The Heritage of The Negro (1965) | Feat. Dr. John Henrik Clark

the people now called Negroes on the mobile and the least understood of the world's people this term Negro demoralizes us and is detrimental I feel it it doesn't give them give us any association pass the slave ship I think that the first task of people of African descent whether in the United States or in Africa or elsewhere is to get rid of this slave named Negro this curious word Negro was seldom or never used in Africa itself and this word has no meaning or no worthwhile meaning at all in Africa I would doubt myself if it has any useful meaning anywhere else what is a Negro a simple question but the answer is not so simple [Music] my name is Ossie Davis I'm an actor and a writer and the narrator of our series of programs on the history of the Negro people I also a Negro what is a Negro in Africa the Whitney girl has no meaning in Brazil the Negro is a man who is very poor and very black and in the United States a man who has any quantity of Negro blood or whatever that is is considered a Negro a Negros a race of people or a condition our programs will be asking this question in many ways and in many different settings our Odyssey will take us throughout the world to Africa where we will explore the relationship of American Negroes to the land of their origin to Brazil where we will ask is Brazil a racial paradise and throughout the United States our aim in this series is both a modest and an ambitious one we will be asking many questions and perhaps answer only a few for there is a vast ignorance of Negro history among whites and Negroes and the job of filling this vacuum is massive do Negros have a heritage and a tradition like the Greeks the French the anglo-saxons or are we something less as others have portrayed us everywhere we have looked we have seen Negroes as savage and barbaric humble and self-sacrificing scared and childish and inferior in I remember as a kid coming from some of the pictures and we spent the whole time from the from the motion picture house to home satirizing the Negro performances we saw in the film well it was also an admission that somehow or other this was to some degree what we were now these these important and very very impressionistic things that we got from these films did to some degree govern our behavior when a Negro child goes into a movie for instance and sees himself or sees another Negro in an unfavorable light he he'd be fields to some degree threatened he feels uncomfortable and a great deal of his laughing at that situation will be the kind of laughter that protects him it's a it's a nervous attack against him his self the way he looks at himself the esteem with which he hold himself and how he will rate with his fellows in the streets you know it's it's seeing something happen to you that you can't control which leaves a scar which leaves you feeling inadequate you know you don't feel loved you're ashamed to look at yourself ashamed to go home shame to talk village boys next door a shame even to ask these questions of your parents although sometime you do it's a horrible situation and sometimes we never get over that there's a neat one I honestly tried to believe that I was somebody and I've always thought during my life to keep that feeling that I did have some value and I say value knowing what that word means and it's been many a night in my life when I learned to sleep alone very deep inside me that I really wasn't worth much I still do not really know what being a new growth is or what it means it means that my skin is a little bit darker it means that my cultural exposures have been somewhat different to other ethnic groups it may even mean that as a human being I might be more sensitive to need and despair oh yes you know that wish I was white kind of thing when you begin to sort of get the feeling of difference but maybe you're dirty something's wrong but there was that feeling you know so early you can't even know where it started not over it yet it's part of my own there charities we were told we were of people without a past and without a future and Negro boys and girls learned before very long that there was something special you know at an early age as soon as you start school you begin to catch on to the whole racial thing but once you get into school you begin to know it and know there's a difference and that the difference is against you there's no real reference to me as a Negro or to my father well any of the other Negroes who have contributed so much to the growth of the United States I'll never forget the picture in the geography book a couple of very ragged Africans you know weeks before we got to the lesson we were stealing ourselves for some Negro child would find the picture first in the book before we got to the lesson and alert everyone would look on page 22 you'd see what's there and then we dreaded reaching that lesson because it was always something about the savages not knowing anything and we had to sit there and hear this and instinctively the white children returned look at me no children you know while this lesson was going on and so Africa became our shame and our torment we were told that our past was barbarism and the white man our Redeemer slavery with a sin of salvation few of us had anything to look forward to we were afraid to look back in 1958 Lorraine Hansberry wrote of play our Raisin in the Sun that showed the conflict created for American Negroes by the African past [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] well what we got now looking at what a well jet Nigerian moving was there [Music] look honey we're going to the theater we're not