"STRANGERS THOUGH NATIVES"

"STRANGERS THOUGH NATIVES" America's signature "greatness" was disproportionately dependent upon centuries of free, enslaved, African American labor, ingenuity, perseverance, faith, consumption. This "black" contribution predates the United States of America's founding national constitution, 1789, and its earlier "Declaration of Independence" ,1776, dating back to 1619, in Jamestown , Virginia, being sealed and settled by the Emancipation Proclamation, 1863. Long before the United States of America was, long before it existed, we Africans were here, already. Because we were here already: abused, encumbered, enchained, and disfranchised, it, then, could become, as it has become because of us : racist, divided, hypocritical . The United States of America could become, as it became, in very large part, if not principally, because of its natal dependence its existence upon our continued, mainly slave, labor status. But, along the way, in the tug of war of human dynamics, tens of thousands of us acquired their freedom. They married, made babies, bought land, became educated, organized and began to speak out in our best interests, "our" meaning the rest of us, including "mama'nem", those of them who yet remained enslaved, with no one to speak for nor to act for them, but us : the freed ones; they being yet unrecompensed, yet unappreciated, yet black enslaved, labor, whose spiritual ingenuity, yet persevered, by faith, by character. When presented with the deceitful "offer" to return to Africa, where they, the troublesome free blacks, could be free of white racism and free to enjoy the fruits of their own labor, "under their own vine and fig tree," in order to colonize Liberia, as an African "nation," founded by the white, mainly slaveholding, but not exclusively such, American Colonization Society (ACS) for the exclusive benefit of those tens of thousands of us who were already "free," our leaders: Bishop Richard Allen, Robert Purvis, James Forten, and 3,000 more free black men who were delegates in specially called colored convention , debated, discerned, declared, ACS' commercial, self-serving, venture, slaveholding ruse; then they voted democratically, unanimously, to reject ACS' fraudulent "gift" of African colonization in January, 1817 at Mother Bethel AME Church, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1817. http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/identity/text10/emigrationcolonization.pdf http://ushistoryscene.com/article/american-colonization-society/ The American Colonization Society debate, which, at times, "had good people on both sides"--so to speak--was subsumed by, succeeded by, the cotton gin's profitability in 1840s , then by Civil War for secession; but it seems to have continued into the 20th century with the Marcus Garvey's Movement-UNIA of the 1920s, and with the African Hebrew Nation of Jerusalem , who left Chicago for Liberia, then for Israel in the 1960s. Either way it goes, we black people remain "strangers though natives" echoing U. S. Senator Henry Clay's 1827 evocative address for support to Congress, where he had totally applauded the ACS scheme that he a Kentucky-slaveholder promoted.