Separatism. So why does that word interest me so much? After all, isn't the integration of all people a noble goal for humankind? 

One thing the womanists (black feminists) have taught me is that writers' social location is important to discern the constitutive elements in their works. I grew up in an upper class Southern family in the Southern diaspora. (Southern families who were displaced after the War--need I say which war?) I was raised partially by a black woman named Bessie, who kept me from the more violent outbursts of my emotionally fragile mother and who often told my mother that The Good Book says the last will be first. (It has always interested me that white Southerners entrust that which is most dear to them--their children and their food--to black people.) I was the first white person ever asked by the Pan-African students to preach at the seminary in the town in which I live. During the aftermath of the first Rodney King verdict, the black people at the library told me how to drive home to avoid the riots, which came within three blocks of my home. I live in one of only two integrated neighborhoods in my town. I know integration and acceptance.

More than that, though, I am gay. I am insistent that I am a writer who happens to be gay, and I am primarily a Southern writer first and an Anglican/Episcopal Catholic writer second. This has caused some consternation in the gay community, many of who want to claim me solely as their own. I also am willing to cooperate with nongay people to achieve political ends. So frightening has my political openness been that a group of gay so-called Christians in Orange County, California do not want me to attend their social events, yet they had no trouble with a psychopath who later murdered his lover (who was a friend of mine) attending their events.

No, I am not a separatist. However, I often come home from a tired day in the nongay world and I long for the companionship of a world in which I do not have to translate every idea I have into someone else's vocabulary. Yet I fear assimilation. I know what happened to the Jews when they thought assimilation meant acceptance in post-Enlightenment Europe. That comfortableness ended in the death camps of Auschwitz and Dachau.

When I taught the Black Muslim movement as a part of the Islamic section in a course on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, many were surprised and some were offended. I became interested in the life of Malcolm X. However, my womanist philosopher friends urged me to go further.

I found the root of what is called Black Separatism in the person of Marcus Garvey.

Garvey is no saint and he certainly made anti-Semitic statements. He is considered by many not to understand American racism, as he was Jamaican. Yet he had influence far beyond his social and geographical location. So why have so many white Americans not heard of him?

For the same reason many of us have never heard of the East St. Louis riots, which preceded the Watts riots by almost half a century. These were terrible riots in which both black and white people were killed, some caught in the fire because of mistaken identity. Marcus Garvey gave a speech in Harlem, a predominately black neighborhood in New York City, in which he called the riots “one of the bloodiest outrages against mankind.”

In the person of Garvey himself were the seeds of  an aspect of Black Nationalism know as Garveyism; its tenets are race first, self-reliance, and nationhood. Garvey sought for a Black Homeland.

His insistence on Black Separatism aroused the ire of J. Edgar Hoover, who was then Assistant to the Attorney General of the United States. Garvey was eventually convicted of mail fraud. After his conviction, he made anti-Semitic remarks about the judge and two members of the jury. He felt they were prejudiced against him because he had met with Ku Klux Klan leaders.

It is interesting, at least to me, that a Black Separatist would meet with the leaders of a white separatist group. However, should one make bargains with whom one considers the devil to achieve one's goal? I was not above working with religious anti-gay conservatives if I could publicize their opposition; it only helped the cause for which I was fighting.

Moreover, Garvey preferred honest racism to clandestine racism. I know that I have been in a group of people who made anti-gay remarks not knowing I was gay. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard young people, even my own students, use the word gay as a synonym for stupid. My Latino and Latina friends have heard anti-Hispanic slogans when they are in a group of English-speaking people who assume they don't know English.

On February 10, 1925, long before Martin Luther King penned his letter from the Birmingham Jail, Marcus Garvey wrote  his “First Message to the Negroes of the World From Atlanta Prison", wherein he made his famous proclamation:

Look for me in the whirlwind or the storm, look for me all around you, for, with God's grace, I shall come and bring with me countless millions of black slaves who have died in America and the West Indies and the millions in Africa to aid you in the fight for Liberty, Freedom and Life.

Garvey died in 1940. I doubt without his laying the groundwork that Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and indeed Martin Luther King would have ever been heard.

Separation or Assimilation? Segregation or Integration? I don't know the answer; I want to believe that the answer to the question Rodney King posed-- Can't We all Get Along? --is “yes.” I hope the future will prove me right. However, I and my mild-mannered, sophisticated, reticent partner of twenty years (we were together during the formation of the integrated gay and lesbian community, from 1978 until 1998) still carry our passports on us at all times. I hope we won't be caught by the Transportation Security Administration if we have to leave.