Interviewer:
Could you please state your name?
Cole:
My name is Ronald Cole Bridgeforth. My mother named me Ronald. I named myself Cole. Cole is my preference.
Interviewer:
Thank you. Well, starting off with that, get to know brother Cole, let's start off with, where did you grow up?
Cole:
Well, I really grew up in two places. One, I was born here in Berkeley, 1944 during World War II. My mother was like 16 years old and grew up as a farm girl in Southeast Arkansas. But getting pregnant while still in high school was a — They sent her away.So she came out here to stay with my oldest aunt, [inaudible 00:01:06] who actually became a city council member in Berkeley for about 20 years, but —
So I was born here and then went back to Arkansas because I was the first grandchild and a boy. So whatever transgressions my grandfather felt about my mother's refusing to marry whoever my father was, was forgiven because now he had a boy grandchild, which she's resented for most of her life, like, okay. So I'm all right as long as I have a little dingling for a child. But anyway, I went back to Arkansas. I lived on a farm for about five, six years with my grandparents and my youngest uncle and my youngest aunt.
And the only one of those 10 children that are left are my aunt, Letty Jean, who was down in South LA. My uncle, Eddie Madison Milly Jr died in Korea. He's about 20 years old. I still grieve his loss. So I spent those, until I was about six, six and a half, I stayed on that farm and it was wonderful. It was idyllic. It was a kind of small town where you had two churches, Methodists and Baptist, and we didn't have enough people to fill both churches every Sunday. So they'd go back and forth. And you had the ministers that came in riding circuit and you know, that whole thing. But it was like, I think probably I was a prince.
My grandfather, he owned a farm and he fed loving kids on it, but he was an educator and he spent much of his life going into small towns in Arkansas, starting schools in the local churches. And he'd have to talk with the white school board members to convince them that it was not going to interrupt with bringing in crops and planting crops because the Black kids are only going to go to school six months out of the year and not nine, but he felt like — He had a 12th grade education, which made him probably one of the most educated men, Black or white in that area of the county. But that was his evitation and I carry that with me.
So the next part, my mother got married when she was about, I don't know how old she was, but I was about six or seven. And had come back to California from Arkansas. And she was going to Los Angeles City College. And ultimately, she wound up going to the University of Southern California School of Pharmacy. She was maybe the second Black woman to go through that school.
She got married and I came out to stay with her and my step stepfather, David William Bridgeforth is where the name came from. And we lived in Compton and it was not the Compton of NWA. It was Compton of working class Black families who were — It's one of the few places that Black GIs could buy land in California back in the fifties. So this was a whole community of a subdivision that stretched from about a 120th to, oh, I lived on 130th. So to the forties, that were basically Black families. Working class, he was a mechanic for this city, I think.
So it was interesting. I mean, it was different in that I came in there with a Southern accent, kind of chubby, wore glasses, had a smart mouth. Got popped in it a few times but that didn't deter me so. But being different sort of established a pattern in my life, so I stayed there till I was 17.
Interviewer:
Wow. So who or what influenced you the most as a child?
Cole:
Probably my grandfather, my uncle Junior, my mother, of course. We belonged or she helped found a Presbyterian church in South LA on 118th street called Bellevue. And I spent much of my childhood in and out of church. Everything from usher board to, oh, I love Sunday school. It was just philosophical debates, you know?
Interviewer:
Oh, nice.
Cole:
They had to explain to me why three quarters of the world's population were damned to hell because they weren't Christian. That wasn't logical to me, but the deacon who was teaching it, old school. Oh yeah, that's the way it is. So it was a good time. Boy Scouts, club Scouts, explore Scouts, spend a lot of time with the church. And so the minister referenced St. Paul Eps, real name. He was our minister and he had a lot of influence on me as did the Boy Scout masters and all of these people that touched my life.Some of the teachers, there were a couple of teachers in high school who came up from the South, from Louisiana and from Texas who could — See, we had a high school, Centennial High School. Centennial is the same high school that — Oh, I don't know what that boy. Who — Not important. It's a rapper. He came through several generations after me. But Centennial was built to siphon off Black and Mexican kids from Compton High School. Compton High School at that time was all white. Of course, now it's all Mexican and Black, but then it was all white. And so they built Centennial, at Central Blvd and El Segundo Ave.
