"Ain't it hard to stumble

got no place to fall?

If the wolfman's knocking at your door,

may not have place at all,"   Bernice Reagon   'Matriarch Blues'

There are continuing arguments as to the value of cultural nationalism. In the final analysis, some say, it is only a distraction from the ultimate human concerns and the fulfillment of those concerns. To the extent that racialism easily allows for a certain immobilization and stasis, by its tendency to mystification and stereotyping, it indisputably becomes self-defeating. James Baldwin says, in a discussion of the dynamics operating in a certain group of expatriates: "For one thing, it becomes impossible, the moment one thinks of it, to predicate the existence of a common experience. The moment one thinks about it, it becomes apparent that there is no such thing. That experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair is the principal truth..." Agreed. And still we find the world of individuals constantly involved in the charting of analogous hypotheses and experiments, discoveries and frustration; the hope evidently being that somehow correspondence will be found, and from correspondence will grow support, and from support--change.

"We been had/we been took/we been misled"

You should hear the 'Harambee Singers.' Bernice Reagon is the guiding force behind the group which consists of four black women. During the peak of the civil rights movement in the South, she was a member of the Freedom Singers. She and her songs have changed in congruence with the shifts in the political emphases of the black liberation struggle. To hear them is to live momentarily in the history and the future they project for black people in America.

To Bernice Johnson Reagan, I say today, almost ten years later: Your voice echoes in my mind and your songs can sing what I felt in Albany better than the few words I put on paper. I remember seeing you lift your beautiful black head, stand squarely over your feet, your lips trembling as the melodious words 'Over my head, I see freedom in the air' came forth with an urgency and pain that brought out a sense of intense renewal and commitment to liberation.   James Forman

This is not to suggest a return to only songs and praying. Remember and rediscover that the impetus resulting in such creation is not one of purely individual experience.

"I wish that it had not been necessary to

become socially and politically oriented,

I don't want to be Jesus Christ. I don't

know beans about politics--I mean technically. But I had to choose this way. My

people were in trouble."   Nina Simone

And Nina sings.