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, June 11, 2016
"WE ARE ALI," IN SOUL AND IN SUBSTANCE
"WE ARE ALI" IN SOUL AND IN SUBSTANCE
Our people's blessed adaptability, agility, flexibility, speed, quickness, sagacity, humility, amiability, honor, integrity, humor, affability, fertility, faith, rhyme, rhythm, soul, and love were all imprinted, all embedded in our late champion, Muhammad Ali.
Those same virtuous qualities are embedded in us, as Ali is a product of our people, genetically, culturally and historically. 'We' each 'are Ali.'
"We are Ali!" This exhortation, was what a young, pretty, female eulogist proclaimed, yesterday, in Louisville, Kentucky. "We are Ali," indeed, individually, collectively, synergistically, divinely, in soul and substance. He is our son and scion.
http://m.dailykos.com/story/2016/06/10/1537218/-Powerful-Eulogy-by-19-yo-Natasha-Mundkur-We-are-Ali
Each biological cell is a reduced, yet, a comprehensive specimen of the whole, being its fractal, being its fraction, but containing all of its morphology, histology, neurology.
So are we with Muhammad Ali, and so was Ali with us. That "We are Ali" is self-evident. With the same dispatch with which he disposed of Sonny Liston, twice, our people, twice, secured their freedom from chattel slavery for themselves, while, at the same time, preserving "the Union," the United States of America, from self-destruction, and from self-annihilation, 1861-1865.
That same personal integrity that was displayed by Muhammad Ali, when he refused to be inducted into the United States armed forces to fight the VietCong in Vietnam, was also on display by our people, when they fought, under the commanding, inspired, leadership of many, especially that of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we defied, defeated "Jim Crow," 1955-1968.
As Ali had first boldly defied, then later defeated, the craven federal executive branch's attempt to put chains on him, so too we as a people first defied, then defeated, the betrayal of our unappreciative nation, which not only denied to us our just share of the spoils of the Civil War victory that we fairly won.
We also won by Supreme Court decisions over decades from the 1930s-1960s, as Ali had won!
Not only were we denied the spoils of war, but worse, we were made the spoils of national reconciliation!
Agents of the federal government had secretly agreed prematurely to end "the Reconstruction's " few spoils, material benefits to some of us, while despoliation of the mass of us, proceeded unrestrained by terrorists acts of law officers, and private citizens. This began with withdrawing the needed protection of federal troops from the still-seething South. At the same time, the U.S. Military was deploying its black troops to extreme southern Texas (or farther West to subdue the Indians), to get them out of the way, to immobilize any effort they may have made toward armed self-defense to avenge the myriad depredations inflicted by former Confederates on the newly freed man and woman, by art of the deal.
They thought that we would die out, like the beaver and the bison.
Predictions of our forthcoming "extinction" by their so-called "learned men" we're confounded, refuted by our forebears' survival .
So too they thought that when they stripped of his title, prohibited him from boxing in the nation, had him thrown into jail that they would kill the audacious will of Muhammad Ali. Wrong about him and wrong about us! We are him & he is us, in soul, and in substance, having been sent to do God's will in this country, this recrudescent Rome!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i1gBM8GSFsQ