And that school was 75% Black and 25% Latino. And so there were Black men, teachers who really kind of looked out for the young Black men who were going to school there because they knew what was coming — we didn't. I mean, we lived in pretty insular community of Black folks. And interestingly enough, I had a teacher in the fifth grade named Mrs. Fox, white woman. I haven't seen her since, but in her class she did a thing with history that was the curriculum of fifth grade. And so she had a Jeopardy thing where she divided the kids into two teams and every Friday we just answered questions as long as we could. She picked me as one of the captains.
And it was in that classroom. I realized that, oh, you have something between your ears that you can ride. And after I discovered I had some intelligence, you didn't talk to me no more, no matter what they did. So yeah, it's interesting who can influence your life and it's important to, I think honor them.
Interviewer:
Absolutely. Absolutely. And you mentioned you were in Compton, until you said 17?
Cole:
Until I was 17.
Interviewer: Aboutk17.tAnd did you come to Oakland after that or?
Cole:
I went to school. I went away to a school called Sterling College in Kansas, which was a Presbyterian school because my grades are pretty bad by the time I graduated. I read everything in the library, all through middle school and the first couple of years of high school. And then about the 11th grade, I discovered girls and I stopped reading and you know, so, and I stopped studying. So my grades were like "C"s. And so my administer got me into Sterling College, which was a small 500 student Presbyterian college in semi rural Kansas, 500 students, two Black students. So I stayed there a year and a half and learned to hate it because Kansas ain't that far from Mississippi really.And then after the second semester of my second year, I transferred to Knoxville College in Knoxville, Tennessee. Also a Presbyterian college, about 800 students and maybe there were 10 of them that were white. Remember, I was born into a segregated world. I mean, seriously, it's still segregated, but no. You did ride on the back of the bus, kind of thing. So by then I was 19 and I announced to my family that I was going to Mississippi to work for something called The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) for the summer of 1964. And of course, they were terrified. They knew stuff I didn't know, my family did. Like that my family, they came from Oakland, Mississippi in the Delta in 1877, right after the Civil War, they had to escape from there.
They knew all of that, they didn't talk about it. I didn't know nothing. I thought I was, you know — I mean, as a church camps and stuff I went to, we worked on Indian reservations when I was a teenager and all that stuff. That's what I thought we were doing. Now we spent a week in Oxford, Ohio at a university. They were trying to prepare us to go into Mississippi and they were trying to get our attention that this is serious. These people kill you. We didn't get it until the weekend I was supposed to go down and did go down to Mississippi, three civil rights workers disappeared. Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney. And the Black Mississippi staff, they said they're dead. And the rest we're like, how could that be? You know, just, yeah. And in fact, they were dead.
Interviewer:
It's terrifying.
Cole:
They sent me to a town that was 50 miles away from where those brothers died. And you started to get a little more serious about Mississippi's lethal. Now they sent 950 students to Mississippi that summer for that summer project. And about 900 of them were white, about 50 of us were Black. And in what became clear over time was, had they just sent Black students into Mississippi for that summer, they would've put us in the river too. But because there were white students from Michigan and Cal Berkeley and Harvard, all kinds of — I mean, they only recruited the children of the ruling class as they call it. When those students came in, they brought with them, their families, their local newspapers, the black and white TV. And so that caused the president, whoever was at that time, probably Lyndon Johnson. Like, "No, we cannot allow those kids to be killed."So they sent in the FBI and justice department and it comes alive. I mean, and that's realistically, if you go back and look at, there was a speech that Julian Bond made in 2014 at the 50th anniversary of the summer project where he laid it out. The decision was made by Bob Moses, who was a state project director. Bob just passed away this year. That even though there was an argument that bringing all these white students in the Mississippi would rob the local people of their agency because they could come in and type and run mimeograph machines and where we were learning to do that. That until SNCC changed the metrics that Mississippi was going to continue to kill Black people and the rest of the country was just going to look away. So they said, well bring some white folks in here and see what happens next. And what happened was we broke open the state.
I don't know what the question is anymore.
Interviewer:
You were just giving the history in your background for after you moved initially. So which is, no, this is very, it's very interesting. And just following that, I mean, just having that experience, how did that change, I guess, the way you were looking at society and things when going into Mississippi and having all these experiences?
