling of homelessness, destitution, Black self-hatred, nihilism, misogyny, and self denial. During that spring of 2005, with a large crack-zombie population, it had become quite a unique and a rather indiscreet open air den. It became the first stop for a heaping multitude that lived and breathed with a grossly deformed and often totally amputated spirit; as if truly believing that there never existed any prosthetic for them. It was a pessimism that fed off of their hopelessness and despair. It was to become a part of the vast social underbelly fronting a modern city and a cabal of the New Talented Tenth who have been groomed for decades to care little if nothing at all for the greater masses of their own people; especially with respect to the poorest of the poor.

This sorrowful sentiment of acute class warfare amongst Atlanta's Black population became extraordinarily pronounced during the years of World War Two (1941-1945) (Ferguson, The Socialization). The promise of jobs, upward mobility, and the enormous influx of labor moving into the city from the rural areas of the state, worked together to produce a shameless backlash from the city's celebrated Black elite. "These people are not fit for citizenship!" appeared to be the universal human cry. The power elite reacted to this influx of a poorer class of their own people as if it was their own tentative grasp upon power that had suddenly come under seize.

However, during that fateful moment just a few years ago, it was there at that bleak and dreadful intersection that had obviously been neglected and left devoid of hope for so many years, that I would ultimately discover the true betrayal of Black America. It was not hard to discover within the glaring duplicity of that appalling locale, just who The Negroes Greatest Enemy actually was. It was shocking but true. What the bombs that were dropped on Black Wall Street, Tulsa Okalahoma in May of 1921 were fitfully unable to accomplish, one hundred years of Talented Tenth class warfare had finally overcome, and Sweet Auburn was sweet no more. Today, admittedly it is an area slowly on the rebound for sure. But, it seems like only yesterday that it was a community lying prostrate to a self-inflicted act of ritual suicide, and it was there for the entire world to witness where the truly destitute had come to sell their souls.

Shrewdly promoting itself as 'The City to Busy to Hate', Atlanta has always contained an enormous reservoir of Black upon Black class warfare. This would explain the never-ending specter of class bigotry that I would immediately come to witness as a prominent lingering feature of the culture of this city. It would explain the terrible state of customer service that is often curiously on display. Of course the employees of Marta (Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) appear anxious in their efforts to put a gracious face upon the city. But, it is how they treat the workers that they encounter everyday that is important. Customer service begins in the Back of the House. This would come to inform a part of my understanding of just why we have struggled for far too long in this world. Malcolm X had it right when he said: 'There shall be no Black/White unity until there is Black/Black unity. This would ultimately become central to my understanding of just what was actually going on with my new staff. Finding a way to get a handle on this would become a large part of my mission in the immediate days to come.

Such as this plague remains steadfast upon this city, it should come as no surprise that even until this day, although cleverly hidden from public view, a small homeless crack-zombie population of acutely drug addicted poor and destitute women and men live their lives directly under a bridge not more than a stone's throw away from King's Tomb. Yes it is true. I know this because I have seen them there. Their home was an actual township rudely constructed of cardboard and a city's shameful disregard. It had been peopled for years by an unconsidered and no longer counted homeless population that for all intents and purposes seems to have fallen way below the radar of municipal concern; as if existing as a part of humanity that has actually fallen off the planet. That is of course, if this is what you are willing to believe. Nonetheless, they were stolen away decades ago after becoming caught up in America's dark alliance of Contra Rebels and crack cocaine. Today, in the very shadow of our beloved Prince of Peace, this has become their new home.

Isn't it is rather fitting that we might find him here; as he did live his life with such a profound dedication to the least of these? It was a dedication that would ultimately lead him into very the heart of some of this nation's most wretched avenues of social blight and moral decay. Here his body now rest nobly entombed. His mighty spirit has risen once again from out of the ashes of history like an African Bennu Bird; hovering fearlessly above what are now twice-cremated remains. Today, his sweet butter love for humanity washes over all who visit a city that has sadly lost its way. There he lies solemnly crouched beside the 'disposable people' knowing full well that there shall be no Poor People's Campaign for them. Yet, overlooking this vast valley in the midst of some of the most dark and barren shadows of social neglect and political misrepresentation, here his spirit rises defiant of death and decay; like an everlasting symbol of healing and redemption. He hovers here over the village in an age unlike no other. Perhaps it is that through his witness we shall discover many of the answers to the planet's bitter and painful yearning for peace and tranquility which resounds so fervently in our world today; moment by moment, every day that we live. He only asked that we would truly build the Beloved Community; right here, right now, right in his very own backyard. Jesus perfected suffering and he perfected love; and it is here in this land out of the moorings of a tortured Black mass of humanity, that yet another savior would come into the world knowing Jesus' pain all too well. It is as if he were a prophet now cometh to teach us how to perfect love. For the entire world to witness his spirit has risen once again. They have indeed been watching, and they do surly visit King's Tomb.