The Fourth Turning

By W. F. Twyman, Jr.

Do you feel the shift in winds? In a short time, we have passed through a portal in time. Some years are uneventful, more of the same. The old ways of being guardrail life. The debates are familiar. The generations know their old vantage places. Then, one lives through a moment in time. The high are laid low for reflection. The non-conformers become like a Moses generation, a bridge between what has been and what is yet to be.

We are living in a turning of race relations. Dogma and slogan words are shifting out. I don’t know how long this portal in time will last but I sense we will be firmly on the other side by 2030. I told my Free Black Thought podcast co-host Michael Bowen that the young need the presence of a new Earl G. Graves. In the New America, the young and gifted will benefit the most from thought leaders of enterprise, reality as construction, not destruction, where it becomes fashionable again to reach into our deepest past for the ingredients of a good life. A good life being no more silence of non-conformers and creatives, no more distortion of reality.

Time is on our side, yes it is.

Since 1607 and the arrival of John Smith at Jamestown, Virginia, there have been portals in time before. One day, everyone knows the running script. Then the vibe in racial life changes going forward. The vibe has changed direction. If one were a free black living in Boston on the day of the Dred Scott decision on March 6, 1857, one knew the world turned. A future Civil War four years later was unimaginable but one living on Beacon Hill felt the chill of a turning in history. The mantra from Chief Justice Roger Taney that a black had no rights a white was bound to respect was unstainable from day one. Justice Taney knew it. The President knew it. White abolitionists in Boston knew it. Black tailors and carpenters and barbers on the Hill knew it.

In January 1877, Republicans and Democrats reached an agreement at the Wormley hotel. The Wormley hotel was a grand establishment owned by the black Wormley family. The Wormley Hotel James Wormley In exchange for Rutherford B. Hayes receiving disputed electoral votes for President, Hayes would remove federal troops from the South. The vibe shifted on that day, although the consequences would play themselves out over the 1878 election. Reconstruction died with a whimper.

Did you know that a relative’s grandfather lived in a world where black barbers dominated the hair cutting industry? As a result, the grandfather could only cut white hair. He never learned to cut black hair. This was his zeitgeist as a black barber in Charlottesville, Virginia before, during and after the Civil War. On May 18, 1896, his racial world turned in Plessy v. Ferguson. The settled norms and mores of racial life shifted in a new direction of sanctioned Jim Crow segregation. Within twenty years, black barbers no longer dominated the barbering industry.

America had another rendezvous with destiny on August 28, 1963. A southern Baptist preacher from Atlanta infused new meaning into an Old American Dream. The aim become content of character, not color of one’s skin. A simple vision from a joyful and painful past. My whole life has been lived in this vibe. The great manifest destiny for my New South Generation was the coming of a better time as it had been for previous generations of black people so situated. See pioneer black lawyer George B. Vashon’s vision of the coming of a better time in August 1862.

There is a theory that American history is constantly turning in direction as generations are born, come of age, have children, and ascend into elder years. The Turnings of American History Since the financial crisis of 2008, we have been in a generational crisis. Things have been coming to a head in how we understand ourselves as Americans. We entered this crisis with the first black American president. As the years passed, those of my Nomad or Moses Generation felt more and more alienated from the public discourse of dogma and slogan words. Wasn’t it a virtue to be color indifferent? Wasn’t life always on the ascent? We who knew segregation in primary schools couldn’t believe the ready acceptance of neo-segregation in the modern era.

We resisted dogma and slogan words in a bewildering world where the young proclaimed Blackness is Oppression. Nothing else matters.

The winds are shifting now. We are entering through another portal in race time. The future beyond 2030 will be unimaginable. We who knew the racial turning in the fall of 1970 are on the verge of another turning. Those born in the 2030s and 2040s will grow up free of dogma and slogan words. And that freedom to me returns us to the American Dream of Dr. King, of Howard University President Mordecai Johnson, of black entrepreneur James Wormley. Blackness for me was always about enterprise, never victimhood or taking offense.

Good evening!

James Wormley