Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Saturday, July 19, 2014
OUR FOREBEARS EXPLOITED MINUTE FISSURES AND DISTINCTIONS
It is blithely said by some that, historically, 'white racism is all the same' whether North or South. This statement is unscientific, hyperbolic, and grossly inaccurate.
Our enslaved and self-liberated forebears discerned and successfully exploited the minute fissures and distinctions between and within the racial, religious, patriotic aptitudes and attitudes, and sources of profits of the whites of the North and of the South, in order to obtain their freedom.
First, they ran away; second, they constructed the Underground Railroad to Canada, with the aid of numerous whites, with agents, stations, and conductors in the North and the South; third, their self-liberating and other abolitionists activities--including their literary and speaking international activities--induced their "Freedom War"; fourth, so valuable were their services to the North and so great was their loss to the South that they constituted that 'military necessity' that engendered the creation of President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, including its prior promulgation, and its epochal release on January 1,1863; fifth, their force of arms--200,000 black troops-- were decisive in deciding the outcome of the Civil War in their favor and in favor of the North; and sixth, their foregoing activities' effects compelled the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution "to secure these rights," and of enabling legislation, that ensuing generations of blacks would use to continue the freedom struggle through the present, electing black Senators and a President Obama in 2008 and in 2012!