LOS ANGELES -- The heavens give off a bittersweet glow for Black Americans.
They have been a harbinger of trauma. Enslaved Africans were ferried across the Atlantic Ocean by sailors tracking the stars and constellations to chart their course. When the full moon lit up the evening sky, many slaves were forced to toil beyond their grueling sunrise-to-sunset hours.
The cosmos has also represented freedom. Harriet Tubman looked to the North Star to point the way for the Africans she helped escape from slavery, and Frederick Douglass named one of his abolitionist newspapers after it. During the civil rights and Black Power eras, the visionary jazz musician Sun Ra, a self-described alien abductee, sang that “space is the place” where the racial justice and universal love he yearned for would finally come within reach.
