What's going on, still: One country, one unfinished story

In 1971, Marvin Gaye asked a question that has never stopped echoing. “What’s Going On” was born when Renaldo “Obie” Benson of the Four Tops watched police club anti-war demonstrators on Bloody Thursday in Berkeley, California.

It grew into an album sung from the eyes of a Vietnam veteran coming home to find hatred, poverty and injustice on his own block. Gaye crooned the ache of a nation: “Mother, mother / There’s too many of you crying / Brother, brother, brother / There’s far too many of you dying.”

More than half a century later, it remains one of America’s most beautiful protests.

This summer, a very different sound is everywhere. Yung Miami’s “Spend Dat,” released earlier this year, is the song of the season — soulful guitar riding Miami bass, a woman declaring her independence and her worth alongside NeNe Leakes, Trina and Trick Daddy.

On its face it could not be further from Marvin Gaye. But listening past the genre, both songs are about survival in an America that has never made that easy for Black people.

One asks what is going on. The other answers: I am going to get mine, because no one is coming to hand it to me. Fifty-five years apart, two artists are telling the same story about the same country.

I know that country intimately. I grew up in Woodlawn, a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago — the very neighborhood where a boy named Emmett Till once lived with his mother, Mamie.

In 1955 that 14-year-old boarded a train to Mississippi and came home in a box. His mother opened the coffin so the world would have to look. It did and a movement was born.

I thought about Emmett again when 18-year-old Nolan Wells — a young man from Ocean Springs, Mississippi — was found dead off Horn Island after a Fourth of July boat trip with three friends who came back without him. An independent autopsy reported the cause of death as undetermined. His family is demanding a full accounting of how their son died.

Seventy-one years separate Emmett Till and Nolan Wells, yet the same unanswered questions, the same unbearable grief of a mother left to bury her boy tie them together.

History does not merely rhyme. Sometimes it repeats itself and dares us to not be complicit.

Complicity is comfortable. It is the quiet decision to look away, to assume someone else will act, speak. It is how a nation sleepwalks backward, as forces work to march us back to a place we swore we’d never return.

This is a clarion call to all people — white, Black, brown, Native, immigrant — every last one who claims a stake in this republic.

We, the people — that was always the promise, but always unfinished. Marvin Gaye knew it. Mamie Till-Mobley knew it when she refused to close the coffin. A young woman rapping about her own worth knows it too.

If little has changed in seven decades, what can anyone do to make a difference? Vote. Give back to the block that raised you. Contribute to the country that owes you everything and needs you desperately. That is not the work of one summer or one song. It is the work of citizenship, and it belongs to everyone.

What’s going on?

The same thing that has always been going on. The only question that has ever mattered is what we will do about it. I refuse to go back. Refuse right alongside me, so we can all move forward.

This guest essay reflects the views of Lamell J. McMorris, the founder and CEO of Phase 2 Consulting and of Greenlining Realty USA, senior vice chair of the National Urban League board of trustees, and author of “The Power to Persist.”