Cole:
I've just read a book named Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent and I can't think of the rest of the name, but it's by a woman by the name of [Isabel] Wilkerson. And she also wrote another book called Warmth of Other Suns, which really chronicles the migration of Black folks from the South to the north, west and east, maybe seven million of us because we weren't here before. And this was like from the 1910, 1920 through 1950s. Now I guess some are going back.But anyway, this book Caste talks about that the way our society is structured, it doesn't matter how much education we get, how much wealth we get, it's still designed to keep us in place. Now I was raised, as my parents were raised to believe that if we did the right thing, if we lived good lives, that we got education, we went to church, we dressed well, did all that stuff that they would stop killing us. And what Caste points out is that ain't true, we have to do something else.
So I don't know what I would've done differently had I understood at 19 and 20 what that book explains. I probably would've done something different, I don't know what that would have been. But I believed in lifting up yourself by your own bootstraps. "Upsuasion," one brother calls it, you know, that we could just be better. Which also flips to the Bill Cosby thing of if we would just do right. And I don't want to curse on this film. So it's just bull, doesn't matter.
[Referring to the sexual assault accusations and legal charges against Black comedian Bill Cosby.]So in Mississippi — As a young Black man in this country, in the 19, whatever that was sixties, early sixties. There were not the LeBron Jameses of the world or Stephen Curry's or the Obamas. It was difficult to determine what you could be, and I didn't want to be a minister. I definitely did want to be my stepfather. I didn't even understand my grandfather. So I'm looking around, and when I joined SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinated Committee, I found brothers who were like myself. Bought them from Harlem and DC and they knew a lot more than me, but they had a spirit about them. And so what I found in Mississippi was purpose. I saw in the eyes of the folks that I worked with, as humble as their surroundings were, I saw in their eyes, a reflection of me as a young Black man who had value.
At any rate, they changed my life. They changed the way I saw the world. And so I've spent the rest of my life, the next 50 years, trying to live a life of which they might be proud. Trying to —
Well, I spent my twenties — I moved from Mississippi, I moved from Mississippi to San Francisco in '65. And I worked for SNCC there, raising money and doing educational programs. And then SNCC dissolved at the end of '66, right as the Panthers were rising. And so you didn't have to be a Panther, you to be in their sphere of influence of the way they saw the world. And my wife was out there at San Francisco State and the Black Student Union, their striking It was just, it was a hell of a time in the Bay. [Berkeley] Free Speech Movement, all kinds of stuff, Farm Workers [Union] are going on.
[Referring to the long 1968-69 student strike for Third World Studies and open admissions. The longest student strike in American history.]So that was my next ideological leap. I grew up as, I thought about being a minister at 15 and 16, but when we started reading The Red Book and [inaudible 00:20:00] and all of them folks in the sixties, we became materialists, dialectical materialists, which is, there is no God kind of thing.
[Referring to Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung in English, which was colloquially known as "The Little Red Book." The Black Panther Party raised funds by selling copies to young leftists and radicals in the later 1960s and early 1970s.]And so we had our education groups where we'd read and discuss and all of that. And we learned to buy guns and arm ourselves for self defense. I'm not sure how that was going to work, but anyway. It's a good theory because white folks always had more guns than we were going to have. So I moved from the nonviolence of the South to the self-defense of the north. And this is like, you get whiplash doing this stuff. I mean, between '62 and '66 that happened.
And after SNCC dissolved, I started organizing young Black men in the Filmore [district of San Francisco]. I had spoken at a high school up near Golden Gate Park and a couple of brothers after I spoke, I was talking about the South. They said, well, can you organize us here? And so we started, we had about 20 young men. Oh man. So, okay. I think, we're just, that takes me there.
Interviewer:
Takes you there. I'm just sure just having that wealth of experience going from Mississippi to San Francisco and then SNCC ending is a year right after you got there, essentially, and then just having to pivot and find your way in a different spot with so many other movements happening at the same time. And just being in midst of all of that, that changing your politics too and just reading and having all those experiences. I'm sure this question would've been different if I asked you say in the sixties, but right now, what would you say, what does it mean to be Black in America? What does it mean to you now?
Cole:
It's to have a double consciousness, not in the way the voice looked at it, but in the way that, for me is to live with love and rage simultaneously. The thing I left Mississippi with was rage, and they were going to draft me. I was and all that stuff and I didn't want to go to Vietnam and it was just madness, but they reclassified me and said, we don't want you in Vietnam, smart decision for them and me. But I was pretty much all through my twenties, just angry. Really pissed.What happened in Mississippi was we went to the Atlantic City Democratic Convention in 1964 in August. And that's where the freedom democratic party of Mississippi, which was biracial, integrated. Led by a sister by the name of Fannie Lou Hamer. Made her famous appeal to the credentials committee of the democratic convention and said, "Look, your rules say that you will not seat segregated state parties. And the Mississippi party is all white. We are integrated, you should seat us."
