From Zero to Eighty: Two African American Men’S Narrative of Racism, Suffering, Survival, and Transformation

By Helen K. Black

Through the lens of age, racism, and suffering, From Zero to Eighty narrates a history of what has not been written about older African American men. In this memoir, author Helen K. Black tells the life stories of John T. Groce and Charles E. Harmon against the backdrop of deep-seated cultural beliefs that engender racism.

In this memoir, Black shares the thoughts and emotions of Groce and Harmon, two African American men who are rich with years, experience, and pain. Among many topics, From Zero to Eighty explores the following:

The definition, description, and stories of suffering both as individuals and as part of a community
The place of these men in a society thats filled with covert and overt racism
The concepts of survival for African American men in general
The mens childhood and young adult years and how they shaped their self- and world view
The significance of mens programs founded by Groce and Harmon
The link between old age and suffering
The future in concrete ways and where we go from here

A biography of two African American elders, From Zero to Eighty recounts a journey of their lives, captured in words of struggle and hope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462005086

Helen K. Black

Helen K. Black, PhD, wrote Soul Pain: The Meaning of Suffering in Late Life and Old Souls: Aged Women, Poverty. She has taught qualitative research methods and various philosophy and religion courses at several Philadelphia-area universities. Dr. John T. Groce currently teaches at Widner University; he founded Mature Africans Learning from Each Other. Charles E. Harmon worked for the US Post Office for thirty-seven years and was a radio talk show host, newsman, and reporter. Now retired, he has received numerous awards for community service.

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Contents

Acknowledgements:

Preface

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Bibliography

* At the beginning of each chapter, we present a Swahili term, its English equivalent, and how we are using it in relation to Charles and John. These words show the significance of Charles’ and John’s African roots, and the meaning, to them, of their lifelong friendship

Acknowledgements:

We are extremely grateful to the following: W. Cody Anderson for providing information about Radio Station WDAS; Christa Caruso for transcribing all of the interviews from which this book emerged; Martha Chapman for typing; Richard Cooper for manuscript advice, input regarding publishing, and reading the final draft of our manuscript; John and Elaine Gray for reading the final draft of our manuscript; John Groce, Jr. for providing the title; Paul Hopkins for suggesting Lionel Robinson as our cover designer; Patricia Rainey-Nichols for typing; Patricia Reid-Merritt for recommending IUniverse as a publisher; Lionel Robinson for his artistry in designing the cover and his availability in working with us; Jennifer Romanski and Robert Rubinstein for reading an early draft of our manuscript and providing constructive critiques; and Holly Santanello for scanning the pictures and symbols that are included in the book and for photographing the picture of the authors that appears on the back cover.

The first author acknowledges the National Institute on Aging #R01 AG11112, R.L. Rubinstein, PI, for supporting the original research discussed in this book.

Preface

In 2006 I was in the midst of co-conducting a research study entitled: Experiences of Suffering in Late Life when I met John Groce at a university lecture. He was active in the African-American senior center that collaborated with the aging department at the university where I worked. He was 77 years old and continued to teach social work studies at a local university. He was also a caregiver for his wife and a founding member of an African American men’s group called: M.A.L.E., or Maturing Africans Learning from Each Other." People who knew John described him as having a sharp wit, swift to anger over issues of injustice and racism and quick to laugh.

When I first met John, I sensed his mistrust. Despite this, I asked him to participate in my research study on suffering and offered my phone number. He said he would call but did not. He told me later he had no intention of calling or participating. His thought had been: We’ve been researched too much. We’ve been over studied and we get nothing back. Yet, he was intrigued enough to contact his source (an African-American colleague of mine, Tracela White) and because I checked out okay he agreed to be interviewed. We set a time for our first session (complete interviews had three sessions). He told me then:

See, if I’m not mentally prepared for anything that could happen in the white community then I’ll be at a disadvantage. I mean we reduced the lynchings and the pickup trucks with rifles but some of that stuff is so deep subliminally that if I let my guard down then I’d be at a disadvantage, so I have to pick and choose. There were some times in my life where you couldn’t sit in here (his home) and talk to me like this. I have a very low… I was suspicious of anybody white. There’s still some of that in me.

After three weeks of visiting John’s home for three interviews, John asked me to interview his friend of over 60 years, Charles Harmon. Along with John, Charles was the other founding member of M.A.L.E. Much later, John told me that if I had not checked out okay, he would not have given me Charles’ number. John explained.

After you interviewed me, when I told you to interview him, you were on the path of acceptance in my own life. I know we didn’t have a really easy coming together. ‘Cause I was trying to avoid you. It was Tracela that convinced me that I should talk to you. And we’ve been developing our relationship ever since. So I’m cool with you.

This comment reveals John’s guardedness with the white community, the breadth of his network in the African-American community, and the quality of his relationship with Charles.

