BLACKS ARE STILL FIGHTING THE REAL AMERICAN REVOLUTION

BLACKS ARE STILL FIGHTING THE REAL AMERICAN REVOLUTION We, African Americans, have been in a revolution since before 1776, continuously. As our nation celebrates, the 4th of July, 2015, it is well to recall that on that date, July 4, the amended "Declaration of Independence" was issued by the Continental Congress in 1776. It declared our sovereignty as a nation, while announcing its independence from England, its "Mother Country. It also set forth its rationale. That amended rationale pointedly excluded "slavery imposed by King George." slavery was too profitable for the planters of the South, or the bankers, shippers, insurers in the North to expend. Agricultural capital and commercial capital amended that document's original anti-slavery rationale. "That historical document effectually ratified the consequences of a pre-existing armed struggle, between American "rebels" and Great Britain's "redcoats," which had begun on March 4, 1770, with the martyrdom of Crispus Attucks. Attucks, an escaped slave, who died in Boston Commons, believing that "freedom" meant the end of slavery, was the first to die from British bullets, when a mob he led was hit. Africans fought on both sides of this armed conflict. Some native African Americans, like legendary sail-maker, James Forten of Philadelphia, had even been captured and imprisoned by the British navy, while fighting aboard American privateers. Others, like Thomas Peters, who later founded Freetown, Sierra Leone, fought for the English, who had promised freedom to all slaves who reached their lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown Thomas Peters and several thousand others who responded to the British offer were later ferried to Nova Scotia, Canada. Finding it to be unsatisfactory, Peters went to England and obtained British abolitionists' assistance to "repatriate" 1100 settlers to Africa--where Sierra Leone was founded by him/them. African American shipping magnate, Paul Cuffe of Massachusetts also ferried several hundred settlers to Sierra Leone. Both Cuffe and Peters died soon after these pioneering endeavors began and too soon to see them successfully realized. Even at the "Revolutionary War's" end, African Americans had to continue to fight for their discrete and unique freedom. The American Constitution of 1789, counted them as only 3/5s of a person in the South, where the great majority lived, for Congressional representation purposes, only; it did not count them at all in the North for any purpose; it taxed their importation into the country at $10 a head; it accorded "full faith and credit" to each others' laws and processes to facilitate escaped slaves recapture; and it permitted the slave trade to last until 1808. In 1793, the first Fugitive Slave Act was enacted, permitting the "recapture" of Africans in the North without Due Process of law, and enslavement in the South. Later this act was strengthened by that of 1850, when by the assertion of "states rights" in the North, Southerns bewailed their loss of property. In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sanford stated that "citizen" did not include blacks, and that blacks had no rights that whites were bound to respect, whether slave or free, and had never had. A Civil War was fought over the status of the slave in the ever expanding geopolitical American land mass, 1861-1865, in which the North prevailed, with the indispensable military aid of 200,000 black troops and sailors. For the blacks, this fight was known as the "Freedom War," having been prayed for and prophesied by such ancestors as Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner, John Brown, Henry Highland Garnet, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and more. Although, the North won the war, the South won the peace. Its Confederate Secret Service assassinated Lincoln on April 15, 1865, after nearly assassinating William Seward, abolitionist Secretary of State, on that same date and hour.The South's Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, then Lincoln's Vice President, assumed the Presidency, and thwarted every attempt to accord any rights to former slaves, at the expense of his fellow-rebels; especially abandoned lands--and their growing crops--blacks had farmed in their "Contraband Camps," were reclaimed for rebels, and for Northern real estate speculators, Johnson opposed giving the ballot to blacks as well. He narrowly missed impeachment by one vote. Three Constitutional Amendments--13th, 14th, 15th--abolished slavery; gave blacks citizenship; and gave them the vote. These were passed by "Radical Republicans" in Congress, who also established the Freedmen's Bureau to protect these freed persons' newly acquired "rights" in 1866. After 10 years white men agreed to a new accord, again on the backs of the now-Republican blacks: federal troops protecting black rights would be withdrawn from the South's retribution in South Carolina and Louisiana, particularly; in return the Republicans would get the Executive Mansion, as the White House was then known. This was the infamous "Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1876," which settled that hotly contested Presidential Election of that year. The Supreme Court upheld this terrorist arrangement in cases like "Cruikshank," 1877. In the wake of this draconian capitalist compromise, "Black Codes" and white night-riding terrorists engulfed the South with murder, arson, and mayhem, to return the newly "freed" blacks to their pre-Civil War status of economic dependence and political emasculation. Blacks fled North and West in waves, in a vain attempt, to escape destruction and subjugation, commencing in 1879 through the 1950's. Those remaining in the South, hunkered down to their "separate-but-equal" status by developing their educational and economic resources, following the paradigm of Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass, while abandoning political aspirations, given the climate of terror, from which there was no succor at law, sheriffs, politicians, prosecutors, newspaper editors, and judges being mob leaders! We have been in a revolution since before 1776, and yet are, to secure these rights.