BLACK HOOLIGANISM

IN RE BLACK HOOLIGANISM Yesterday in two different contexts the scourge of African American , internecine gang warfare plaguing black people in 2019, was brought to the direct forefront of my mind. The first was a passionate 2007 video by Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam on Facebook, wherein he rhetorically ripped them apart before an appreciative, large, predominantly Muslim, audience. The second was an article in USA TODAY about the 400 years' of African Americans' arrival in America at Jamestown, Virginia, upon slaveships pirated by English privateers from Portuguese slavers on the high seas. These slaves were born free in what is now Angola. Angola was part of the Congo, historically; formerly a vast region of high civilization that was beaten down in stages over the years by Portuguese treaties, treachery, transgressions, that in due course allowed cannibalistic, uncivilized African tribes to subdue Angola, as agents for Portugal and to enslave thousands of Angolans . These captive Angolans, who were surely headed to Brazil, Portugal's American possession, by Papal treaty with Spain, were, in turn, recaptured by English pirates. From these twice-captured Angolan slaves came those of Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. There, 20 or so of them were traded in exchange for food in August, according to a letter of John Rolfe, Pocahontas' widow. Ironically these Angolan slaves' agricultural knowledge, skills, and adeptness saved Jamestown, itself, from additional winter starvation, woefully experienced since its 1607 founding, and laid the economic foundations for the United States in the cultivation of tobacco and corn. But back to the proliferation of black gangs devastating black communities, urban and rural, in 2019, from and after 1968, the year of Dr. King's apotheosis. From then, these spiritually abased persons' fratricidal conduct has defied easy solutions; else Dr. King's own efforts in Chicago in 1966-1967, would have been successful. King had moved his entire family to the housing projects, only to flee back to Atlanta, as his own children became "sullen." A solution may be to cut off the supply of oxygen ( new recruits) from the ranks of fellow ghetto dwellers of these gangs, by infusing food for the body, light for the mind and hope for the spirit into young boys and girls, regularly, to lure them away, righteously, spiritually from incarceration doom, or the cemetery ( taking innocent lives with them ) by instilling love, truth, camaraderie, corrective history, skills, jobs, in them, they, in each other, parents, siblings cousins, other relatives to fight back, naturally, in some security. Meanwhile others may pursue their own hopeful efforts on political or economic levels. "Each one teach one." Is a '60s mantra, maxim that can work person to person, family to family, church to church . That's all I know to do beside teach, pray, applaud any progress, be it ever so humble to defeat the savage black hoodlums, gangs, criminals, killers.