Being Black: The 80's with Touré

Bob Marley x Black Determination

Episode 8
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“Redemption Song” by Bob Marley and the Wailers is one of the ultimate songs about the Black spirit and the immense determination that has gotten us through life in America. I’m talking about a specifically Black determination that has powered our resistance and carried us through life in America. A sense of Black determination that we hear in Redemption Song as well as Sam Cooke’s “A Change Gonna Come,” Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise,” and Kendrick’s “Alright.” No matter how hard things have been we have always been certain that one day we would overcome.

Jamaican reggae musician Bob Marley (1945 – 1981) performs on stage, a microphone in his hand, late 1970s. (Photo by Express Newspapers/Getty Images)

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Toure [00:00:00] I’m Touré and this is Being Black. The eighties. 

Bob Marley [00:00:05] All pirates, yes, the rob I. Sold I..

Toure [00:00:10] Bob Marley’s Redemption song. It’s one of the greatest songs of the last century. It’s a simple acoustic ballad, just Bob and a guitar. But what makes it so powerful is the story he’s telling. It’s the story of Black people. That story, according to Bob, is about going through hell and surviving. It’s a story about perseverance and resilience and Black people being the chosen people. 

Bob Marley [00:00:40] Won’t you help to sing? These songs of freedom? ‘Cause  all I ever have. Redemption Songs. 

Toure [00:00:56] Bob recorded Redemption Song in 1980 near the very end of his life. It was his last single and it was the last song he ever performed. He worked on it for years and finished it near the end when he was dying of cancer. He knew he was going to die because he was 36. For years he had told people he was going to die at that age. 

Roger Steffens [00:01:22] He predicted his own death at the age of 36. 

Toure [00:01:25] That’s Roger Steffens, a writer who followed Bob on tour in 1979 and wrote a great oral history of Bob called, “So Much Things to Say”. 

Roger Steffens [00:01:34] And I talked to the two young men that Bob knew in the sixties. They were saying, Oh, Bob, you know, you’re going to be a big star. Everybody’s going to know you. You’re going to have a long life. You got to be rich and all of that stuff. Then Bob says, No, man. He says, When I’m 36, I’m going to die. He was 24 at the time. It’s an odd thing for a young person in particular to be thinking about. And I spoke with both of those men and they swear that’s what Bob said. The third confirmation is a television interview I did on L.A. Reggae, my cable series with Bob’s mother, and she recalled vividly them coming to her in that summer of ’69 and saying, Hey, Bob just told us he’s going to die at 36. So I’ve got three witnesses to that. 

Toure [00:02:16] Why did he think he was going to die at 36? 

Roger Steffens [00:02:18] He just knew. He knew he was psychic. 

Toure [00:02:21] Many people said that throughout his life, Bob showed us that he was psychic. He knew things that we have no idea how he could have known them. 

Roger Steffens [00:02:31] They had numerous instances of people telling me about psychic experiences with him. Jamaican writer Jeffrey Phelps met Bob for the first time on the campus of Dewey University West Indies in Kingston. And they they sat down under a tree and began to talk. And within 5 minutes, Bob was telling this guy his entire life story. A guy  he had never met before in his life. Jeffrey was so shaken by it that, you know, he began to tell people, you know, there’s something else going on with this guy. But those prophecy stories go back to the time he was three years old when he was reading the hands of people in the little village at Nine Mile. And it was a police inspector and it was a close friend of his mother’s. And they both came to Bob’s mother and said, hey, keep an eye on this kid because there’s something else, something otherworldly about him. He couldn’t possibly know these things about me. How did this little three year old kid know that? So he was he was a different kind of human being. 

Toure [00:03:26] Bob’s other worldliness, his psychic power and him approaching the end of his life and knowing this is one last chance to make a big statement, all of that pervades Redemption Song. It begins with the original sin the transatlantic slave trade. 

Bob Marley [00:03:46] Old pirates yes, they rob I Sold to the merchant ships. 

Toure [00:03:55] The pirates Bob’s talking about are the white people who stole us. Calling them pirates establishes them as the rogues, the villains, the criminals who stole us and sold us.  

Bob Marley [00:04:11] But my hand was made strong. By the hand of the Almighty 

Toure [00:04:17] But Bob says Black people are resilient. We are the children of God. In the song’s key line, he says. 

Bob Marley [00:04:28] Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.

