Like Dr. King, Bishop Tutu’s life was given a sanitized, fairy tale version, while redacting, as much as possible, the Jim Crow bad wolf of apartheid he spent two-thirds of his life fighting. The story has been the same for centuries no matter the continent or country: governments using White supremacy as an operating system have been the big bad wolf to every Black leader from Toussaint L’Ouverture and Nat Turner to Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah.
The dissemination of the fairy tale Dr. King narrative is a continuation of the Jim Crow education White educators have been feeding Black children since integration. Jim Crow, one of the names the big bad wolf has gone by, never lied to us. Jim Crow promised colored folks death, exploitation, and injustice in all areas of life. Maybe we believed the sacred stories of our heroes were safe from the big bad wolf because we lived them and could pass them down to future generations through our oral story-telling tradition. We were wrong. Through public schools, the heroic tales of our leaders were hijacked. Now, the Black community must reject the caricatures Dr. King and our other Black heroes have been made into by White people who desire to erase their ancestors’ genocidal activities.