And Lyndon Johnson said, if I seat them, Negroes from Mississippi. I'm going to lose the [white] Southern vote and I won't be president the next time around. So they cut a deal. They offered two [non-voting] seats to that party. And Fannie Lou Hamer said, "We didn't come here for no two seats." And so we were rebuffed.
But in my young brain, 19 and 20, it's like, we've done everything that you said we should do and you say, "Yeah, but..."
So a lot of us left the South really disillusioned, people went in their different directions. I went to embracing armed-revolution. So, yeah. So during my twenties, I was pretty much angry and enraged and walking on the edge of staying alive. I really, I had a lot of idealism about, I'd be willing to trade my life and you could free my people. It ain't that simple though. And it wasn't until my first son was born, I think '73 and I was about 29. That I came to grips with life because then that wasn't just me anymore.
Now I've digress a bit. I met my biological father in 2015. He was already in his nineties. Very successful, PhD in math, taught a Black college down there in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where my mother had gone to school as a high schooler. His absence in my life was a determinant for me. It shaped my journey as much as anything he could have done if had he been present. Not knowing my father was extraordinarily painful for me. I can't even emphasize how painful it was. Because I shut it off for years. "Didn't matter" — [but] it did matter.
And I meet young men now who say, "It don't matter." I said it might, it might not matter. I can't tell you what it does for you. It mattered for me. So when my son was born, I came to a full stop and I said, I don't want my child to experience the pain that I experienced of growing up without a father. And for that reason, I made two critical decisions and I made a promise to him that I was going to stay alive and stay out of jail. And that meant I had to live my life differently and whatever pipe dreams I had about dying in the revolution and all that, forget that. Stay alive, stay out of jail.
And I told him, he saved my life because he gave me a reason to live. So that took me through my twenties. Now, I got two sons and decided, "Okay, you're smart." I'm moving furniture for a living. And it was like, that's a pack animal. So I guess I need to go back to school. So I went to school, I went back to where my grandfather would've had me go, which was become an educator.
Interviewer:
Okay.
Cole:
That fits quite naturally with me.Interviewer:
I'm sure that had a big impact, not just because you making the conscious decision to further education and again, it's not just you anymore, it's the family now. So it's like you seeing the larger implications of that and just moving forward of like how can I take care of them in a more holistic way and you know, in a better situation. Especially if you're doing a lot of things including, moving furniture or things that's becomes a big burden physically, eventually, you can have back issues and all those things to go along with that.
Cole:
Yeah. I was very clear about that. It would be amiss of me not to mention that I've been married for 50 years, probably more, do the counting. But yeah, over 50 years. And I blame my wife for that because I was a serious fool for most of my twenties and thirties, just a fool. And she hung in there with me and I credit her with, along with my sons for where I get to sit here now. I don't know if she ever regrets it, but you know, what can I say? That's what she made. And I've tried to be a good husband.I was married before that. It's my second marriage, the first marriage I screwed up. I just, just messed up. Wasn't ready to be married and acted and showed it. But one thing I learned from that was I never wanted to hurt anybody that bad again. And so the second time I tried it, I'm like, this is for life.
Interviewer:
I hear that. Yeah, it's a big part of experiences is just learning from whatever past mistakes or just ways you could have made it a decision differently. As you said, it's just impacting you in a way and said, I don't want to go this route again and really following up on that and having it as a determinant for you moving forward to moving to the next stage of your life. So it sounds like that experience, especially being married the first time was just kind of led you also helped to kind of leaded you on the path to the life that you have now in big one.
Cole:
Fair enough.
Interviewer:
Okay. All right. Well, just moving from that, I'm curious just from these experiences you've had, what would you say are some lessons that you've learned about society or Black society?
Cole:
I've never accomplished anything of significance without help. Although, I grew up in the American way of rugged individualism and all that crap. The truth is that you're not going to get anywhere without help. Finding it can be an issue for you, accepting it can even be a bigger issue. I have trouble with that one. What else? Get back to the question again.
Interviewer:
Sure. What are some lessons you've learned about Black society and just as you've been through all these different experiences?
