After more than 40 years, I’m Tired

It has been a good ride but I’m feeling I’m at the end of The Gantt Report. I’ve been writing editorial columns for more than 40 years. I began in the late ’60s when I wrote for The Signal at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

But they couldn’t scare me or stop me from writing.

Also during those 40 years, I never got paid one dime for writing columns that I know were being read. Many people would buy newspapers and visit websites just to read The Gantt Report.

But I never sought payment and the publishers who wouldn’t or couldn’t pay me have continued to this day to get The Gantt Report if they or their readers wanted it.

Ultimately, I risked my life, I jeopardized my career and I faced hatred from enemies of African Americans merely because I tried to inform my people about issues that other journalists were afraid to talk about or write about.

The mis-education of people of African descent makes it easy for others to divide us, to trick us, to fool us and to make black people hate our brothers and sisters and hate ourselves.

Many of us would rather believe in Satan than to believe in one another, support Lucifer than support one another and to lock arms and hold hands with the devilish beast than hold hands with our family members, friends and neighbors.

I began to think my time as a regular opinion writer is at the end of the road when people didn’t just disagree with me  but some people despised me.

I expected my exploiters to feel that way.

I suspected my oppressors felt that way and I knew my journalistic competitors often wished that I was off the media map. However, when I began to be hated by African-American youth, I realized someone else needed to write the influential and encouraging words that appear more and more difficult for me to write.

When you write about black historical facts and college-educated black people say, “I don’t care about black history. All I care about is what happens in my lifetime,” you can imagine how it made me feel.

I felt when you hate my writing you are hating all of the great black writers of the past. Why? Because nothing written by Lucius Gantt is new.

My columns and my words were words of Frederick Douglass, words of Denmark Vesey, words of Harriett Tubman, words of Adam Clayton Powell, words of Martin Luther King Jr., words of Huey Newton, words of Kwame Nkruma, words of Steve Biko, words of Patrice Lumumba, words of Amilcar Cabral, words of Jomo Kenyatta, words of Nelson and Winnie Mandela, words of Fannie Lou Hammer, words of Marcus Garvey, words of Malcolm X and the words of many other black heroes and freedom fighters.

I’ve tried to quit in the past but black media pioneers like Charles Cherry, Ike Williams, Garth Reeves and Levi Henry pretty much begged me to continue.

Nowadays, almost every publisher feels a need to “edit” The Gantt Report’s unique editorial style so it can read like white folk’s opinion columns and I think that is ridiculous. If black editors and publishers want blacks who write like whites, they should just go ahead and hire the kinds of columnists they admire.

So, I want to thank the readers, the friends and the supporters of The Gantt Report as I come to the end of the column as you know it.

I will continue to write because God gave me the gift and I have to use it. I want to write a screen play or perhaps more books. I will even write an opinion column when the media and the people feel they want to read my perspective on current or historical events.

I have a few protégées who can carry the media cross, like Andrea Giggetts, and there are other senior writers who can write, if given the chance, like Jim Haskins and James Scruggs.

Brothers and sisters, I’m tired. Contact your local paper or Internet site if you agree or disagree with my decision. And keep in mind black people in America and in the world will always need a black voice to plead the black cause.

Thank you again for your love and support.

*Lucius Gantt, a political consultant based in Tallahassee, is author of the book Beast Too: Dead Man Writing which is available at Amazon.com. You can like The Gantt Report page on Facebook and contact Gantt at www.allworldconsultants.net