BLACKS ARE AMERICAN ENEMIES?
How and when did we black people become the "enemy" of the United States of America? Which action is it that demonstrated black enmity ?
This question first occurred to me as I read in Thomas Paine's essay, "Common Sense, on The King of England's Speech dated February 19 and 28, 1782." It recurred to me, when the American CIA director, Pompeo, said to the BBC that the Russians and Chinese are America's greatest threats, without mentioning American black folks at all. But with President Trump's ill-conceived "shithole" descriptive references to African descendants and American policy and disparities it is clear that African people are the 'domestic' enemies of America!
But why? For what? Paine writes:
"Her [America's] situation now is such, that to whatever point, past, present, or to come she casts her eyes, new matter rises to convince her she is right. In her conduct towards her [enemy], no reproachful sentiment lurks in secret . No sense of injustice is left upon the mind. Untainted with ambition and a stranger to revenge , her progress has been marked by providence, and she, in every stage of the conflict has blest her with success ."
P. 291, THOMAS PAINE , COLLECTED WRITINGS (1955)
When this founding father, Thomas Paine, wrote these words, America was newly-flush with victory over King George III of England. British General Charles Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia, in October 1781, following seven years of war. The "enemy" then referred to was the British. The blacks had fought on both sides, seeking freedom from chattel slavery, wherever it could be found!
It later turns out that a black slave named "Armstead," who was a spy for the Americans, unbeknownst to the British, who had thought that he was a spy for them; secretly, had lured Gen. Cornwallis and his army into the lethal sand-trap that compelled their surrender from, a position of hapless siege and total annihilation wherein it found itself!
The Marquis de Lafayette writes of the indispensable heroism of then-slave Armstead in Lafayette's book "Lafayette in America, 1777-1783."
A few years after the war ended Armstead was finally granted his freedom, a small plot of land, and a small annual pension by the Virginia legislature, in homage to this black man's extraordinary spy service. "Lafayette Armstead," as he was later known, is not taught in school history of the Revolutionary War. That would make a black man seem to be heroic, or, by extension, the black people in America as well! Such racist, purposeful, factual, omissions as these bestir American racism and sycophancy, in whites and blacks, respectively.
Not meaning to digress, the issue before us is: how and when the black man in America became the [enemy]? Well, it must have been after the Revolutionary War, given Armstead's singular representative contribution on behalf of the black.
But the "Articles of Confederation" were the young nation's governing document in 1782, when Paine wrote his essay. 'The Articles'
and the "Declaration of Independence," which Thomas Paine, undoubtedly, and as surely, wrote were its leading documents.
I re-assert Thomas Paine's authorship of the "Declaration," rather than Thomas Jefferson's, given the presence of certain phraseological similarities between the two versions. The infamously stricken phrase about "Indians and Negroes," that was formally redacted from the "Declaration's"
original draft by a Constitutional Congress' editorial committee, in 1776, was recast by Thomas Paine in this 1782 essay, six years later. http://alexpeak.com/twr/doi/change/
He said:
"That the very man who began the war, who, with the most insolence refused to answer , and even to hear the humblest of petitions, who hath encouraged his officers and his army in the most savage cruelties, and the most scandalous plunderings, "who has stirred up the Indians on one side, and the Negroes on the other," and invoked every aid of Hell in his behalf, should now with an air of affected pity turn the tables from himself, and charge on another the wickedness that is his own, can only be equaled by the baseness of the heart that spoke it."
Id. P287-288.
My additional point of proof besides phasing is in the fact that Thomas Jefferson was a well-known slave holder, while Thomas Paine was not a slaveholder! Why then would Thomas Jefferson write anything inimical to his economic or political interests or contrary to his inherent biases and beliefs in the original "Declaration?" He would not! Paine would! President Jefferson's racist prejudices are set forth frontally in Jefferson's 1785 book, NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA, "Query XIV."
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/jefferson/ch14.html
Jefferson's book was a clarion call for American racism, based upon his innate alleged inferiority of African Americans, Jefferson said .
This rash crassness was later responded to by that iconic black Maryland farmer, Washington D.C. assistant surveyor, astronomer, mathematician, Benjamin Banneker, who wrote his renunciation in a 1791 letter to Jefferson refuting its baseless allegations. Benjamin Banneker's letter, as further proof, included his ephemeris (almanac). This astronomical work Jefferson sent to the French Academy, M. Cordocet, that confirmed the accuracy of Banneker's calculations. Banneker's almanac went on to be published widely in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, as a valuable reference.
https://founders.archives.gov/docum…/Jefferson/01-22-02-0049
Oh my! I digress again! The query being how and when did African Americans become American "enemies?" During the period after the American Constitution was ratified in 1789, it could not have been then; for despite being regarded as 3/5s human in its legislative provisions, the slaves fully counted for Southern representation purposes in the Congress a virtual, matrix-like "non-citizenship status" was ours . We were and we were not at once!
