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.
Friday, April 22, 2016
OBAMA MONEY, PLEASE!
PRESIDENT OBAMA MONEY, SIR!
Money will change you for the better, just like the lack of money will, also, change you for the worst.
Money is as essential as food, water, oxygen, shelter, clothing, in our avariciously capitalist country.
Black people in the United States of America need some money! Its lack is at the root of all of our evils.
Every effort or attempt to spread some money to that large segment of chronically poor black people is met with sadistic sneers, derision, obstruction from racist politicians.
This viral resistance began during and after the Civil War, when what had been an effort to put down a rebellion, morphed into the slaves' "Freedom War" to end slavery, after January 1, 1863, when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. After the war, under Lincoln's Vice President, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, in the short-lived era of "Reconstruction," 1865-1876, it was totally quashed !
Blacks were promised 40 acres of land and a mule as a portion of their "freedom dues," --land, money, seed, tools, and a horse--to enable them to start new lives outside slavery. "Freedom dues" had been historically paid to white indentured servants in Maryland & Virginia once their contract ended.
This promise was made in 1865, in Savannah , Georgia, by Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, and by Union General. William Tecumseh Sherman, to a representative group of black ministers, who were led by Rev. Garrison Frazier. When asked what they wanted these stalwart black men said that they wanted to be free, to be left alone to govern themselves with dignity with and with ample means provided to them by the government to do so.
"Freedom dues" were "paid" by acquiescence to some former slaves for a short time on certain of the abandoned plantations and islands near or in Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana and Mississippi, that they had formerly worked.
There, they grew crops as before, indeed, as they had also wisely done while in "contrabands' camps" during the Civil War in Corinth. Mississippi, Virginia, elsewhere. They also built schools and churches and commissaries .
They planted, truly well, but others harvested; for, Congress and the states refused to confirm in law what had been made by its plenary agents, Stanton & Sherman, in January 1865 in Savannah, which is set forth in "Special Field Order, No. 15," on January 16, 1865, by "Order Commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi" that General William Sherman signed.
Instead, nothing was given to them, beyond that mere " possessory titles" conveyed by General Sherman, by the U. S. Congress, after Lincoln's assassination, except orders to evacuate standing crops, since those promised lands had been sold to Northern investor capitalists or reclaimed by rebels!
This breach of faith and contract with the freed men and women by their government was continued by political successors like Andrew Johnson and later Congresses; all are the roots of the present lack of money among the slaves' progeny.
Even in 2016, any and every effort to remediate this festering legacy of economic injuries are constantly being rebuffed by banal politicians, whose complicity created them, and by the judiciary which dances around them in nullifying decisions.
That leaves only the President , Barack Obama, whose term is rapidly running out, and whose "Brother Keeper's" program is reliant upon private donations, being unfunded by the federal government. This unsatisfactory, woeful state of African-descendants' claims of restitution deepens an unspoken, yet pervasive racial, disappointment with President Barack Obama 's otherwise-exemplary two-term, hopeful, historical administration.