Black History Month is upon us once again; a time when corporate America gives lip service to the men and women who built this nation.

The hypocrisy of all that “freedom and justice for all” bullshit is never more odious or obvious than during the month of February. Following the race riots of 2020, the Mainstream media (MSM) is going all out to give the impression they actually care about people of color this time around.

Black History Month is our token celebration designed to downplay the deep-rooted racism endemic in American society, and to generally make white Americans feel good about themselves for watching some TV show featuring Black people.

Of course, we get the requisite MLK documentary; maybe something about Thurgood Marshall or Rosa Parks; and the remaining Tuskegee airmen will get dragged out for one last interview…

ESPN never runs out of material; Black athletes have long been known for their political activism. Back in the day, simply being a Black man in professional sports was a political statement: just ask Hank Aaron, Jackie Robinson or Jim Brown…or Colin Kaepernick.

The ongoing (non)-controversy regarding the National Anthem is more endless fodder for the MSM, and yet another example of the restrictions placed on peaceful protest in this country…especially for Black men. It is ironic that NFL players were forbidden to kneel during the playing of the Anthem in 2020, while all restrictions were removed from touchdown celebrations.

The owners had no problems watching their ‘property’ entertain us with their silly end zone antics – as long as they remained strictly apolitical.

Over the years, Black History has been sanitized and co-opted by the MSM in America. Our history books gloss over the fact that so many Black Americans were forced to flee this country and head to Europe in search of REAL freedom, both artistic and cultural.

As usual, we are not given much context for how we got here or why racism is still so embedded in our cultural fabric. We get to see all the ‘feel good’ stories of Black heroes overcoming oppression, but we never get to talk about the reasons for their oppression or why it still exists.

Black History is American history. It shouldn’t be separate. In a truly “post-racial” society we wouldn’t need a special month to celebrate Blackness. The fact that we had to establish a special time to highlight the achievements of African-Americans is proof enough that we have a long way to go before we overcome racial bias. The problem is that our history has literally been ‘white-washed’ to exclude the many contributions Black people have made to our country.

And while it is widely acknowledged – now – that African-Americans have made profound contributions to the world of art, literature and music, most Americans are unaware that so many of our most cherished cultural icons – now celebrated as national heroes – were forced to ply their trades overseas before they were accepted in their home country. Some never got the recognition they deserved, at least not during their lifetimes.

Black artists were victims of racism in the US even after they became household names around the world.

Many Black performers to this day have not been given their proper due because they were labeled ‘communists’ or subversive for their political views…mostly because they dared to speak out about the racism they encountered on a daily basis back home.

For decades following the Civil War, ‘Jim Crow’ laws kept most Black people in the south dirt poor – as second class citizens living in virtual apartheid.

As legendary performer and ex-pat Josephine Baker noted, Black artists made their way to Europe to shake off the racist constraints they lived under in America. Many gravitated to Paris or London, the centers of Western culture at the time.

In in the UK, the ‘blues boom’ was exploding in the early 1960s and Black artists were welcomed with open arms at a time when much of the US was still segregated. Institutionalized racism did not exist in Britain (although there certainly were – and still are – plenty of racists) – slavery had been abolished in the British Empire back in 1830 – fully three generations before the American Civil War.

Unlike teenagers in the states, by the early 1960s young people in the UK were able to cultivate a growing interest and a love for the music of Black America: Folk, Blues and Jazz.

In May of 1964, segregation was legal in the southern states. It would still be two more months before Congress passed The Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. The USA was still over a year away from implementation of the Voting Rights Act, which secured the right to vote for minorities, especially in the South.

At a time when the country was deep in the throes of racial strife and unrest – a time when Black people were rarely seen on American Television, Granada TV in the UK broadcast the ‘Blues and Gospel Train’ in 1964: a program featuring Muddy Waters, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee and other Black musicians touring with the ‘American Folk Blues and Gospel Festival’ filmed at the disused Wilbraham Road railway station in Manchester.

The ‘Festival’ had already toured Europe and the UK previously in 1962 and 1963, playing both Manchester and London, to rapturous – mostly White – crowds.

Around the same time, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds and a whole slew of other British rockers began plundering the music of Black American bluesmen to great effect.

It wasn’t until the ‘British Invasion’ arrived on our shores in early 1964 that American kids finally began to sit up and take notice when these white boys from England started playing our own music back at us…

And then along came Jimi Hendrix.

James Marshall Hendrix was one of those artists – the likes of James Baldwin, Paul Robeson, Nina Simone and Josephine Baker – who had to escape from the endemic racism in the USA in order to make a name for himself.

And if it hadn’t been for a couple of highly educated, genteel Brits, the world’s greatest guitarist would probably still be languishing in obscurity today, playing back up guitar on the “chitlin circuit.”

Chas Chandler was the former bassist of The Animals. He’d just quit the band and he was looking for new acts to manage. On a visit to New York City in late 1966 he ran into Linda Keith. Keith was a former model and girlfriend of Rolling Stones’ guitarist Keith Richards. She heard that Chandler was in the market for new talent so she alerted him to an unknown guitarist she’d seen going by the name of Jimmy James playing one night at a tiny club called Café Wha? in Greenwich Village.

Chandler immediately recognized his genius, took Hendrix under his wing and brought him to London in October, 1966. He quickly assembled a band, changed the spelling of his name to ‘Jimi’ and unleashed his immense talent onto the unsuspecting British club scene. His first public appearance on stage was to “sit in” with the newly-formed power trio CREAM, featuring Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton on guitar…also known as ‘God’ to British blues fans.

