My People Are Rising (2 page)

I want to express my appreciation to Anthony Arnove and Haymarket Press for rec
ognizing the importance and value of
My People are Rising
. I could not have asked for a better editor in Caroline Luft, who seemed to know about everything from football to music to politics. Her patience and commitment to the project were invaluable.

I thank my family for always being available for information as well as inspiration. My mother allowed me to call her day and night to ask her questions—at times redundant—about our family history and her memories of the turbulent years of the '60s and '70s. My brothers, Elmer and Michael, and my sister, Joanne, provided ever-present support. My cousin Mark shared so much valuable information about my father's side of the family. I thank my children—Aaron Patrice, Nisaa Laketa, Venishia, Aziza, Asha, and Zain—for their joyous curiosity about their dad's writing a book, and for their love and strength. Also in my heart are my grandkids Fela, Iyanna, Grace, Natasha, Daisia, Syrena, Miko, and Taliyah, and my great-grandchildren, twins Xamaria and Xavier, for the hope and peace they bring into this world of uncertainty.

And the one person who, above all, helped me and cajoled me in making this book worthy of publication is my partner, Farah Nousheen. For the past seven years we have worked together on this project as if we were one, even while she was immersed in completing her BA and master's degrees, and in post–9/11 activism in the South Asian community.

Lastly and very importantly, I express my utmost gratitude to all my friends, comrades, and the people of Seattle, especially those who kept on asking me, year after year, “Hey, Aaron, when's your book comin' out?” At last, I have an answer.

Our Family Journey Begins

The Dixon family. Back row, left to right: Mommy, Poppy, Joanne. Front row, left to right: me, Michael, Elmer. Chicago, summer 1964.

1

Ancestors

Southern trees bear strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

—Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit,” 1939

On a hot, muggy
night during the tumultuous and wild summer of 1968, I crouched in waiting, along with three comrades, clutching my carbine tightly with sweaty hands. We were silently waiting for our prey. No, this was not Vietnam; it was Seattle. The riots had raged for three nights, much like the other rebellions that scorched across America that summer, from Newark to Chicago to Los Angeles. These rebellions would leave hundreds of people dead, wounded, and imprisoned, as well as endless blocks of burned-out, ravaged buildings, standing as a lasting memory of the anger of Black America. I did not know, nor did I care, whether I would survive that night or, for that matter, the many other nights we took to the streets to seek our revenge.

It was only a few months earlier that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, and just a few years since the assassinations of Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. These deaths were still fresh in our minds and hearts, as were the countless deaths of the lesser-known victims of American racism. For more than three hundred years, Black people in America had been denied basic civil rights, first when they were ripped from their African homelands and sold into slavery in the New World, then, after Emancipation, under the racist system of Jim Crow laws and segregation. The uprisings of the '60s, erupting with volcanic force throughout Black America, sent a loud and clear signal that the time of silence and complacency was at an end. Taking up arms against the racist power structure was a powerful move toward liberating our streets, our cities, our communities, not only for Black Americans in our time but also for those who had come before, and those who would follow.

Thus, my story, and the stories of so many others, begins not in 1968 but hundreds of years earlier, when the first Black slaves set foot on this sacred land of the red man. Yes, the ashes of our ancestors are long gone, and memories of them have long since dissipated. Yet their struggles, their strength, their courage, and their wisdom, along with their failings and flaws, will always be with us, pushing us, encouraging us, and watching over us as we navigate our way through the life ahead. For most of us whose ancestors were dragged ashore, shackled, bewildered, and despairing, it is difficult to tell where our stories begin or end.

I know very little of my slave ancestry, and even less about Mariah, a small, bowlegged Black slave woman in Durant, Mississippi, where she lived, toiled, and died thousands of miles away from her ancestral homeland. In 1858, under the old slave laws that did not legally recognize marriage between enslaved people, she married Frank Kimes, a half-Irish and half-Black mulatto man, as he was described by the census. They officially remarried after Emancipation. Mississippi, like most Southern states, was an inhospitable place for most newly freed slaves. Many remained in bondage or worked as indentured servants under the Black Codes, laws enacted after Emancipation by the Southern states to restrict the rights of Black people, keeping them in servitude. Worse developments were to come with the reign of terror under Jim Crow laws, starting the 1870s, which included mandatory segregation, the elimination of the rights to vote and to bear arms, forced imprisonment, and hideous acts of lynching.

My maternal great-great-grandmother, Emma, one of Mariah's four daughters, was born August 2, 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War. Emma grew up in a small house in Durant under the watchful eye of Mariah, now a free woman, free to raise her five children according to her own will. When I was a little boy, Emma would tell us stories of her childhood, such as how her mother would sit on the porch and keep an eagle eye on her children as she instructed them in the art of doing laundry. Emma also told us how, when she was a young child, the local Cherokees attempted to kidnap her, thinking she was one of their own because of her long black hair. Emma left home at eighteen to marry Mr. Joseph Ely, who worked as a brakeman for the railroad. Emma worked as a laundress, one of the few occupations available to a Black woman during the late 1800s in Mississippi. In the early 1900s, her husband died a tragic death on the job in a railroad accident. Emma went on to live a very long life, surviving uterine cancer, and she gave birth to eight children, only four of whom lived beyond childhood.