During my interviews with Charles, I learned that he was a well-known news reporter/radio announcer for radio stations WCAU and WDAS in Philadelphia during the late 1960s and 1970s. This period was the height of black community awareness and unrest in Philadelphia, and Charles was integral in bringing black activists, entertainers, and politicians on his show to discuss what could be done to improve access to goods and services for residents of inner city Philadelphia.

Charles also worked at the post office when John was working there. In fact, events and experiences in the men’s lives crisscrossed. Although Charles’ manner, which was soft-spoken and laid back, seemed to contrast John’s fire, both men approached issues they cared about with passion, such as their men’s group. Within M.A.L.E, Charles and John created a workshop to empower elderly African American men to realize both their skills and their responsibility to teach and nurture following generations. Their programs presented an Afrocentric perspective on issues such as men’s health, interpersonal relationships, and spirituality, among others. They encouraged men to discover their roots by steeping themselves in Black-American history and reading African literature. After completing this workshop, men were given a graduation ceremony—at a time in life when most elders do not participate in any rites of passage except illness and death.

About a year after our interviews ended, John called to ask if I would help Charles and him organize their transcribed interviews and tell their life stories in book form. We had a tentative first meeting in my office with Charles and John sitting on opposite sides of a long table, each of us cautiously looking at the other. John began:

The African tradition states that we’re responsible for five generations. So what you put in your children is not manifested until their children are born and so on down the line. So we will be held accountable ultimately for five generations.

Charles continued:

If you ask some of the kids, they don’t even know who Martin Luther King was. I didn’t believe it but there’s so many people that have no idea of the past. How many family members know their grandparents or what kind of work they did? How did they get to where they are now? Who went before them? The kids are growing up and if they know their immediate family, they’re lucky.

After I agreed to participate, questions hung in the air: Charles and John had been clear about their goals, but why did I want to be involved? I recalled that John needed to know the quid pro quo. I did not have a scientific answer, but I told them I wanted to give back to them what I had learned through them. What I did not anticipate is how our work together would ignite a transformation in all of us.

We met regularly to discuss what was important for Charles and John to include in the book. When we were halfway through, we decided to send four chapters to a book editor; we also asked a reader to go over our manuscript for general content. After a week or so, both got back to us, saying much the same thing: Unless someone is a celebrity, there really won’t be much interest in the story of two African American older men. Underlying this comment are two unfortunate myths bred into our American value system: 1) Stories of non-celebrities have little to offer in terms of popular interest and modeling behaviors and, 2) Ageism—Individual stories of those who are old and ‘unknown’ offer even less to the American reading public.

I began to think about these comments in terms of the kind of research I do—qualitative research. We know that old age, racism, and suffering exist in North America in the 21st century. But these phenomena become real only when given the faces of ordinary human beings who live the phenomena. Intense learning about age, racism, and suffering involves ‘seeing’ these phenomena from behind the ‘other’s’ eyes. It also requires bearing witness to their experiences.

We then asked my friend and colleague, Bob Rubinstein, to read our book. As a well-regarded anthropologist and ethnographer, his advice was crucial to the type of research that this book is based on, and to the cultural issues it explores. Bob thought the men’s stories were interesting, but was convinced that the analysis must be pushed deeper into the men’s context to explain who these men represent. Our rewrite began.

Based on the research interviews I conducted with Charles and John a year earlier, and the meetings we held regularly for over three more years, what follows are the oral narratives of two African-American men who are rich with years, experience, pain, dreams realized and one deferred—until now. That dream was to tell their life stories through the lens of age, racism, and suffering as a legacy for the family to stand on. The legacy was born from the depth and breadth of their experiences as African-American men living ‘ordinary’ lives in the 20th and the first decades of the 21st century. At one point during the writing of our book, John commented: This has been inside me for so long. I’ve been waiting for this.

This is Charles’ and John’s story. I’m the instrument to assist in the telling.

Helen Black

Philadelphia, PA

2011

Title Symbol Meaning*

Introduction

"Ankh: Life

The life of the body, mind, and spirit"

missing image file

The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others. One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line…I have sketched the two worlds within and without the Veil, and thus have come to the central problem of training men for life. (DuBois, 1903)

When W.E.B. DuBois wrote The Souls of Black Folks in 1903, he named the color line as the problem of the 20th century. He suggested that the African American identity suffers through the rupture of a double consciousness, or by perceiving two identities within one self. One identity is created through the reflections of trusted others and shows the self as authentic and without artifice. The other identity is created through the eyes and discourse of the dominant society and is internalized, disclosing a disoriented self. The African American’s smaller (personal) and larger (public) worlds often collide, creating not only a double vision of the self, but actually two selves presented to two worlds.

The Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, in almost every speech he’s been involved in has pointed out that the race problem is America’s most serious domestic problem. So when I come in here to speak to you I am speaking as a Black man. And I’m letting you know how a Black man thinks, how a Black man feels, and how dissatisfied Black men should have been 400 years ago. ( Malcolm X, 1963)

…Now some Negroes don’t want a Black man to speak for them. That type of Negro doesn’t even want to be Black. He’s ashamed of being Black…Now that type we don’t pretend to speak for. You can speak for him. In fact you can have him (laughter).

(Malcolm X, 1989)

Malcolm X, 60 years after W.E.B. DuBois, named race as America’s most serious domestic problem at the beginning of his mission, and continued to say so until the end of his life. Over one hundred years after DuBois, and almost sixty years after Malcolm X, two African-American men—Charles Harmon and John Groce—named racism as the problem in 21st century America even as the first African American president sat in the Oval Office. John remarked:

I don’t care who they elect. Racism is the most long lasting and surviving disaster in our country. If you look at the Africans coming in with the slave trade starting in 1619, there’s been no other people that came to this country that way.

For Charles and John, racism generated a particular mentality within both whites and blacks that they termed the slave mentality. They believe it is difficult to exorcize this mentality after it seeped into the foundations of our political, religious, and social institutions, and into the center of our souls. Charles and John show, through the vantage of their long lives and experiences of suffering, how the slave mentality distorts self-knowledge and erodes self-esteem in blacks. This mentality also nourishes stereotypes about all ethnicities and races. John reminded me that, according to DuBois, the talented tenth should have led us to where we should be now. Black leaders would show the African American community how to lift their veils and integrate their personalities, and set the community on a course of education and achievement. John explained that DuBois came to realize: the talented tenth proved inadequate to surmount the barriers confronting the submerged masses (Moon, 1972).

Like a shape-shifter, racism continued to affect the generations following the end of slavery in different ways. For one group it gives rise to hopelessness. Presently, it lingers in blighted urban areas where young Blacks hang on street corners instead of attending schools without adequate supplies of textbooks and encouragement, and where teachers are told to buy what they do not have at the dollar store. For another group, racism may mobilize frustration into activism. Charles offered a concrete description of racism in the 20th and 21st century: Every time we learned the game, the rules changed. Or, as John said, We’ve come some ways. But we never get into those smoke-filled rooms. That’s where the power is.

This book explores the deep-seated cultural beliefs that engender racism and some effects of those beliefs as they are passed down through generations to the present day. Although the form of racism changes with the context, according to Charles and John, the content of insidious racist beliefs remains the same.

The story that the book tells comes from two streams of thought. The first stream of thought comes from the mindset that Charles and John mentioned early in our meetings—the slave mentality that affects both blacks and whites. This mindset was first generated by persons who invested in a particular set of beliefs (Blacks are inferior) because it benefited them. The dominant culture promoted opinions on the appearance, intelligence, and worth about the people they forced from their African homeland. When enough people believed that they, too, would benefit (economically, politically, socially), the set of beliefs became systematic and resulted in institutions and movements such as slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and covert and overt racism. Yet racism has also generated strong resistance within Black Americans, such as abolition, the underground railroad, the Civil Rights movement, and the powerful tool of using one’s own voice to tell one’s story.

Charles and John scorn a particular myth that is intended to de-color one’s actions or attitudes and negate the everyday reality of racism—to say we are color-blind or that we don’t even notice another person’s color. The biases and prejudices learned in childhood, sustained or reworked by positive and negative experiences with people of colors other than our own, continue to feed and nurture stronger biases and prejudices. Or, they begin to generate empathies and understandings.

The second stream of thought comes from an understanding of suffering. The sense of rupture in the African-American consciousness of which DuBois spoke has an interesting parallel to the subject that brought Charles, John, and I together—the study of suffering in old age. Although suffering has been described in many ways, such as a state of severe distress, a threat to our integrity (Cassell, 1982), and awareness of our brokenness (Black, 2006), all definitions include a sense of being fractured, or ruptured. This sense of suffering reveals the self as not unified or integrated; the self feels split.

The definitions of suffering mentioned above have a similar meaning to DuBois’ description of African-American double consciousness. Racism continues to promote two images of the African American—one as ‘less than’ the members of the dominant society, and an African-American vision of the ‘self’ as both threatened and capable of resisting those threats. These two images, as they describe a ruptured or broken identity, also describe suffering.

This book examines how two streams of thought came together—the slave mentality and suffering—through the life experiences of two African-American older men. And this is where our story begins.

Why Men? Which men?

