Cover Story: Joe Beasley

I grew up here in Georgia, in Bibb County. Today, Georgia's a melting pot. But during the old days, it was really only two races. The Native Americans had pretty much been driven out of Georgia. So there was just African-Americans and whites. We were living under apartheid. I worked in the cotton fields. It was like a sharecropper plantation; at the end of the year, you never made enough to get out of debt.?

I was in the eighth grade when we moved to Cincinnati. In 1956, I enlisted in the Air Force and served for 21 years. We had our own Civil Rights Movement in the military, because we were the last to get promoted and the first to get demoted.?

In the PX, where you'd buy your grooming material, for example, they had nothing for black people. You had to fight for those things. There'd be ethnic days for food. There'd be a Mexican day, an Irish day, where you'd have specialty food. But we were African-Americans. We wanted a soul food day.?

And there was no entertainment in the military that catered to African-Americans. We said, by God, we want us a black group. They said, "We got just the person for you." And it was Charley Pride. Now, Charley had his talent. But give him to people who like country and Western. Don't give it to us.?

It's the same kind of diabolical thing when Thurgood Marshall died. We made a loud cry. We wanted a black person on the Supreme Court. They said, "We got just the man for you: Clarence Thomas." Black as the sun.?

Some of the flaggers say about America, "Love it or leave it." I say, "You leave." If there's any group that's been in America, it's Africans. We didn't come here; we were brought here against our will. This is our home, but we've never been able to feel at home.?

We need to live together on this planet. It's nationalism and patriotism that's got us into so much damn trouble now. I'm a patriot, yeah. But I'm a citizen of the world. I love people in the Gaza Strip. I don't support my tax dollars going to knock down the little huts they're living in in the Gaza Strip. I been there. I seen it. One of the best expressions of patriotism is to tell America, "You're goin' awry. The things you're doing, you got the whole world pissed off at you." We spent billions of dollars last year fighting terrorism. If we'd employed that money to house people, to feed people, we'd move so far back from the violence. Patriotism is knowing right is not might.?

Right now, I'm involved with a project that is trying to link up a billion Africans throughout the globe — Africans on the continent to those of African descent. It's called African Ascension. With that, we can leverage opportunities. It's building these kind of linkages that I want to spend the rest of my life doing. I've been traveling all over the world. I'm going to London soon to open up a chapter and try to convince Coca-Cola to move its Africa headquarters from London to Africa. The colonial days are over.