STILL HERE!

STILL HERE BY GRACE African Americans have made their involuntary home, the United States of America, a superpower by their free slave labor, peonage, discriminatory practices. Thereby, they received less than was their true due , less than was fair market share for centuries. Their color, hair texture, appearance made them vulnerable in comparison to indentured “whites”, who for a time into the mid-18th century shared the economic fate of the imported Africans. So in the middle 18th century, the future President, author , American philosopher, Thomas Jefferson, codified a color-based rationale to placate “Christian” slaveholders’ consciences . He wrote a secret book that later was to be publicly disseminated, NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA (1785). In “Query XIV.” of that book of racist propaganda, the “enlightened” man justified his own, and that of all now-“white” slave owners’, lifetime encroachment upon the lives of enslaved African people and their descendants’ lives as well forever. Ironically, an “Ethiopian,” Dogon-descended, African man of science, Benjamin Banneker was famously corresponding in 1791 with Thomas Jefferson about his scurrilous book. Benjamin Banneker, was a freeborn, first American wooden clock maker, largely self-taught mathematician and astronomer, almanac author, Maryland farmer, husbandman, actuarial table maker, and the main surveyor of the team designing the nation’s new capitol, Washington, D.C. Banneker’s personal example put to shame the lies about innate African inferiority that Jefferson had claimed for an entire class of man. But Banneker was not alone when it came to African inventiveness and technical mastery to which the United States of America was prime beneficiary. From the space age of the present day to the cotton gin of a former day, countless numbers of able African American inventors , designers, builders, technicians , within and outside of agriculture, and education, have enriched Americans’ power internationally. Not just free labor and inventions, though, but perhaps preeminently in culture, in music, the arts, drama, film, television, radio, recording, and especially athletics, from the Olympic Games to Adolph Hitler’s “Aryan race” shame, black America has contributed mightily to America while being its despised minority. The American Revolution itself was remarked as beginnings on March 5, 1770, with the killing of Crispus Attucks in the “Boston Massacre.” Attucks was a black man who was killed by the British while protesting. Peter Salem at the Battle of Bunker Hill killed the British commander . Salem was another black man. James Armistead (Lafayette ) a Virginia slave and double agent for the American patriots betrayed the British general in chief, Cornwallis, into a siege trap from which there being no escape he was forced to surrender , lest his troops starve! That shrewd deed in 1781 ended the fighting between the late “Mother Country” and her precocious child! So, one might say that the blacks began and successfully ended the Americans’ “revolution” although they were not freed in recompense, as a class as promised by patriots! As with the American Revolution, the blacks once again rescued the United States from the British in the War of 1812. England had burned down the “White House”, causing its occupants to flee. But at the decisive Battle of New Orleans in 1814, the blacks famously helped General Andrew Jackson to defeat the British. But the promised free land, freedom, benefits promised to the Africans were not forthcoming ! In the Civil War, “Freedom War,” the Africans sided with the Union forces by 200,000 soldiers and sailors and with over a million “contraband” (slaves escaping to Union lines) who greatly helped preserve the Union, the nation, who also helped, this time, by liberating themselves by force of sable arms ! But after the end of Civil War came constitutional amendments: 13th (slavery); 14th (equal protection and due process of law); and the 15th Amendments (federal voting), with the enabling statutes in laws. These new “rights” were castrated by United States Supreme Court’s decisions, starting in 1866 with New Orleans’ “Slaughterhouse” , Louisiana’s “Cruikshank” and more. We now-African Americans, entered a “nadir” (low spot) period in American society of being neither slave nor free, but another: “Jim Cow,” i.e. segregated socially, amerced politically and economically, and later terrorized—lynched, burned out, bombed out, shot and killed in Wilmington , NC, Tulsa, Oklahoma , East St. Louis, Illinois, Omaha, Nebraska, Springfield , Illinois and Missouri, dozens of other locales, in “white” riots, pogroms, coup d’etats from 1898-1943 and beyond that! But here we are! We are still here! In 2020 due to the grace of God! We Here! Due to the faith and works of our forbears still here, and grateful!