"Your History, Your Way" -- Walmart Goes 365Black

"Your history. Your story."

This is the moniker to Walmart’s black centered campaign to kick start a passion for the teaching of black history 24-7-365black. Here’s more on the campaign:

Walmart goes 365black, finding a BlackAtlas from American Airlines and riding My Black Journey via Amtrak along the way

Walmart “History Teaching History” is an ongoing national educational and community-focused campaign that gives African-America heroes a platform to share their considerable knowledge and keys to success with young, aspiring hopefuls.

The video for this campaign features Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King, and Thurgood Marshall… hardly black people who accomplished anything other than being the first black individual to accomplish something white people had been doing for many years (in fact, basically invented – save for the ability to induce white guilt, which is MLK’s specialty).

Sadly, Walmart left out the story about the failed attempt to keep open one of its stores in Tuskegee, Alabama, a powerful tale of the Visible Black Hand of Economics in the fabled hometown of the Read Tails themselves, the Tuskegee Airmen. 

The story of the Tuskegee Airmen provides much of the fuel which keeps Black History Month aloft, an admission made in the book, “Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II” by J. Todd Moye. It contains a hilarious admission about the depths of actual black history -- definitely don’t jump into the deep end of this pool, for the depth of black history wouldn’t fill a kiddy pool:

Unfortunately, in collective memory the Tuskegee Airmen’s story was in danger of becoming too precious to withstand critical inquiry. This reality became all too apparent on the January 31, 2007, broadcast of Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.” Speaking on what he called “Black History Month Eve,” Larry Wilmore, identitied as the fake newscast’s “Senior Black Historian,” braced himself for February’s commemorative period. Wilmore joked that Black History Month served the sole purpose of “making up for centuries of oppression with twenty-eight days of trivia,” calling it a time when the American “bow our heads in solemn reverence for Harriet Tubman and the Tuskegee Airmen.” As if on cue, four days later the Coca-Cola Co. ran an advertisement during the television broadcast for Super Bowl XLI. In the advertisement, “Tuskegee 1941” served as one of exactly six moments worth celebrating in the combined history of black Americans and their preferred soft drink. 

 “Tuskegee 1941: Pilots prove heroism has no color,” ran the legend next to the image of a Coke bottle. But if the extent of the public understanding of the Tuskegee Airmen had progressed from complete ignorance to “Blacks can be great pilots” or “Blacks can be heroic” over the previous sixty years, it had not progressed much at all. Wilmore’s satire struck deep. By the time he spoke, the Tuskegee Airmen had come to represent a feel-good story that Americans of all races and ethnictieis could tell themselves during the one month of the year when they were encouraged to think of black history as American history. The oversimplication of their experience threatened to reduce the Tuskegee Airmen to a collective cliché. The “Never lost a bomber” myth packaged their experience neatly and made it safe for mass consumption – just the thing for Black History Month. 

 That the news of the lost bombers broke shortly before the US Congress honored the Tuskegee Airmen with the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor that body can award to civilians, was fortunate. When more than 300 of the original pilots and members of the support crews gathered in the Capitol Rotunda in March 2007 to receive the honor, the emphasis in the speeches from President George W. Bush, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and other was on the Airmen’s record in helping their country overcome white supremacy, not on the (mythical) record of the 332^nd in combat. “I thank you for what you had done for African Americans, but more, I thank you for what you have done for America,” Powell told them. “You caused America to look into the mirror of its soul, and you showed America that there was nothing a black person couldn’t do. “(p. 176-177)

Well, nothing a black person except run a city competently – a city that was already built like one of those starter cities in Sim City.  A city, mind you, that elected a Tuskegee Airman its first black mayor…

The sole reason the Tuskegee Airmen were being honored by the US Congress in March of 2007 was because of the depth the (mythical) “Never Lost a Bomber” narrative had penetrated the American psyche.

That’s it.

Hilariously, "The Tuskegee Airmen and the "Never Lost a Bomber" Myth" by Daniel Lee Haulman, shows the Nubian flyers had already lost bombers in their first few missions, a fact The Chicago Defender – perhaps the most important black newspaper in all of American history – lied about on March 24, 1945 in an article titled ‘332d Flies Its 200^th Mission Without Loss’.

He writes:

“On March 10, 1945, the respected and widely read Liberty magainze published “Dark Angels of Doom,” an article by influential black journalist Roi Ottley about the 332^nd Fighter Group in combat. Ottley wrote that “in more than 100 combat missions in which the Red Tails have given escort cover to their ‘Big Friends’ – the long-range heavy bombers – they haven’t lost a single ship to enemy fighters!” By then the 332^nd had flown more than 130 bomber escort missions, and had lost bombers on only six of those missions. But the group did not fly 100 missions before losing a bomber. In fact, the group lost bombers during its first few missions. (p. 1)

So yes, we can look in the mirror and smile knowing what the Tuskegee Airmen did (black people, selected for their intelligence, were able to be trained to fly planes in a segregated unit of the Army Air Force) and that it was a Tuskegee Airman himself, Coleman Young, who presided over the destruction of Detroit.

And it was black people who drove white people out of the city through violence and property devaluation, that kept electing every four years after 1973 and through the mid-1990s the same Tuskegee Airmen whose true legacy is the destruction of Detroit. 

So yes, Gen. Powell... black people are capable of destroying what once was one of the world's greatest cities. And a Tuskegee Airmen was at the helm for the start of black-rule in Detroit. 

There's your black history Walmart and schools won't teach.