Amazingly, considering that CREAM was the first rock n’ roll “supergroup,” Hendrix managed to blow them off the stage. He played behind his back. He played between his legs. He played with his teeth; all while seamlessly riffing on every blues lick ever invented, and then some. At one point Clapton simply stopped playing, put down his guitar and walked off stage. When Chandler caught up with him in the dressing room Clapton was visibly shaken and asked, “Is he really THAT good?”

Yes, he really was that good.

Word got out about this amazing new guitarist and soon the ‘Jimi Hendrix Experience’ was being touted by the likes of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Pete Townshend among many others. From that point on, Hendrix was the toast of the town.

But it wasn’t until June of 1967 that American audiences were introduced to the brilliance of Jimi Hendrix, and only because famous Beatle Paul McCartney was on the Board of Directors at the Monterey International Pop Festival in California, slated for June 14-16 – and he insisted that Hendrix was on the bill.

Monterey Pop turned out to be one of THE pivotal events of the 1960s “summer of love” and it launched the careers of several headliners including Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, The Who, Otis Redding and Jimi Hendrix.

But why did it take someone of Paul McCartney’s stature to lobby for an artist whose talent was so unquestionably great?

Because America was then and still is a racist country at its core. Even at the height of the Civil Rights era a man like Jimi Hendrix would never have been accepted in his home country without the full-throated endorsement of the entire British musical elite.

Sadly, even though he stole the show at Monterey Pop, American music journalists still found it difficult to let go of racial stereotypes. Music critic Robert Christgau famously referred to Hendrix as a “psychedelic Uncle Tom” and he even had the gall to claim that Jimi couldn’t sing! Sam Silver of the East Village Other wrote, “Jimi did a beautiful Spade routine.”

But Jimi Hendrix was undeniably Black, and he was undeniably great…and while he may have had a weak voice, clearly he could sing. His artistry simply couldn’t be ignored, but neither could his skin color…

In later years, critics and fellow (White) musicians tried to say that Jimi’s music ‘transcended’ race, that his skin color didn’t matter or that his songs were “universal” – but this is simply wrong. Jimi Hendrix was a blues man at heart. His songs, like RED HOUSE or HEAR MY TRAIN A COMIN’ are based on the blues, and his playing is firmly rooted in traditional tropes. Hendrix was a guitarist like his predecessors Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King and the rest. And he was a proud black man; outspoken and boldly sexual.

Hendrix was also the epitome of ‘Cool.’

How inconvenient Jimi Hendrix is today, as he serves to remind us of how culturally backwards America has always been compared to the ‘civilized’ world in Europe and the British Isles. It’s another example of how damaging systemic racism has been to our society and to our popular culture in general. Jimi had to go to England to make a living because he literally couldn’t get arrested back home – which is saying a lot for a black man in America in the 1960s!

During his brief career, even though he was acutely aware of racial injustice back home, Jimi somehow managed to remain fairly apolitical – mostly out of necessity for the sake of his career. Rather than wade into the divisive politics of the era, Hendrix simply let his guitar do the talking. Jimi’s anti-war song MACHINE GUN is a perfect example of this.

His famous version of THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER at Woodstock in 1969 was another key defining moment. Jimi’s National Anthem was noted for its sonic impact: Hendrix inter-mingled the traditional melody with the sounds of missiles, falling rockets, exploding bombs and agonized screams from the feedback of his white Stratocaster.

Some critics perceived his aural interpretation on an even deeper, more visceral level. They heard a song of internal suffering, protest and suppressed rage; THE definitive non-verbal political statement of the times.

Hendrix played the National Anthem during the height of the Vietnam War, when black and brown soldiers were dying in huge numbers – far in excess of their White counterparts. He ignored the pleas of his white manager – Englishman Mike Jeffrey – to forgo performing the anthem during his final tour in 1970, for fear of provoking a riot.

Of course, that never happened. The song only ever inspired jaw-dropping awe among fans. Hendrix’s powerful interpretation of the Anthem can be viewed as a non-violent protest on a par with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. Hendrix took a founding American document and reconstituted it into a brutal reminder of just how far we’d strayed from our professed values of “Liberty and Justice for all.”

Jimi Hendrix was one of the few Black artists to overcome the ‘race barrier’ during his short lifetime. The fact that his popularity has only increased in the years since his death at age of 27 in September, 1970 is a testament to his enduring genius.

Thankfully, his legend lives on.

ADDENDUM [3.26.21]

Contrary to popular belief, Jimi’s creativity hadn’t “dried up” in the last years of his life, as evidenced by the many hundreds of hours of completed songs and demos which have subsequently been released. At the time of his death he was in the process of compiling songs for his proposed double album, First Rays of the New Rising Sun.

Another racist trope always trotted out about Jimi Hendrix is that he died of a “drug overdose.”

JIMI HENDRIX DID NOT DIE OF A DRUG OVERDOSE!!!!

Can we finally clear this myth up once and for all?

I really get tired of seeing this, especially in the mainstream media. Not only is this totally wrong but it also implies that Hendrix was some sort of drug addict – and this is a completely false impression. Jimi took a lot of drugs to be sure, but he was never addicted to anything. His official cause of death was Asphyxiation due to inhalation of vomit. If the half-wit German woman he’d spent the night with hadn’t been so negligent he’d still be alive today. If only Monika Dannemann had called the EMTs sooner, Jimi’s life might have been saved; he could have been induced to cough up enough fluid to clear his lungs.

Sadly, we’ll never know.