Cole:
Never give up, never quit. Live life for your people and you'll never die. That sounds kind of, I don't know, might sound kind of weird, but that's the way I see it.And I was thinking about this this morning that it's the analogy, the story that those Native Americans are attributed to about having two wolves inside of us. And the question is, which wolf do you feed? Well, as I said earlier, I have rage and then I have love. And the thing that happened when my son was born, my first son was that I stopped feeding that first wolf, which was rage and anger. Legitimate rage and anger — these folks was trying to kill us out here.
And I started feeding that wolf that loves and wanted to nurture. And education fell into that because that's — Even, I became a counselor, I got a master's in counseling and I was a community college counselor, but I still focused on this is an educational process. This is not a shrinking process. I'm not going to talk a hole in anybody's head. I'm going to help people learn to manage their own journey. Black folks are beautiful, resilient, persistent, determined, and focus on that.
Not only what white folks are doing to us, although they're doing a lot, that is not the key that opens the door. It's like, even with the Brotherhood of Elders, I understand about the politics of Oakland or America, California, and all of that but that's not where I focus my energy. My energy is about how do we build a network of brothers? That's what I found in Mississippi with SNCC was a network of brothers and sisters. And that's what I found here. And every place I've stopped along the way, I've tried to build those networks. Whether, it was here, in West Africa.
I did not mention that I spent two and a half years in Senegal and Gambia in the late sixties and early seventies.
Interviewer:
Were you teaching or what were you doing at that time?
Cole:
Oh, I didn't have no degree. No, I was escaping America.
Interviewer:
Oh, okay.
Cole:
And I thought that if I got out of here, the madness would disappear. Wasn't true. Brought the madness with me, but I met a lot of good brothers. In fact, my oldest son is named for my best friend who is Senegalese, Omar Job.I didn't know a lot. I hadn't studied our history. I'm living in Dakar with a family. I didn't know anything about Goree Island, which is right off the coast. I mean, within a canoe, a boat ride. I didn't know that there was a slave castle there or any of that stuff.
Now, one of the people who lived there who were Senegalese, they knew it was there. They didn't talk about it, which is one of the themes of being in Africa. But I was adopted into a family that extended from Gambia, which was English speaking to Dakar which was French speaking. And I moved back and forth between them. I was pretty poor, but I had a ticket home, that was a requirement to get a visa.
But in the end, somebody asked me the other night, why did you come home? This is where my blood is. I mean, there's something about culture, it's like the water. And you may be — In fact, I met at the Senegalese ballet [at] general rehearsal, Omar and I were hanging out with the cast or the dancers. And being an American in 1969 or '70, I was sort of like celebrity. Hey, people want to speak English, wonder what's going on and all that stuff.
But after the laughing and joking, a brother walked up to us and said, I'm such and such and I'm from Cleveland. Now, he was deeply immersed. He looked like any other African there. And he was a dancer or a drummer or whatever he was. And he'd been there about eight years, but he was still not Senegalese. He could speak French and he could speak well off, but he wasn't Senegalese. And he was preparing to go home because although he hated what was happening in Cleveland, it was still his home. And that's kind of what I experienced that it's time. You're not going to find peace here.
Interviewer:
I get that. Essentially sounds like you've been searching for that or you know, even to escape it and go to other places and having those experiences.
Cole:
Yeah. I guess maybe that's one way of looking at it, at least that part of my life.
Interviewer:
Or maybe some was the piece was when you started having children finding some of that maybe?
Cole:
Yeah. Children settled me down, gave me a reason. I was still pretty crazy. I've been pretty crazy most of my life, but you know, it's relative, I guess. Go ahead.
Interviewer:
Okay. What would you say are maybe the top three things or that you would think are the most harmful that you've seen happen to the Black community or in the Black community?
Cole:
You know, Stokely Carmichael once said that, and I got to know him when I was in the South and actually here in San Francisco. He said, the worst thing that white folks did to us was not to enslave us — although, they did. The worst thing they did was teach us to hate ourselves. And I've subscribed to that.So what do we have to do? We have to love ourselves. I mean, that was the switch that happened in my life. That forget the anger, get with the love. So I love yourself as an individual, which can be a struggle, love your family, love your community. And you start to dig deep into Black folks' history and culture, it is a beautiful thing, for me anyway. It's just, we're at extraordinary people.