In findings from our original suffering study, the experiences and stories of suffering of black elders differed in content and expression from those of white elders. Black Americans lived through a different set of events and experiences that are unimaginable to those who have not experienced them. During the writing of this book we realized the importance of placing Charles and John in context in order to see their point of departure on the subject of age, racism, and suffering. John described this context:

Everything we do even in terms of ourselves happens in the context of black men. I know it’s not exclusive because we come into the white world to be educated, and the political stuff, but the context is black men. See, the whole question of studying groups of people is how do you make up for the differences, even in one family. You try to establish not so much what went wrong, but what went different in the same house. How did that happen? Look at my kids—Joel (middle child) went out in the street, but John (eldest son) was able to handle the street and the legitimate life at the same time.

John compared the community of which he is part to his family. He asked the age old question of: Why do such differences exist? But differences among persons, even in the same family, also have a context: a person’s talent is encouraged or overlooked; white flight occurs in a changing neighborhood; a child is the target of a racist remark and the wound remains into old age.

To call Charles and John representative of African Americans would be short-sighted, and would present a monolith where diversity and heterogeneity reign. In order to acknowledge the variation in experience and expression in any community, I asked John whom he regards as the African American community? Is there such a collective for any group?

There are rural Blacks, groups of southern Blacks who have different life expectations from northern Blacks; there are those who hail from Jamaica, the Caribbean, and other islands who are often grouped together as black people. There are also the young African-American men in college classrooms who consider themselves grateful to the older generation, but individualistic, and reject belonging to any group based on color or ethnicity (see Chapter Five). There are also those persons whom William Julius Wilson referred to as the underclass, the urban or big-city poor African Americans (once described as the undeserving poor) who suffer from a social isolation that affects every area of their lives, and, according to Wilson, primarily due to a complete lack of interaction with mainstream society. John explained:

The community we are referring to is that of African-American men. Of course it isn’t a community in isolation, but one that’s an integral part of several communities, and I think the entire African-American community. There certainly will be people who’ll say they are not a member of this or any other community. Well, we say that a people who were so long under a system of oppression can ill afford the notion of individualism. The collective idea has been the hallmark of whatever progress Blacks in America have made. I don’t care if he’s young old, educated or not. To me, to us, the notion that a black person is not a member of this community is selfish and dangerous. It is always in community that we win.

John’s powerful words not only pushed our analysis deeper into the lived experience of African-American men but also into why John believes individualism undermines the black community. Their stories become ‘smaller’ or more personal when we think of the diversity of elderly African-American men, and their stories become ‘larger’ or more pronounced because of our need to hear their voices before death silences them.

This book also places Charles and John in another context—the place where their suffering began. John explained:

We have to identify the causes of the suffering, and that speaks to the larger picture. I believe a lot of the negative that happens in the total black community, particularly men, is the holdover and the residual down through the generations of slavery. We have to find a way to name slavery for what it really was. Because there’s still implications. For instance, every once in a while I have to be careful not to acquiesce in white men’s presence. Everything they say is not funny. And to laugh at their jokes, or accept them, is wrong.

John reminded me of the subterranean intentions, implications, and inferences of inter-racial conversations, and that even silence could be considered acquiescing to an affront. For African-American men, being on guard is a persistent activity.

The suffering of African-American men is unique due to their history in America. Elderly African-American men who were born, as Charles and John were, in the first few decades of the 20th century, experienced the political and social sanction of racism for a large part of their lives. Perhaps because advances for African Americans have been made, and younger Blacks have reaped what the older generation sowed, both men are convinced that many young, educated African Americans do not appreciate the continuing need for community. John remarked, mixing into a middle class neighborhood makes it harder to see the demons that are hiding out there, or perhaps even to recognize them as demons. He paraphrased E. Franklin Frazier (1957): The black bourgeoisie thinks they can mesh into white society. But they can’t insulate themselves against race discrimination. Black men can’t play the masculine role as defined by American culture. They can’t assert themselves or put themselves in positions of power like white men.

Charles remarked: We are saying what is contrary to what society wants us to think today. We have to address what is still going on although nobody wants to talk about it anymore. I was suddenly reminded of a comment made by Attorney General Eric Holder in 2009, for which he was harshly criticized, in regard to an honest discussion of race: We’re a nation of cowards.

John continued:

We did accomplish a lot. But everything is not rosy. What has happened to black men is that a lot of them don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. And we can say it’s individual as much as we want. Like we can say that our individual healing came through us, but it did not, nor did our individual suffering come from us. It had a root somewhere.

According to Charles and John, the root is slavery, and it has continued to fulfill its main objective.

The starting point is slavery. Its main thrust was as a mechanism that could keep Blacks under control for over three hundred years, so it completed its task. You know what it was? Pit one Black against another and you’ll always have control. Pit light skin against dark. Pit those with education or money against those who don’t have. That way you’ll always have control. Every strong leader has the capability to divide and conquer. The Romans knew that.

So, why are men solely the subject of this book? And why does suffering matter? The experiences of any ‘grouping’ cannot transcend identity factors such as age, color, or gender. It is precisely their identity factors that make any group’s definitions and experiences of suffering unique. By excluding