Even so, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and other black folks in their new Free African Society, relying on spurious promises about their freedom from Dr. Benjamin Rush, and others, sacrificed their own lives, health, fortune to save the white Philadelphians from Yellow Fever plague in 1793, that killed 5,000 people.
The blacks, who were falsely represented to be immune to the disease, helped whites, by nursing them, cleaning for them, feeding, washing and burying them; while the big white folks like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington et al., fearfully fled the nation's Capitol for safer climates, quarantines, not as contaminated!
So given the blacks' salvific labors for the nation's Capitol in 1793 in the Yellow Fever Plague, they must have become enemies of America at a later date and place.
http://hsp.org/…/richard-allen-ap…/the-yellow-fever-epidemic
Well, the War of 1812 came next, against Great Britain again. Andrew Jackson, future President and commander of the American forces at the Battle of New Orleans, praised the black free men and slaves who brought him American victory; although he reneged on his promise (as did Congress) to give these black warriors land, money, freedom, like the white soldiers got. Oh well, at least he praised them! They were not the enemies!
http://www.rarenewspapers.com/view/602305
The Civil War, of course, was a "white man's war." Blacks, slave or free, could not enlist until after January 1, 1863. Though the status of blacks was certainly the issue to be decided by the war, the blacks were not the 'enemy,' as recently as 1865, when the former "white man's war" came to a close, due once again to the salvific blacks!
http://www.abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org/…/abraham-lincoln-…/
Neither were blacks the 'enemy' in the early Reconstruction period when they were freed from slavery, given citizenship by birth, and given the right to vote, 1866-1870, by the 13-15th Amendments to the United States Constitution and their enabling statutory laws.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_Amendments
Perhaps 'enemy' is in the "nadir" as historian Rayford Logan has termed it, the period after 1876, with the Hayes-Tilden Compromise . This was the reconciled political agreement between unidentifiable leaders of the North and South that federal troops were to be withdrawn from the South as consideration for the Presidency going to Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio, a Republican, and the North assuming a "hands-off" approach to the South's handling of its black folks: socially, legally, economically.
"Enemy" status, if extant, for we black Americans lasted well-beyond the 1896 "Atlanta Exposition Speech" of Tuskegee's founder Booker T. Washington (who replaced Frederick Douglass as national black leader who died that year) and lasted equally well-beyond that same year's Plessy v. Ferguson U. S. Supreme Court decision that mandated "separate but equal" Jim Crow-segregation in every public venue as lawful all over the nation. As this draconian decision was not reversed until 1954, to the extent that "enemy status" yet existed or pertained, it lasted at least until then.
But given Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's civil rights labors, victories and 1968 assassination, plus the strong efforts of others, it is clear that the same "enemy status" obtained through 1968. For, it was then that Richard M. Nixon revived the Dixiecrat "Southern Strategy" to enable the Republican Party to win the Presidency, then, and again in 1972.
Now in January 2018, with Donald "shithole" Trump as our President, with mass incarceration and with lawful police killings of black justified in federal courts by the cops' subjective "fears," whether blacks are still enemies of the United States of America, is a question well-worth considering!

BLACKS ARE AMERICAN ENEMIES?
How and when did we black people become the "enemy" of the United States of America? Which action is it that demonstrated black enmity ?
This question first occurred to me as I read in Thomas Paine's essay, "Common Sense, on The King of England's Speech dated February 19 and 28, 1782." It recurred to me, when the American CIA director, Pompeo, said to the BBC that the Russians and Chinese are America's greatest threats, without mentioning American black folks at all. But with President Trump's ill-conceived "shithole" descriptive references to African descendants and American policy and disparities it is clear that African people are the 'domestic' enemies of America!
But why? For what? Paine writes:
"Her [America's] situation now is such, that to whatever point, past, present, or to come she casts her eyes, new matter rises to convince her she is right. In her conduct towards her [enemy], no reproachful sentiment lurks in secret . No sense of injustice is left upon the mind. Untainted with ambition and a stranger to revenge , her progress has been marked by providence, and she, in every stage of the conflict has blest her with success ."
P. 291, THOMAS PAINE , COLLECTED WRITINGS (1955)
When this founding father, Thomas Paine, wrote these words, America was newly-flush with victory over King George III of England. British General Charles Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia, in October 1781, following seven years of war. The "enemy" then referred to was the British. The blacks had fought on both sides, seeking freedom from chattel slavery, wherever it could be found!
It later turns out that a black slave named "Armstead," who was a spy for the Americans, unbeknownst to the British, who had thought that he was a spy for them; secretly, had lured Gen. Cornwallis and his army into the lethal sand-trap that compelled their surrender from, a position of hapless siege and total annihilation wherein it found itself!
