Free Streets on Fire by John Shannon

In the 1920s, with the Klan on the attack—even electing governors in Colorado and Oklahoma—the black community turned to Father Divine and Marcus Garvey and Back to Africa.
    “Nationalism went on the decline in the 1930s,” he maintained. “The textbooks won’t say it, but it was at least in part because the Communists built these huge national campaigns for black issues. Defending the Scottsboro lads. Bringing blacks into the CIO unions. Organizing poor black and white sharecroppers together in the South.
    “Then, toward the end of the Civil Rights Movement, things turned around again. I think leaders like Stokely and Malcolm saw that they’d got about as far as white society was prepared to let them. And really, Jim Crow in the South didn’t matter much anymore. Much of black America had migrated to the industrial North, and that’s where the struggle was. They were the heart of the unions, trying to resist union-busting for the next fifty years. They pretty much lost that one, too.”
    “So nationalism comes back again?”
    “Ask yourself why. Is there anybody doing one thing for the inner-city poor?”
    There was a crash outside and they glanced out the broad window. Across the road a number of workmen peered down into the pit where the crane’s cable disappeared.
    “Oops. Dropped the Virgin,” Jack Liffey said. “I hope they get her out of there safely.”
    “Out? They’re not taking her out. They’re burying her.”
    “Did she just die?”
    “That house is owned by a rich guy who belongs to some Catholic sect that thinks the world is about to end. Something about Our Lady of some kind of rose and this old woman on Long Island who saw visions.”
    “I’ve heard of her. But still.”
    “The guy believes the Pakistanis, or maybe the Iranis, are about to nuke the Christian world. You know, the Islamic bomb.”
    Jack Liffey couldn’t help chuckling. “So a big statue of the Virgin will survive. That’s a comfort.”
    They glanced at one another. “You still wonder why the blacks give up on us from time to time?” Mike Lewis said.
    “Tell me about Umoja.”
    “Umoja, sure. They’re a lot like Ron Karenga’s group. They’ve got a storefront, they give breakfasts to poor kids, they wear dashikis, and they teach black kids pride. They give classes on African history and African languages. Off the record—they don’t know very much about Africa, but they try hard. There’s a lot of do-it-yourself ideology about Egypt as the root of civilization and some invented stuff about the ‘African philosophy of life.’ I can understand a people that was so badly used working up their pride, but some of the history they believe is pretty touch-and-go. The Egypt stuff is pure bunk. It’s not all that many steps from an ‘innate African worldview’ to ‘they’ve-all-got-rhythm,’ you know?”
    “I was in Africa for a couple weeks,” Jack Liffey said. “I worked a fiddle to come home the long way from ’Nam. It was nice to go into a dance club and see that a whole cross-section of Africans couldn’t dance for shit.”
    “You’re Irish,” Mike Lewis said. “And you quit drinking.”
    “I reconsider that every time I have to listen to you.”
    *
    Her palms throbbed and ached where they pressed down on the low racing handlebars. Maeve didn’t like racing bikes. Back home in Redondo, she rode her mom’s old British bike that had nice ordinary handlebars and a nice comprehensible lever marked L-M-H on the handgrip, but here she had to settle for Mary Beth’s brother’s hyper-expensive Peugeot racing bike with low bars and so many levers she had no idea what gear she was in. Robert—they called him Bucky—was away back east in a summer catch-up session at some expensive eastern college for rich dummies. Mary Beth was riding her own mountain bike with straight handlebars that would have been a lot more to Maeve’s liking.
    A truck woodshed past on Arrow Highway, rocking the two girls in