Now yes, we are living in a slave society and many of us are really being subjected to that on a daily basis in these prisons and in these exploitive jobs. I mean, you drive through Oakland, see all the homelessness and all of that. And you're like — In the wealthiest country in the world, it's just, you can't ignore that. But I still think the thing that harms us most is we don't love ourselves as much as we could or should.
Interviewer:
I hear that. And what do you think-
Cole:
Oh.
Interviewer:
Go ahead.
Cole:
Lack of education.
Interviewer:
Lack of education.
Cole:
I don't know. Not taking advantage of the education. But there's a reason why they start putting us, getting rid of affirmative action in these schools. We were turning out folks who could lead and now we still turn them out in Black colleges, but education is a lynchpin in my opinion. It's certainly attributed to why I'm get to sit here. All that reading I did in the middle school, in early high school, all the — My mother's a pharmacist. She's passed away in 2017. My grandfather was a school principal. Those were the foundation pieces that allowed me to navigate America.
Interviewer:
Wow. Wow. And you know, just around that, I think you started to speak to this. What are some ways that you feel like we can fix these issues, especially around loving ourselves? Like you mentioned, having so much hate for each other, not understanding that. What do you think are some ways you can fix some of these issues?
Cole:
It is just the reverse of what I said, which is reach deep, find love, find something that you would do for free, if you could afford to and find a way to get paid for it exceptionally well. The most precious thing we have is life, is this breath.The first thing I use to sometimes ask students, what's the first thing a child has to do or baby has to do when they're born. And they say cry. They say this, that. To me, it's take a breath. And what's the last thing you give back when you leave here, breath. So the great blessing for me is that I woke up this morning and had the gift of breath. Now, what am I going to do with that is the question for me.
And so that's the answer. Go to school, learn every way you can, read, love, fight. Just find a way. I had to learn, I had to identify the tools that I needed to use. Some people have become doctors. You're a journalist, this brother's a videographer. These are all tools to the liberation of our people. And so mine was education. It's still education. That's why we're doing this storytelling.
Interviewer:
That's right. And speaking of which, what would you say liberation means to you in 2021?
Cole:
I thought about that earlier and I'm not going to answer that directly. I'm answered another way.
Interviewer:
Okay.
Cole:
When I look at the two of you, it validates the journey I've made in my life. So what does liberation look like to me? It looks like a world in which y'all could exist. And y'all get to determine what that looks like, but the fact that you get to determine that is everything.
Interviewer:
I hear that. I hear that. Wow. Well, I think part of that is just the fact that we have resources available and are able to at least have these conversations. And one of the big reasons, I think that even we are here today as well, is the Brotherhood of Elders Network. Kind of bringing us together to work on this project together and move forward.And I'm curious, how was the Brotherhood of Elders Network impacted your life?
Cole:
Well, I don't know. It's like a home. As I said earlier, I have spent most of my life trying to build or be part of groups of young men, not so young anymore, who were committed to making a difference in our world.And the Brotherhood of Elders — You know and I lived in Michigan for like 30 some years and I was successful there. I mean, I rose from a janitor to a director of employment, to faculty member and union leader and all of that stuff. But I wasn't, while I had, and still do have good friends there, they did not see the world in the way I see the world. I mean this church, sorority, fraternity job. Those are the three pillars. Those weren't my three pillars. I didn't go to church anymore, didn't belong to a fraternity, I worked. And I built student groups and I built basketball leagues and not alone, of course but —
So when I got here and Greg Hodge said, you need to come to the Brotherhood of Elders meeting. I was like, what's up with that? So he talked to me for a while and I came and it was like, "Oh these brothers look like me, they think like me." I kind of see my journey as being on a path, right. And I've always, most of my life, especially those years in Michigan, there wasn't anybody in front of me. I'm trying to create the path with kids behind me. I got here, I met Arnold Perkins. I said, "Oh, wait a minute now. There was a brother on the path in front of me and that was gratifying." And I looked back and said, "Oh, there's some brothers behind me." It just fit. It just fit.
And not everybody who comes to the Brotherhood stays. I mean, passed through, maybe most. But for the ones who stay, who are like me, they have found something that just fit. You could say, these are my ideological brothers, whatever you want to say. But yeah, it was the first time since I left the South that I felt most comfortable.
Interviewer:
Wow.
Cole:
I don't mind working, just give a purpose and building a Brotherhood was, I could live with that. And as I said earlier, when I see these young men behind me and maybe behind isn't the right word. Maybe they're in front of me now. I am just so gratified. The only thing I regret is that I am not going to be here to see the world that you've built, but maybe I will. Who knows? One of the things that — There was a question in here somewhere about what would you tell your younger self.