One of Emma's surviving girls was Mabel, my great-grandmother, who according to many was very beautiful. Mabel did the unthinkable—she had an affair and became pregnant by a German-Jewish man, Mr. John William Brown. This affair and pregnancy led to her being ostracized from her family and community, and resulted in the birth of a daughter, Willy Joe—my grandmother. Named after her father, later she was raised as “Josephine.” Mabel departed this world far too early, at the age of twenty-three, dying of “consumption,” the earlier name for tuberculosis.

Josephine was only three years old when her grandmother Emma took her in. The fact that Josephine looked more white than anything else presented problems for her grandmother. Southern social rules of the time dictated that a child who appeared to be white should not be seen in the company of an adult who was obviously Black. Soon, the decision was made that Josephine would go live with one of her mother's sisters, Aunt Marie, in Chicago, where racial rules were slightly less restrictive. Aunt Marie's husband, Uncle Milton, had graduated from Lane College, a boarding school in Tennessee. He was employed with the post office. They lived with their three kids in a big Victorian house on a large plot of land on Chicago's far Southside, where they grew much of their own food and ran a family ice cream parlor. My grandmother often talked about working long hours in the ice cream parlor and performing many other chores while the other kids played.

There was one thing that my grandmother wished more than anything else, and that was to be able to take piano lessons just as Aunt Marie's kids did. But she was denied that opportunity, something my grandmother would never forget. Her unhappy stay with Aunt Marie added to the anger and confusion she already felt. Although Aunt Marie herself was mixed, she could never really accept her sister's half-white daughter. When Josephine turned twelve, her grandmother Emma made the long train trip up from Mississippi to Chicago and took Josephine back to Durant, and eventually sent her away to boarding school.

Black boarding schools were a saving grace for those Black families who could afford to send their older kids away to be educated and prepared to enter the segregated US society. Boarding school was a place to meet others and build camaraderie during the remaining years of youth. That is where Josephine met my grandfather, Roy Sledge, a dapper, handsome young man. It is said that Roy's family history in America begins with the story of an African princess, enslaved and brought to the shores of the New World, who eventually married a Cherokee chief. Roy's father, Cyrus Sledge, was the only Black blacksmith for miles around in Como, Mississippi, and was often seen riding his white horse through the countryside.

Although Roy had only one suit, he carried himself as if he owned a whole closet full. It wasn't long before Josephine, strong-willed, and Roy, mellow and calm, married, and Josephine gave birth to my mother, Frances Emma Sledge, in 1925. They soon joined more than a million other Black Americans in the Great Migration to the North of the 1900s, looking for more opportunity and freedom than what they had experienced in the Jim Crow South.

Roy found work in Chicago as a railway porter, and Josephine, who passed as white, took a variety of jobs before finding permanent work as a waitress in a restaurant, where she eventually retired after thirty-four years. It is interesting to note that the entire time Josephine worked there, neither her customers nor her employers had any inkling that she was of mixed race. This was a common practice among Blacks light enough to pass.

Roy and Josephine struggled at times, even separating on numerous occasions. Roy's personal battle with alcohol caused him to lose his job with the railroad. Josephine had to move to St. Paul and back to Chicago before Roy, at thirty-two, was able to get a handle on his drinking and reunite with his family. With assistance from Josephine's uncle Milton, Roy landed a much-coveted job at the post office, where he worked until retirement. His tools for maintaining his sobriety were the Bible and the
Christian Science Monitor
, which he read diligently in silence every day after work.

Josephine was determined that her daughter would have the best of whatever she could provide, sending her to the best schools, starting her on the piano at age five, and finding the best piano instructors. At age seven, Frances was acknowledged as a child prodigy and began giving recitals and concerts in Milwaukee and Chicago. Josephine was relentless in her desire for her daughter to become an accomplished pianist, since the opportunity had been denied her. She would often set straight those white teachers who tried to rebuff her about teaching her brown child.

My mother graduated from high school at fifteen. After graduation, she refused to go any further on the piano. Ten years of having her knuckles swatted with rulers by stern teachers and the many hours of practice had pushed her to the point of no return. She was no longer interested in being a serious pianist. She tried modeling for a while and enrolled at Hamlin University in St. Paul before eventually settling into studies at Chicago Teachers College in 1944.

In 1943, my father was across town, preparing to graduate from Inglewood High School. Elmer Dixon Jr. was born in 1924 in Henderson, Kentucky, to Elmer and Mildred Dixon. Their family also joined the Great Migration to the North, landing in Chicago in the mid-1920s. Despite Chicago's own form of segregation and racist practices, Chicago and other northern cities would provide a launching pad for the coming Black middle class.

My paternal grandmother, Mildred West, was one of the many grandchildren of Amanda Brooks, an enslaved woman whose father was the slave master on the Arnett plantation in Henderson, Kentucky. Mildred's family traveled a different road out of slavery than did my mother's family. When the Civil War broke out, Mildred's grandfather, Richard Brooks, and her great-uncle escaped the plantation to join the Union Army, becoming some of the first slaves to join the Union forces. After the war ended, the slave master and his family abandoned the plantation and headed to Colorado. Mildred's grandfather and great-uncle each received a government allotment for having fought in the war. Combining that with the slave master's land, which Amanda Brooks inherited, the family founded their own town and gave it the family name, Brookstown.