Toure [00:04:34]  Here Bob is quoting the great Marcus Garvey, an activist from the early part of the 20th century, who famously proposed that Black people should return to Africa. Black Baby Jesus imagined where we’d be now if we’d done that. Garvey said, We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is your only ruler, sovereign. The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind. What he’s saying, what I hear is that true? Liberation is achievable. If we can shift our mindset. Others may enslave our physical form, but we are in control of our minds. More he’s saying if we can defeat the colonized mind and white centrism, if we can believe that we are powerful and free, if we can resist seeing white people as the center of the world, then we can achieve real freedom. And in the realm of the mind, we can liberate ourselves. 

Roger Steffens [00:05:48] Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, for God’s sake. 

Toure [00:05:52] Roger Steffens again. 

Roger Steffens [00:05:53] Don’t be a slave to a system that does nothing to make your life better. Open your eyes. Be awake. Be aware of what, what’s been done to you. So it’s a call to Black people to liberate themselves from that slavish mentality. It’s it’s not so much a song against the system as it is against the mindset of the system. 

Toure [00:06:18] And there’s this. When Bob says,

Bob Marley [00:06:23] My my hand was made strong. By the hand of the Almighty. 

Toure [00:06:29] And  

Bob Marley [00:06:31] We’ve go to fulfill the book 

Toure [00:06:35] He’s saying that we Black people are God’s people. We are the chosen people, and we have a destiny to fulfill. And no matter how low our history takes us, our destiny is to go high. It’s not about Black superiority, but the certainty that even though history has been rough to us, Nate, because history has been rough to us, we should know that God has high plans for us. This is why I say this song is about Black resilience, Black persistence, and Black perseverance, all of which have been critical to our survival, not just our physical survival, but our spiritual survival. Throughout this series, we have noted how Black history shows us dealing with oppression, but remaining vigilant. And it shows us taking one step forward and then one step back over and over. Yet we remain strong. In the book, Bob Marley lyrical genius Kwame Dawes likens the message of Redemption Song to the biblical story of Joseph, whose zigzag life has him oppressed and buked and scorned and pushed down. Yet he retains his faith in God and in himself. And ultimately, his failures lead to his rise. He rises to prominence and glory, not in spite of his oppression, but because of it. You have to hear the story. The actress Yvonne Orji from Insecure told me the story of Joseph when she came on my other podcast Toure Show I had never heard it before and it struck a deep chord inside of me as a symbol of the African-American experience. 

Yvonne Orji [00:08:25] God told Joseph in a dream that his brothers would bow down to him like his brothers weren’t really rocking with him because they knew that he was his daddy’s favorite. Daddy gave him a Coogee coat and it was fly, and they were like, I hate this guy. And then, you know, one day his dad told Joseph to go and bring his brother some food or what not. They saw him come in and they were like, hey let’s kill this dude, like, once and for all, because, you know, he’s over here talking reckless. Talking about  we’re going bowed down to him? Let’s kill him. And so one of the other brothers was like, that’s not that’s not a good idea. How about we sell him to slavery? Because in his mind, he was like, I’m going to come back and save him, but backfired. So they sell Joseph and Joseph ends up working for Potiphar and while he’s working for Potiphar, Potiphar’s  wife, it’s like, look, who’s that handsome young man.  Who dat?. So when Potiphar was out, she was like, lie with me. And Joseph was like, No, I’m a man of integrity. I’m not going to this to you. And so she lies on him is like, Joseph tried to rape me. Of course, Potiphar  puts him in jail. And Joe, I know the whole time Joe was probably like, all I did was have a dream that I shared. What the heck. And so  

Toure [00:09:39] Shouldn’t have said anything. 

