GUEST COMMENTARY: BY GODFREY ENEAS
NASSAU, Bahamas, January 26, 2021 — As I described in a previous article when I talked about the underbelly of America, my own past experiences in the underbelly of America are still a part of my consciousness. I resided in the United States for five years as a student athlete. It was an epoch of transformation as the social and economic conditions for African-Americans were dramatically altered. It was the height of the Civil Rights Era.
Alabama, where I was a student at Tuskegee Institute, was one of the centres of civil rights activity. Rosa Parks , a native of Tuskegee and at the time a resident of Montgomery, sparked the bus boycott. A young pastor at Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church named Dr. Martin Luther King Jr led the boycott and turned it into a national movement.
In conjunction with the Montgomery bus boycott, just 40 miles east of Montgomery the town of Tuskegee was the scene of its own boycott. This one was based on the right of Blacks to participate in their local ft elections. The white establishment decided to disenfranchise the people of their right to vote by redrawing the boundaries of the city by enabling only 10 Blacks to vote, even though the voter register comprised 400 eligible Black voters. This was a prime example of voter suppression through gerrymandering.
This was the setting for my sojourn in America. Black Americans were facing Jim Crowism, which had manifested itself as institutional racial discrimination, voter disenfrancement and racial segregation. The weapons that were employed by Dr. King and members of his Southern Christain Leadership Conference (SCLC) were nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience to reveal America’s underbelly to the world.
It was this period that represented my four Tuskegee years from 1961 to 1965 and a year up North at the University of Wisconsin. My five years were most revealing to a foreign, highly impressionable student from The Bahamas. As a student athlete, I had opportunities to travel throughout the South as a member of Tuskegee’s varsity baseball and swimming teams. This allowed me to visit a large number of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) throughout the South where I experienced Jim Crowism in its various forms. While at Wisconsin, I played baseball and rugby and was able to travel throughout the Midwest, where a “hypocritical” form of racial segregation and discrimination was the order of the day. Throughout America, segregation and discrimination are parts of the American DNA.
My attendance at Tuskegee was a propitious time for Black Americans as the Civil Rights Movement was a change agent. Tuskegee students were a part of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and participated in freedom rides, sit-ins, and marches like the March from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. My friends and I were in Montgomery when the marchers arrived.
Traditionally, Bahamians are South Florida oriented as we spend our time in Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, West Palm Beach and many of us vacation in Orlando. My first visit to Tuskegee was by train, so my father and I boarded the train in Miami, but when we reached Jacksonville we had to change compartments. We had to move to the compartment for Blacks as the train was segregated as late as 1961. Jacksonville was where Dixie began on the Florida East Coast as the Mason Dixon Line extended from Washington,D.C. to Jacksonville. In a figurative sense, the Line separated the North and South politically and socially, hence the reason for changing compartments as we entered Dixie.
In recent years, young Bahamians have aligned themselves with Atlanta, Georgia, because Atlanta has emerged as the Black capital of America. Every Mayor of Atlanta from 1974 to date has been Black and it was the urban area of Atlanta that turned Georgia Blue and gave it its first Black Senator. Further, Atlanta is the Black intellectual capital of America as it is the home of HBCUs like Morehouse College, the Morehouse School of Medicine, Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University and Morris Brown College. Apart from the HBCUs, there are 57 colleges and universities in the Atlanta area.
This is the underbelly I witnessed during my student years in America. Bahamians in my age group can remember a segregated Miami when Black Bahamians visited relatives who lived in “Coloured Town” just like their Black American brothers and sisters. The racial dynamics changed in America around the same time as Majority Rule came to The Bahamas. The ‘60s were progressive times for Blacks in America and The Bahamas. Majority Rule occurred 54 years ago and the majority of the people in our country are between the ages of 0-54 years with a median age of 32.3 years.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Godfrey Eneas is a Bahamian Agricultural Economist who served as Director of Agriculture, President of The Bahamas Agriculture and Marine Science Institute(BAMSI) and Ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). He has authored two books, Agriculture In The Bahamas: Its Historical Development(1492-2012) and the New Caribbean: A Region In Transition. He is also a regular contributor to The Bahama Journal Newspaper and Radio and Television Programmes on Jones Communications.)