going to be in it you know George I don't like that you pick this boy to go out with you looking like that George if he's ashamed of his heritage what do here we go again a lecture and a half again passed and I break West African heritage and one second you know we're gonna hear all about the greatest chandi empires the song gate civilizations the sculpture of a mean some poems in the band - and then the whole monologue is going to end up at the word heritage let's face it baby your heritage ain't nothing but a bunch of raggedy spirituals and some grass [Applause] [Music] when the English swing themselves with dragon at the Heritage Program of how you act a federally sponsored effort to develop better opportunities for Harlan's Negro youth a new version of African history is being taught Robert Moore is a visiting lecturer [Music] we are Americans of our original the accomplishments of Africa before director of the program is John Henrik MacLeod is generally gloss over are neglected in human history a lot of this the misconception of Africa and the distortion of African history is involved and a word that is relatively new the word Negro a kind of nickname that European laziness the inability are via a desire to identity in the period of the Europeans had to justify the exploitation of Africa and the demeaning of a whole people they systematically started the effort to read the African human history a great deal of ignorance of African history sits upon the old conservative racial discrimination and Prejudice which we have had in Azle Davidson as a British writer and historian on African states it still sits upon the belief perfectly unscientific quite unbathed in any scholarly discipline that the Africans that is to say if you like the Negroes are people of some sort of inferiority to others and there have not been able to develop in the same way now you know the great myth of the colonial era the great myth took the shape of saying that the Africans the Negroes are children and because they are children it said failing to develop we the Europeans you the Americans must go in there and show them the way they should go civilize them introduce them to the blessings of orderly life one of the misunderstandings you see about Africa is the apparently primitive material nature of their civilization you look at these people living in these villages and you wonder what is their past do they have a past what lies behind it all they have nothing but a few straw buildings nothing but a few cattle it seems quite inconsiderable the Dinka for example have no stone in their country they have almost no metal after our country is under water half the year they cannot build and could never possibly build an imposing material civilization but their achievement was of course to learn how to master their environment and this they have done with quite outstanding success so that the outside picture of the superficial picture is gives no indication at all of the depth of their culture these are the people who have mastered the problems of taming this difficult vast continent with all its extraordinarily great obstacles to living it swamps its deserts its mountains and its forests the story of Africa over the last two thousand years has been one of quite epic dimensions [Music] Africa endless deserts scorching and windswept by day bitterly cold at night and the Sahara the world's largest desert a harsh bleak expanse of land challenging anyone to cross it snow-capped mountains near the equator gigantic waterfalls in the jungle mists and rain almost daily these were some of the barriers to penetration to the outside world it was the Dark Continent a land of mystery where stories were spread of giants and Dwarfs the people whose heads grew under their arms of monstrous animals [Music] it is here and this forbidding other world that what may be the remains of the first man were discovered in 1959 in Tanganyika a scientific expedition had been digging for weeks and the sun-baked earth looking for traces of the earliest man then in July dr. Lewis Leakey and his team found what he called Zinj anthropos nicknamed the nutcracker man because of the strength of his jaws he was about 600,000 years old and maybe the creature that makes africa the real cradle of mankind the records of ancient Africa began with Egypt about 3,000 BC its spectacular achievements of the monumental pyramid and brooding sphinx have always been credited to Asia and the Mediterranean but there is growing evidence that Egypt holds more than originally thought to the land to the south cush the land of the Negroes about 700 BC kushai kings conquer Egypt and become the 25th dynasty little is known today about the land of cush but in the ancient world it was highly respected in 1791 the French philosopher Count de Valle wrote of the Kushites a people now forgotten discovered while others were yet barbarians the elements of Arts and the sciences then in about 325 AD cush is attacked and destroyed and disappears from our view for the rest of Africa there is little we can say for certain except for the Kushites Africans had no writing they kept in their memories the history of their people stories narrated down from generation to generation this oral tradition must tell us much of the history that will fill the gaps in our knowledge and the western Sudan Negro kingdoms arise in the medieval periods of walled and fortified cities markets and fairs Ghana is the earliest of these civilizations going back to 300 AD in the 8th century an Arab writer tells us that the Arabs sent an expedition to this pagan land of gold African markets the main source of gold before the discovery of America