Yvonne Orji [00:09:41] Listen. And he’s in jail and he’s like, Yo, I had a job. I mean, won’t pay me nothing because I was a slave, but I still had a job. And imagine now I’m in jail. But then, because God’s hand, it was all over, Joseph. God gives him a favor with the warden and makes Joseph basically in charge of the whole prison. So then, while he’s in prison, the king had to cupbearer and the baker who were thrown into the same prison that Joseph was at. And because Joseph has the gift of interpreting dreams, they were like, Yo, we had these crazy dreams and we don’t know what it means. And Joseph was like, Well, it didn’t work out well for one of you. For the other, you you’re going to be restored to power and you’re going to be great. And so they’re like, Oh, that’s great. Joe’s like, Hey, when you go to the king and when you get restored to power, please don’t forget about me. Like, just like, Hey, remember me, fam? So he gets released. What do you do? Forget about Joseph. Joe’s still in jail. The king now has these dreams that nobody can interpret. And it’s like, you know, months, years, months later, years later. We all know. That’s why sometimes when you’re like, how come they forgot about me? It’s like, it’s not over, though. And so the out of it was the cup bearer. The baker was not one of them was like, Oh, while I was in jail, there was this man who interpreted the dreams. I think he could interpret the king’s dream because nobody else could. So basically, Joseph told the King of Egypt that he’s going to have seven years of famine and seven years of excellence. So during the seven years of excellence, he needs to save up for those seven years of famine. The king is like, cool, cool, cool. I appreciate this. You know what? I’m with you one better. I will make you in charge of that stockpiling all of our grains so that when it’s time for us to have a famine, we won’t suffer. So, Joseph, now is what second in command, Vice president of Egypt. Cut to see him in his land, his brother. And that is why seven, ten, 15 years later, his brothers come to Egypt because they’re like it was a famine. And Egypt is the only place popping because you know what they say their stockpile their grain because of the Joseph. So they come. Joseph sees his brothers and guess what happens eventually they bowed to him when they realize this is our brother. So the dream materialize. 

Toure [00:11:57] That to me is a metaphor for the story of Black people and how others have attacked us and oppressed us and pushed us down. And yet we remain strong and steadfast. We are the tree that bends but doesn’t break. We are the people who are strong because of our pain, and we now remain resilient and persistent in demanding our rights and demanding our respect and focused on liberating our minds and our children’s minds. That sense of Black certainty of victory, in spite of Black pain, is a constant in our arc. From Marley song 

Bob Marley [00:12:43] How long shall they kill our prophets  While we stand aside and look.  Ooh, some say it’s just a part of it. We’ve got to fulfill the book.

[00:12:45]  

Toure [00:12:52] To Maya Angelou’s iconic poem. 

Maya Angelou [00:12:54] You may trod me in the very dirt, but still like dust I rise.

Toure [00:13:01] I mean, you hear that same message over and over. It’s in Sam Cooke’s A Change is Going to Come in 1964 

Sam Cooke [00:13:16] I was born by the river in a  little tent.  Oh and just like the river, I’ve been running ever since.  It’s been a long. A  long time coming, but I know a change gon’ come.

Toure [00:13:37] And it’s in Kendrick Lamar’s  Alright. In 2015. 

Kendrick Lamar [00:13:41] We been hurt, been down before, nigga When our pride was low. Looking at the world like, where do we go. Nigga? And we hate po po po .Wanna  kill us dead in the street for sure,Nigga. I’m at the preacher’s door when knees getting week and my gun might blow. But we gon’ be alright. Nigga,  We gon be Alright.  Nigga, we gon be alright. Nigga, we gon’ be alright. We gon’ be alright. . 

Toure [00:14:01]  A change is going to come. And we got to fulfill the book and we’re going to be all right because we have Black resilience.  Shit,  sometimes all we got is Black resilience, but we got that. I mean, I’ll never forget that day in 2016 when Trump was campaigning in Chicago and he was bringing all the racism to the surface and making racist feel great again. And it felt like this country was taking a gigantic step backwards. And some of us were like, Is this a return to slavery? But then we saw video of a band of Black protesters in the midst of a Trump rally jumping up and down and singing,  Alright. 

Crowd [00:14:45] We gone be alright. 

Toure [00:14:45] And it felt like a message to all of us that no matter what, we’re going to stand up to racism and no matter what. We’re going to stay strong. And no matter what, we’re going to fight. Because sometimes Black resilience is all we’ve got and sometimes it’s all we need. That moment buoyed me. I think it buoyed a lot of us. And it made me certain that the Black resilience that got us to this point was so deeply instilled in the younger generation that they were willing to go into the belly of the beast, a Trump rally, which at that point felt like a Klan rally. Like a place where a Black person was risking their life. They were willing to go into all of that and protest the madness, the racism, the championing of white supremacy. Oh, I loved them. They made me feel like the legacy of Black resilience was continuing on. And that made me feel like we were going to be alright.  And now a sermon on Black Determination from the Reverend Dr. Michel Eric Dyson 

Michael Eric Dyson [00:16:00] People have often wondered how Black people have kept coming, kept going, kept rising. Kenny Burke released a song in the eighties, “Keep Rising to the Top.”  That is the emblematic response of Black people to circumstances of oppression in America.  How have we come forward?  How have we been determined to rise no matter what, as the brothers and sisters in the streets say, “irregardless of the circumstances we confront”?  We have risen above Jim Crow.  We have risen above incarceration.  We have risen above enslavement itself.  We have risen above the circumstances when we came over on ships, not meant to cruise us into luxury, but to capture us into enslavement. We have risen regardless of the circumstances.     That is because we have an iron will, a stubbornness, a determination to keep rising.  That word rise is perfect for us as an acronym of our determination. 

