ENCOMIUMS TO OUR GREATNESS
The cacophony of Constitutional exclusions experienced by black Americans is bewilderingly long.
These exclusions cropped up after the Civil War, which the North later won, because of the 200,000 black soldiers and sailors, whom Lincoln had enrolled out of a sheer "military necessity," after January 1, 1863; though discriminatorily paid, shod, clothed, armed, trained, and led by many indifferent, or even racist, exclusively white, officers, into battle against their former masters. Still they won victory in Vicksburg, Nashville, Petersburg, Richmond.
In the interest of peace, profits, and the regular resumption the very profitable business of white power privileges, the Northern capitalists instructed their political cronies--Republicans and Democrats--to sacrifice the now "free blacks" on the altar of white manifest destiny.
Part of that "manifest destiny" was also to effect a final resolution to the troublesome question: "What is to be done to, for, or with, the black, now former, slaves?" Their solution was to betray these black national salvors back to the South, who "best knew how to handle" them. And so that's what they did.
"The colored people are left, in the States where they have been disfranchised, absolutely without representation, direct or indirect, in any law-making body, in any court of justice, in any branch of government... Constituting one-eighth of the population of the whole country, two-fifths of the whole Southern people, and a majority in several States, they are not able, because disfranchised where most numerous, to send one representative to Congress, which, by the decision on the Alabama case, [Jackson v. Giles] is held to be the only body, outside of the State itself, competent to give relief from a great political wrong. By former decisions of the same tribunal, even Congress is impotent to protect their civil rights, the Fourteenth Amendment having long since, by the consent of the same Court, been in many respects as completely nullified as the Fifteenth Amendment is now sought to be. They have no direct representation in any Southern legislature, and no voice in determining the choice of white men who might be friendly to their rights. Nor are they able to influence the election of judges or other public officials, to whom are entrusted the protection of their lives, their liberties, and their property. No judge is rendered careful, no sheriff diligent, for fear that he might offend a black constituency; the contrary is most lamentably true; day after day the catalogue of lynchings and anti-Negro riots upon every imaginable pretext, grows longer and more appalling. The country stands face to face with the revival of slavery; at the moment of this writing a federal grand jury in Alabama is uncovering a system of peonage established under cover of law."
P. 877-878, "Disfranchisement of the Negro, 1903," CHARLES W. CHESTNUT :STORIES, NOVELS & ESSAYS (2002)
Harry Houdini's death-defying escapes do not begin to rival the survival skills exhibited by our forbears in bringing us, indeed, delivering us from the precipice of white-hot hell fires of extinction ; which extinction white scientists and savants had so learnedly and so assuredly predicted for blacks!
No historical example in human or in inhuman history is comparable to our real-life, daily-documented, tragic testimonials and encomiums!
Monday, October 31, 2016
ENCOMIUMS TO OUR GREATNESS
ENCOMIUMS TO OUR GREATNESS
The cacophony of Constitutional exclusions experienced by black Americans is bewilderingly long.
These exclusions cropped up after the Civil War, which the North later won, because of the 200,000 black soldiers and sailors, whom Lincoln had enrolled out of a sheer "military necessity," after January 1, 1863; though discriminatorily paid, shod, clothed, armed, trained, and led by many indifferent, or even racist, exclusively white, officers, into battle against their former masters. Still they won victory in Vicksburg, Nashville, Petersburg, Richmond.
In the interest of peace, profits, and the regular resumption the very profitable business of white power privileges, the Northern capitalists instructed their political cronies--Republicans and Democrats--to sacrifice the now "free blacks" on the altar of white manifest destiny.
Part of that "manifest destiny" was also to effect a final resolution to the troublesome question: "What is to be done to, for, or with, the black, now former, slaves?" Their solution was to betray these black national salvors back to the South, who "best knew how to handle" them. And so that's what they did.
"The colored people are left, in the States where they have been disfranchised, absolutely without representation, direct or indirect, in any law-making body, in any court of justice, in any branch of government... Constituting one-eighth of the population of the whole country, two-fifths of the whole Southern people, and a majority in several States, they are not able, because disfranchised where most numerous, to send one representative to Congress, which, by the decision on the Alabama case, [Jackson v. Giles] is held to be the only body, outside of the State itself, competent to give relief from a great political wrong. By former decisions of the same tribunal, even Congress is impotent to protect their civil rights, the Fourteenth Amendment having long since, by the consent of the same Court, been in many respects as completely nullified as the Fifteenth Amendment is now sought to be. They have no direct representation in any Southern legislature, and no voice in determining the choice of white men who might be friendly to their rights. Nor are they able to influence the election of judges or other public officials, to whom are entrusted the protection of their lives, their liberties, and their property. No judge is rendered careful, no sheriff diligent, for fear that he might offend a black constituency; the contrary is most lamentably true; day after day the catalogue of lynchings and anti-Negro riots upon every imaginable pretext, grows longer and more appalling. The country stands face to face with the revival of slavery; at the moment of this writing a federal grand jury in Alabama is uncovering a system of peonage established under cover of law."
P. 877-878, "Disfranchisement of the Negro, 1903," CHARLES W. CHESTNUT :STORIES, NOVELS & ESSAYS (2002)
Harry Houdini's death-defying escapes do not begin to rival the survival skills exhibited by our forbears in bringing us, indeed, delivering us from the precipice of white-hot hell fires of extinction ; which extinction white scientists and savants had so learnedly and so assuredly predicted for blacks!
No historical example in human or in inhuman history is comparable to our real-life, daily-documented, tragic testimonials and encomiums!