Interviewer:
That's right.
Cole:
And I would say, I would counsel patience I would counsel listen to the voice inside your head. It's there. I can remember the moment in Los Angeles in 1971, '72, that I first heard that voice loud and clear. It was paralyzing. And it said, "You can't go." And I'm pretty sure if I had gone, I would've died that night. And I thought, well, that must have been my grandfather and maybe it was. But over the years, there are places like times and places I can identify that I heard a voice. And my guess is that voice has always been there, but I couldn't hear it because of the noise of the world.So I would counsel, "You know what's right, do that." Doesn't matter what anybody else is saying or doing, you know what's right. Listen to yourself.
Like I said, when I went to Africa, I had no — I read hundreds of books in Africa, frankly. Books that had been donated to the local library, by the British Literary Society, whatever it was. But there was a lot of stuff in that library that was not taught to me in high school or college. But I still was relatively ignorant. Nobody was talking about slave trade, although there was a book by Basil Davidson in there.
So not having a wide ranging body of knowledge that one can accrue by reading and listening, it's hard to put the world together. Or you can look at something and not know what it is, but because you need a reference. So yeah. Educate yourself. Listen to that voice, internal voice. Honor your ancestors. I didn't really start looking at my ancestors until the last 10 years. I mean I knew my grandfather and mother and all of that, but I didn't know my grandparents, my great grandparents. Annie and Calvin James, who were born as slaves in enslavement —
Interviewer:
Wow.
Cole:
— in Oakland, Mississippi, and had to hide in a box car with their kids in 1870, to get across that Mississippi river out of the Delta, because they weren't going to let them travel. Even though they were ostensibly free. They needed people taking them crops in the Delta and they would not let you travel. You start trying to get on a train, you find yourself listed as a "vagrant," farmed out to some local farmer. So they hid and they got help from a white man whose name is lost of history, but is instructive because they weren't going to get out of Mississippi without his help. Just like I wasn't going to survive in Mississippi without those white kids there.So I didn't know about them. So they came across the river, they homesteaded some land through The Freedmen's Bureau. They were both illiterate, but they got 160 acres of hill country. I mean it wasn't cotton land or where you grew corn and stuff, but it was a kind of land that you could raise 11 children on.
And we still have some — I still own five acres of that land. Everybody in the family got their piece. My mother had 10 acres when she died, I got five. My sister got five and it's not worth it. I mean every 20 years they cut wood off of it but that's not it. What it is that that's the legacy. I don't know if my sons will value it the way I value it, but — So I didn't know about them.
I did in 2007, my wife and I got our DNA done by African Ancestry. And we were able to identify where my father's father's father came from where our mother's mother's mother came from and where her mother's — So as a young man, 18, 19, 20 years old, I just, I was never going to be a slave. They would've just had to kill me.
When I got my feedback, I was in the Detroit Museum [Museum of African American History]. We used to take kids down to the Black history museum in Detroit, beautiful place. So we used to take students down there about 50 at a time and go through the exhibit and have lunch and lots of conversations.
I was in that museum, that's where I bought the kit to actually to have my DNA done. And we got the results and I'm sitting in that museum waiting for the kids to go through their tour. And I started to think about, there was a female child or young woman from Molly, in Senegal which is the very area I lived in, who began a journey sometime before, probably before 1830. From that area into that slave castle that I didn't know existed until recently. Well, the last 20 years in Goree Island, because there was only one slave castle in that area. Most of them were down the coast toward Nigeria and Ghana and all of that. But there's one there on Goree Island. And in fact, I have a picture of it in my living room. Friend of mine's a photographer took this beautiful picture.
I got to thinking that this young woman made a fateful decision. She decided that no matter what, no matter how difficult it was, she was going to stay alive. And she stayed alive long enough to cross the middle passage and to have a female child. And that child made the same decision. Stay alive, no matter how difficult slavery was, she stayed alive long enough to have a female child. And that went on generation after generation of women until it got to my mother who was born in 1929. And that's the reason I get to sit here.
So I sat there thinking, and I was really weeping. This foolish young man who was committed to throwing away his life rather to be enslaved, jumping overboard, whatever that might be, attacking the guards. These women had made another decision. My wife always told me that was macho male bullshit. This whole thing about following the spear. But that gave me another look at the world, seeing that DNA. And it's a bit humbling. It's important to be humble. I've not been accused of that a lot, but it's important.