Michael Eric Dyson [00:16:00] R is for resistance.  We have resisted from the very beginning.  We jumped overboard rather than go down to the watery grave of enslavement in America.  “And before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave and go home to my God and be free”. And for those of us who were enslaved in America, what did we do?  We resisted.  We escaped enslavement.  We slowed down work.  We broke the implements and tools needed to do the work we were assigned.  We even aborted babies to keep them from coming into the tragedy and horror of American slavery.   We resisted by sharing bodily oils and odors and, if you will liquids into the food of the masters.   We at night prayed to a God.   We at night played with each other.  We at night sought entertainment that would distract us from the horrors of enslavement.   But we kept resisting no matter what the consequences are, because we were determined to be free. 

Michael Eric Dyson [00:16:00] I: Intellectual.   We used our brains to make a difference.   This is something that is not often ascribed to Black people, but we have been deeply and profoundly intelligent.   We have been determined to do the things necessary to get our way to freedom.   It was Frederick Douglass who said, ” Knowledge unfits a child for slavery.”  George Clinton said it this way.   “Free your mind and your ass will follow.”   We were determined to use knowledge to escape the paralyzing conditions that were arbitrarily imposed upon us by people who refused to acknowledge our fundamental dignity and humanity.  We used the gray matter God gave us.  We used the brains that we were given at birth to figure out ways to make maps, to draw songs, to present quilts that would allow us to indicate what method we would use for escape, what arrows pointed to what directions we needed to take to get out of here.  and even in our enslaved songs our sorrow songs,  “Green trees are bending.  Ain’t got long to stay here”,  we were signifying and intellectually using our capacity to signify freedom to each other, to escape the horrible conditions of American enslavement. 

Michael Eric Dyson [00:16:00] S: the Spirit We were a spiritual people even when we weren’t religious to binding together, to talk about the institutional matrices that receive the desire of Black people to be spiritual.  But spirit is deeper.  It transcends religion. Spirit makes religion behave right.  Spirituality resides in all of us, regardless of our partisan beliefs in one God or another. 

Michael Eric Dyson [00:16:00] We are spiritual. people who understand our cosmic connection to each other to embrace the love and passion and empathy that flows from breast to breast and from limb to limb.  And then finally, we were enlightened.  We hear a great deal these days about wokeness and antiwokeness.  What does the America have against being woke?  Thomas Jefferson said that the rapid descent of Black people into sleep was an index of our inferiority.  My bad, I thought it was an index of working 18 to 19 hours a day.  They came up with a term, dysaesthesia aethiopica, to suggest the peculiar disease of Black people to sleep.  Frederick Douglass said, “no other harm or offense was done to slavery and by Black people during slavery than for Black people to be penalized for oversleeping”.  And now they want us to remain asleep.  But we must be enlightend.  We must be woke.  We must understand the plight and predicament of those who are still arrested in their development in America.   Yes they don’t know the difference between CRT and OPP.  We must continue to use our enlighted engagement with the world around us to make democracy real, but especially to continue to embrace Blackness as the  signal of our divine attention to the conditions that we exist in in this mortal state.  We’re grateful for the Blackness that has taught us to keep rising, to keep resisting, to keep being intellectual, to keep being spiritual and to be enlightened so that the end of the day our Blackness is a badge of pride and not a stigma to be avoided.  We keep rising.  We are determined to keep going. 

Bob Marley [00:16:00] Won’t you help to sing, these songs of freedom? ‘Cause all I ever have Redemption songs

Toure [00:16:00] Thank you so much for listening to this season of Being Black in the Eighties. It has been an honor to tell this story. I love Black people and Black music and it has been a joy to put this together. I’m Toure and this was Being Black. The Eighties. The next episode of this show is already available and soon we’ll be back with Being Black The Seventies. This podcast was produced by me, Toure and Jesse Cannon and scored by Will Brooks with additional production by Bryan de Meglio and executive production from Regina Griffin. Thank you for listening to this podcast from the Grio Black Podcast Network. Please tell a friend and check out the other shows on theGrio Black Podcast Network, including Blackest Questions with Chrissy Greer.  Dear  Culture with Panama Jackson, The Grio, Daly with Michael Harriot and Writing Black with Maiysha Kai.