Conference looks at black consciousness movement

Pitt history professor Laurence Glasco was surprised to learn that the black consciousness… Pitt history professor Laurence Glasco was surprised to learn that the black consciousness movement had reached minorities around the world.

Through his travels on Semester at Sea, Glasco learned that people in China, Japan and Northern Ireland identified with the civil rights movement in America.

To illustrate this, Glasco spoke of when he went to China to teach a one-month African-American history course at a minority center.

“Before I went to China, I didn’t even know they had minorities [there],” he said.

To his surprise, Glasco discovered that his students knew all about Frederick Douglass and the civil rights movement. His students identified with black people’s struggle in America and looked up to figures like Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr.

While lecturing, with the help of an interpreter, about abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Glasco noticed that his students would repeatedly nod their heads and say, “Just like China.”

After this happened several times, Glasco asked them what they meant.

They said they saw a similarity between the way Douglass had to obey his master, and the way they had to take whatever job the state told them to, Glasco said.

And when Glasco told them that Douglass was accused of a crime, but couldn’t defend himself, the students again said, “Just like China.”

Glasco’s speech was part of the All-African and African-American conference held Saturday in the Cathedral of Learning. Hosted by Azania Heritage International, the conference celebrated the life and legacy of Steve Bantu Biko.

Biko, of South Africa, co-founded the Black Peoples Convention, which brought together about 70 other black consciousness groups. In 1973, the South African apartheid government banned Biko, confining him to his hometown of King William’s Town in the Eastern Cape.

On Sept. 12, 1977, Biko died after being beaten by policemen. He is now considered a martyr for the black consciousness movement.

“The black struggle has inspired so many people around the world,” Glasco said.

While on Semester at Sea, Glasco traveled to India, where there is a group of people called the Dalits, or the “untouchables.”

“I had assumed that this was something in the past,” Glasco said. He had expected to find a diminished legacy of prejudice against the Dalits, similar to the legacy of slavery in America today.

Instead, the plight of the Dalits in India was similar to the plight of blacks in Mississippi 100 years ago, he said.

The Dalits were segregated and could not enter certain establishments, Glasco said. They were thought of as lazy and dirty people, he added.

A Dalit told him how the civil rights movement inspired them. In fact, the Dalit militant group is called the Dalit Panthers, after the Black Panthers, he said.

“The mind is the most dangerous weapon,” Milton Allimadi, another speaker at the event, said. “But the mind has to be liberated first.”

Allimadi added that the “negative and racist portrayal” of Africans in the media undermines that goal.

In his book, “The Hearts of Darkness: How white writers created the racist image of Africa,” Allimadi explores the issue by looking at examples provided by leading newspapers.

Keith Richburg, a black reporter for The Washington Post, said he felt lucky that his ancestors had been taken from Africa to become slaves, Allimadi said. Richburg, who covered the genocide in Rwanda, justified his statement by explaining that he escaped the fighting in Africa when his ancestors became slaves.

In his autobiography, Richburg wrote of growing up in a good, clean, middle-class neighborhood, describing how he was forbidden to associate with any black people from Alabama, whom his father referred to with racial slurs, Allimadi said.

According to Allimadi, The Washington Post hired Richburg to cover events in Africa because they could protect their own racist views without being accused of racism, since Richburg is black.

In order to make a difference and change prejudice against blacks, young people need to become involved in the black consciousness movement, Kwame Botwe-Asamoah, a Pitt Africana studies professor, said.

Revolutionaries are all young, he added.

Botwe-Asamoah told the attendees to bring their young grandchildren, nieces and nephews to black consciousness forums and events.

“Without the children, what we are doing here is meaningless,” he said.