Interviewer:
I like that.
Cole:
Are we done?
Interviewer:
Well, now I'm curious. So there was the one side you mentioned, what was the other, your father's side for the DNA?
Cole:
So my mother's side was Mandinka. My father's side was Yoruba.
Interviewer:
Oh wow. Okay.
Cole:
My oldest son's middle name is Yoruba. I have, in fact, I just got a book about Yoruba religion and how that has moved across the world. I've always been fascinated with the Yoruba religion and I didn't know why. And I can't say that it's a one to one thing, but yes, my father's side of the family are Yoruba.
Interviewer:
Well, it's great to know.
Cole:
And my wife's family is Ebo. So women only carry one chromosome, but I don't know if it's extra the Y. So she can only trace her maternal. But men carry X and Y so you can trace both sides. And it made a difference for us, really did. It's like people were having dinner last night, Jewish and there people come from Russia and I don't know how far they go back and relatives who actually, they still have some relatives in Russia. You know, yours is broken, that link. Although, I clearly Gates has shown that, Henry Lewis Gates has shown that if you have enough money, do all that research, you can get pretty far back. So we'll see what happens.
Interviewer:
I hear that.
Cole:
That's the next stage of life.
Interviewer:
Yeah. Oh, okay. Last question. What is some advice you would like to give for the younger generation?
Cole:
It's really, I've said everything. Never give up. Never quit. Love your people, live for them and you'll never die. That's an odd thing to say, but it's what I believe. I'm an educator. I was going to say I was, but no, I'm an educator. And so I used to give away books in my office. I gave away a lot of copies of Frederick Douglas's narrative. And so I gave a copy to a young woman who ultimately wound up taking a class from me. And so halfway through the semester I asked her, so did you ever read that book? And she said, "No, I left it on my nightstand and my 15 year old brother took it. He read it." I'm like, that's what it's about.So I don't know what the words would be selfless or whatever it is, that's not what it is. But what I've taught my students, whichever way I taught them, whether it was taking them somewhere or giving them a book and just in conversation or you got to write that paper, because I'm going to give you a grade. They carry that with them and it would be reflected in their own children. So when I say you'll never die, that's what I mean. That you don't —
See education to me is like a ripple on a pond. Like you throw a pebble in there, you don't know where that ripple is going to hit shore and you don't know what tidal wave it may give rise to. But it's the faith of an educator and you do it anyway because you do have faith that it will hit shore, you just don't know when or where. So give me the question again.
Interviewer:
It sounded like you answered it. What's some wisdom you would share the younger generation?
Cole:
Faith in yourself, brother. Faith in yourself. Love yourself. Love your family. Don't get seduced by the rage and the anger. There's a quote I use a lot. There's one of the books I gave away was Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. Now the first half is about his time in the concentration camp. And I don't know how I book came to me, but I was struggling with probably in the nineties or something or eighties about how I was going to proceed with life. And somebody gave me this book and I read the first half. The second half, I don't read because its psychological theory. But the first half I read and it talked about who survived the camps and his analysis is those people who had purpose beyond themselves had reason to live beyond their own life — survive the camps.And he talks, he likes to quote Nietzsche, which is Austrian German, some man, a philosopher, the 1800s, maybe earlier. "That what does not kill you will make you stronger." That's one thought. The other was a little more complicated. Those who chase monsters should be careful that they do not become monsters themselves.
And I felt like in my twenties, that was my road. That I stop valuing life, my life or anybody else's life. And I was on the edge. And the rest of that quote is, if you look long into the Abyss will look back into you and the Abyss is hell, it might be. So I'd like to go back and read why he used those two quotes, but for me it was very instructive. You know, which wolf do you feed? And I'm just extraordinarily grateful that I get to be here and perhaps I have more work to do. We'll see.
Interviewer:
Let's see. Well, thank you so much, brother Cole for sharing your time and your words of wisdom with us. This has been excellent. And I'm just so glad that you've been a part of this journey every step of the way for the Brotherhood of Elders world history project. So thank you so much for your time.
Cole:
Thank you.
Copyright © Cole Ron Bridgeforth. 2022
Copyright ©
Copyright to this web page, as a web page, belongs to this web site. Copyright
to the information and stories above belong to the authors or speakers.
Webspinner:
webmaster@crmvet.org
(Labor donated)