We are still here. Through it all, we are still here.
"We" are the descendents of African slaves. "Here" is the United States of America.
"Through" is the preposition that characterizes the tough slough of our sojourn, our "pilgrims' journey." We have been through a litany of tests, challenges, tribulations that have killed others.
Take "yellow fever." We were healing white Philadelphians in 1793, during that then-Capitol city's yellow fever plague, while this young nation's white leadership fled in terror for their lives. "We," in this instance being the "Free African Society," forerunner of the African Methodist Episcopal church.
It was founded in 1787, the same year the United States of America was founded, by Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and others: all free, self-reliant, devout leaders, one of whom, the treasurer, was a white Quaker. Though thousands of whites died, during the "yellow fever" peril, many more thousands of whites were saved by our nursing, feeding and caring. Meanwhile, a significant number self-sacrificing blacks who had nursed, fed, cared for, washed, and buried the dead whites, also died, themselves. Certain white physicians had falsely claimed that all blacks were immune to the disease, doubtless in an effort to forestall blacks' flight from Philadelphia as its wealthy, leading whites had done. This contention may have been partly due to the practice of "yellow fever" inoculation invented in West Africa, ancestral home of many slaves. Inoculation was then unknown to European medicine. Such immunizations worked only for those who had been inoculated, not for all blacks as alleged!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_African_Society
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| Richard Allen |
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| Absalom Jones |
These broken promises of legal equality accumulated, fueling unrest, until the "Dark Energy" of Black people irrupted, most dramatically, in the Civil War, and 100 years later in the Civil Rights of the 1960's.
Faith in God is the cosmological constant of black life in America, from its founding through the present. This faith abides and abounds whether expressed denominationally or secularly enmeshed in the idioms of popular culture. Slave songwriters sung of it in their spirituals, from which the other major forms of black musical expression primarily derived. He--God--"made a way out of no-way, over and over again!" This insipid physical cosmology is the source and it is the soul of black folks.
It is what is meant by "Dark Energy" whose complement is "Dark Matter." Both being symbiotic coefficients of God's divine light! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_cosmology
"This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine. Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!"
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