Our Future: September 2005 Archives

Thousands of years ago, the darkness of the evolutionary night began to fade at that moment when the first ape-like creature came down from his home amidst the branches of towering trees and slowly shuffled out onto the flat, grassy land below. This primordial human being did not clearly understand why he came down. Something in his churning body chemistry made him move in a new direction. In his brain – a brain different from others in his immediate family and even from those of his hoary ancestors – the seed of humanity was born. And in his strangely shining eyes was the glorious secret of that hidden dream of newly born humanity.

Though African Americans have made progress under the aegis of American civil rights ideology, they still lag behind non-blacks in earnings and wealth. Not only that, in the key category of ownership of economic institutions, they consistently end up with less than one percent of business sales and revenues.

This makes the African American community deeply subservient to other ethnic and racial groups in the U.S., not in a position of economic strength, not only in spite of, but because of the civil rights ideology. The following article compares black nationalist greats Malcolm X and Rene W.E.B. Du Bois with contemporary civil rights leaders in terms of the economic ideology and possibilities they offer and concludes blacks would be better off following black nationalist ideas, many
of which are supported by and elaborated in Prout ........ Read More