REPUGNANCE

REPUGNANCE  “Repugnants”, Hillary Clinton’s nickname, caustic epithet, for Republicans, though true now, has also been historically true for her Democrats, the current preferred party of blacks. The Democrats (a/k/a “Dixiecrats”), Thomas Jefferson’s and James Madison’s Party, was once called the “Democratic-Republican Party” before splintering in 1824. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic-Republican_Party After the split the Democratic Party became primarily the political party of Southern slaveholders, and their many Northern sympathizers—“Copperheads”—who seceded from the Union to assert their alleged “constitutional rights” to: expand slavery beyond—the South; beyond the “Mason-Dixon” line’s 1820 Missouri Compromise and beyond the Kansas-Nebraska Act’s “popular sovereignty” of 1854. The Republicans were primarily capitalists on Wall Street and in the Northern manufacturing, banking, shipping, insurance, distribution, mining, timber, business companies. In truth, blacks had no true political party that favored them as people or ‘citizens’ before the Civil War and very few afterwards, appearances aside, puffery aside, and lies aside. The wonder and the glory of it all is that we were consistently, creatively able to exploit political differences, few as they were, between them both mainly by self-help, running away, “stealing away home.” Others included rebelling, lecturing, publishing, preaching, litigation of freedom suits . But, it was mainly by secretly: starting, staffing, funding, directing, maintaining an incredible “Underground Railroad” that “had landed many a thousand” fugitive slaves in Canada, Caribbean, Europe, Mexico; by ships, trains, wagons, mules, on foot. The grievous mounting losses of their most valuable property, by way of the “Underground Railroad” and by “Freedom Suits” was what caused the war, after the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 failed, interim Supreme Court cases failed, and the Dred Scott decision of 1857 which authoritatively negated any possible “citizenship” legal status for blacks—slave or free—failed to keep, corral the blacks in thralldom. Now in 2020, the same consistent creativity, secrecy, perspicacity that characterized our forebears efforts must be exemplified by us once again. Our people kept hearts, minds, eyes and ears open, and their mouths shut, as they went about the careful business of liberation of self, family, friends, from slavery. So must we!