Go Tell it on the Skyway
The Jacksonville Skyway is often referred to as “the train to nowhere.” It’s an unmanned transportation system that constantly loops around downtown Jacksonville. As it has a very low ridership, it mainly functions as a monument to failure. It is also an apt metaphor for the collective consciousness of our city: empty, one-tracked, on auto-pilot and yet, elevated.
Here are some other brilliant ideas the city has had recently:
cut funding to libraries even though our illiteracy rate is around 47%
ask a Muslim appointed to the Human Rights Commission to “Say a prayer to your God,” implying that the Muslim God is strange, different and even inferior to the Christian God
fail to pass a gender anti-discrimination amendment, thereby discriminating against the LGBT community
Jacksonville needs to claim a new metaphor, employ a new narrative. We are currently re-telling that tired old story of southern poverty and ignorance. We need to adopt a narrative about education and acceptance if this city wants to be the urban center which it claims to be.
Historically, we already have a powerful narrative of resistance to mindless ideals that don’t take into account the humanity of all humans. Jacksonville birthed (at least) two great civil rights activists, Stetson Kennedy and James Weldon Johnson. These men are a part of Jacksonville’s underground narrative, the story that remains untold, or perhaps whispered.
Stetson Kennedy died in 2011 and fought for equality to his figurative last breath. That, in itself, is evidence that we have not come as far as we’d like to believe we have come. Some people cling to the idea of a “post-racial society” in order to push anti-discrimination dialogue back underground where mainstream white culture doesn’t have to deal with it. Such people are usually naive to questions of race or gender due to lack of experience with “the other” and their unique issues. Although Stetson was southern white, he was dedicated to the idea that all life is sacred.
Kennedy was a folklorist, author, and human rights activist. In 1937, he travelled around Florida with Zora Neale Hurston and a massive recording system collecting folk songs and stories for the Florida Writers Project. While in France in 1957, he wrote The Klan Unmasked, a book about infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan, over which there has been some controversy. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in St Augustine. He also opened his home to his friend, Woody Guthrie, who wrote a number of songs while on the shores of the Beluthahatchee River.
Stetson Kennedy’s home is now a historical landmark. In contrast, James Weldon Johnson has not been treated with the same respect.
Johnson was born in Jacksonville in 1871. A (Harlem) Renaissance man, he was a lawyer, writer, educator, diplomat, and civil rights activist. He accomplished the following in his life:
he was the first African American manager of the NAACP
he was appointed a diplomat to Venezuela and Nicaragua by Theodore Roosevelt after working on his presidential campaign
he worked to quell race riots in 1919
he wrote the poem Lift Every Voice and Sing, which was set to music by his brother and is known today as The Negro National Anthem
he published over twenty books, including The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and The Book of American Negro Poetry
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is an amazing book which should be required reading for all Jacksonville citizens. Johnson spends half of chapter 5 describing the city around the beginning of the 20th century. Johnson explores ideas of self-knowledge, knowledge of the other, identity, and passing. There are many poignant scenes, one describing a lynch mob who burn a man alive.
This mob scene is difficult to read, but it is important to understand the narrative of oppression to which Jacksonville is, for some archaic reason, still ascribing. We aren’t lynching or burning people anymore — thank God — and we even have a Black mayor (who some would point to as evidence of Jacksonville in a “post-racial era”), but the failure to include the LGBT community in our anti-discrimination policy was a huge blow to our sense of equality and fairness.
Jacksonville is spinning the same old narrative that it’s been spinning for decades. It’s attempting to accidentally create new and powerful LGBT and Muslim activists. If we could let go of our empty-headed Skyway mentality, we could reclaim our strong history of civil rights activism and move forward with the biblical idea that if you love your neighbor as you love yourself, all other commandments would be fulfilled, or like Dr. Seuss’s Horton says, “a person’s a person no matter how small.”
All judgment aside, Jacksonville, every person deserves to be treated with respect. If James Weldon Johnson had received the respect he deserved, he might not have left our city, he might not have written a fictional autobiography in which a talented and intelligent black man eschews his heritage and possible greatness in order to pass as an average white man, and he would have numerous monuments to his legacy in this city and elsewhere in America. Instead, he is all but forgotten, and a fight that should be over is raging on.