then about 10 67 Arabs from the north fired by their new faith storm into the western Sudan [Music] after years of fighting the Arabs conquer Ghana and settled there from this time on sand Saharan Caravan trade flourishes and with the trade comes Islam Islam spreads through West Africa when Europe was going through a so-called Dark Ages Muslim culture is the main advancement of human knowledge most important of all a written language comes to the western Sudan almost all that we know about these kingdoms was preserved for us by Arab and Negro scholars at that time around the 12th century Ghana gives way to the Empire of Mali in 1320 for King Mansa Musa makes a pilgrimage to Mecca with a caravan of 60,000 people an Arab traveller arriving in Mali in 1353 wrote the Negroes have a greater appearance of injustice than any other people neither travellin or inhabitant of this land has anything to fear from robbers or men of violence could the same be said of the 14th century England or France the kingdom of Songhai most famous for its university the fabled Timbuktu students and scholars from all over the world came here to study a moorish traveller wrote more profit is made from the book trade and from all other branches of commerce if we ask ourselves a little more nearly what have been the cultural contributions of African peoples to the rest of the world then of course we are faced immediately with the remarkably original and outstanding quality of their plastic arts the most important art in Africa has of course been dancing and dancing has passed into the of the whole of the rest of the world from its African origin so if you go to places like Brazil or the West Indies or the southern United States you will find African dances still being danced there though of course in different circumstances and therefore in somewhat different ways but the whole concept of rhythm as being an expression of the personality and not simply a wiggling of the body and a weakling of the body is all that most Europeans can achieve but an expression of the personalities this comes from the African concept of dancing a more obvious is the tradition of plastic art a large number of African peoples have developed forms of sculpture in wood or in stone or ivory or in brass or bronze or iron or gold which are of great effectiveness and great originality and this too of course is passed into the general Western tradition of pictorial art and to some extent of plastic art as well the remarkable art of painting and buffet the bronzes of Benin was said to be worthy of chilly me Europe was amazed at the discovery that Africans could perform such an impressive creation of bronze casting African sculpture burst upon the European art world it became a major influence in the modern movement Picasso Braque more Giuliani leisure there are found in African sculpture of freedom and a vitality they had been searching for here was no slavish imitation of nature something the camera could do better but a new and fresh way of looking at the world behind the appearance we have only skimmed the surface of the history of African and there are wide gaps in our knowledge among the riddles of ancient Africa are where did the Negro come from what happened to the Kushites after their defeat where did the sculptors of benin learn their remarkable skills we haven't even begun to penetrate some of these mysteries yet growing knowledge and interest in Africa is rediscovering a world we never knew and many negroes are examining for the first time the values that were lost my name is Yumi and I'm addressing my question to mr. Carr I want to know what happened to the so-called Negroes culture the most tragic destruction of African culture was the destruction of the African culture brought to these shores from to American shores now the first thing they did was to forbid the drum forbid all African ceremonies forbid out of an ornament literally to destroy and people in such a manner and they have to be remained and in American image this was not exactly true in the West Indies it was slavery make no mistake about but because it was all in Ireland many of the Africans could communicate with each other and maintain some of the African cultures while in the United States it was impossible because as they arrived mother brother sister split off and they went in opposite direction then they will be sold they might have been resold within a matter of days after they were sold the last time so it was difficult for relatives to keep track of each other it was typical for a continuity to be maintained in and out of the culture this was the beginning are the fragmenting of our family in this country it was also the beginning of the demeaning and they are some negation of the masculinity of the black male in America this meaning of our culture and it's reading us out of the commentary of human history has left deep psychological scars but we are trying - now is a massive job of rebuilding the inside the spirits the hopes the history the culture of people we're trying to restore those values that have been taken away and we're trying to get across to black youth that they have a part to play in the making of a new world they have the imagination they have the energy you must first restore that part of yourself that has been negated by oppression it is essential to you as bread and war it is part of the food that must be your spirit in the world of tomorrow it is this part of but you will have to transfer to your children [Music] this is any

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Length: 28min 39sec (1719 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 04 2016