The Marquis de Lafayette writes of the indispensable heroism of then-slave Armstead in Lafayette's book "Lafayette in America, 1777-1783."
A few years after the war ended Armstead was finally granted his freedom, a small plot of land, and a small annual pension by the Virginia legislature, in homage to this black man's extraordinary spy service. "Lafayette Armstead," as he was later known, is not taught in school history of the Revolutionary War. That would make a black man seem to be heroic, or, by extension, the black people in America as well! Such racist, purposeful, factual, omissions as these bestir American racism and sycophancy, in whites and blacks, respectively.
Not meaning to digress, the issue before us is: how and when the black man in America became the [enemy]? Well, it must have been after the Revolutionary War, given Armstead's singular representative contribution on behalf of the black.
But the "Articles of Confederation" were the young nation's governing document in 1782, when Paine wrote his essay. 'The Articles'
and the "Declaration of Independence," which Thomas Paine, undoubtedly, and as surely, wrote were its leading documents.
I re-assert Thomas Paine's authorship of the "Declaration," rather than Thomas Jefferson's, given the presence of certain phraseological similarities between the two versions. The infamously stricken phrase about "Indians and Negroes," that was formally redacted from the "Declaration's"
original draft by a Constitutional Congress' editorial committee, in 1776, was recast by Thomas Paine in this 1782 essay, six years later. http://alexpeak.com/twr/doi/change/
He said:
"That the very man who began the war, who, with the most insolence refused to answer , and even to hear the humblest of petitions, who hath encouraged his officers and his army in the most savage cruelties, and the most scandalous plunderings, "who has stirred up the Indians on one side, and the Negroes on the other," and invoked every aid of Hell in his behalf, should now with an air of affected pity turn the tables from himself, and charge on another the wickedness that is his own, can only be equaled by the baseness of the heart that spoke it."
Id. P287-288.
My additional point of proof besides phasing is in the fact that Thomas Jefferson was a well-known slave holder, while Thomas Paine was not a slaveholder! Why then would Thomas Jefferson write anything inimical to his economic or political interests or contrary to his inherent biases and beliefs in the original "Declaration?" He would not! Paine would! President Jefferson's racist prejudices are set forth frontally in Jefferson's 1785 book, NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA, "Query XIV."
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/jefferson/ch14.html
Jefferson's book was a clarion call for American racism, based upon his innate alleged inferiority of African Americans, Jefferson said .
This rash crassness was later responded to by that iconic black Maryland farmer, Washington D.C. assistant surveyor, astronomer, mathematician, Benjamin Banneker, who wrote his renunciation in a 1791 letter to Jefferson refuting its baseless allegations. Benjamin Banneker's letter, as further proof, included his ephemeris (almanac). This astronomical work Jefferson sent to the French Academy, M. Cordocet, that confirmed the accuracy of Banneker's calculations. Banneker's almanac went on to be published widely in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, as a valuable reference.
https://founders.archives.gov/docum…/Jefferson/01-22-02-0049
Oh my! I digress again! The query being how and when did African Americans become American "enemies?" During the period after the American Constitution was ratified in 1789, it could not have been then; for despite being regarded as 3/5s human in its legislative provisions, the slaves fully counted for Southern representation purposes in the Congress a virtual, matrix-like "non-citizenship status" was ours . We were and we were not at once!
Even so, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and other black folks in their new Free African Society, relying on spurious promises about their freedom from Dr. Benjamin Rush, and others, sacrificed their own lives, health, fortune to save the white Philadelphians from Yellow Fever plague in 1793, that killed 5,000 people.
The blacks, who were falsely represented to be immune to the disease, helped whites, by nursing them, cleaning for them, feeding, washing and burying them; while the big white folks like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington et al., fearfully fled the nation's Capitol for safer climates, quarantines, not as contaminated!
So given the blacks' salvific labors for the nation's Capitol in 1793 in the Yellow Fever Plague, they must have become enemies of America at a later date and place.
http://hsp.org/…/richard-allen-ap…/the-yellow-fever-epidemic
Well, the War of 1812 came next, against Great Britain again. Andrew Jackson, future President and commander of the American forces at the Battle of New Orleans, praised the black free men and slaves who brought him American victory; although he reneged on his promise (as did Congress) to give these black warriors land, money, freedom, like the white soldiers got. Oh well, at least he praised them! They were not the enemies!
http://www.rarenewspapers.com/view/602305
The Civil War, of course, was a "white man's war." Blacks, slave or free, could not enlist until after January 1, 1863. Though the status of blacks was certainly the issue to be decided by the war, the blacks were not the 'enemy,' as recently as 1865, when the former "white man's war" came to a close, due once again to the salvific blacks!
http://www.abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org/…/abraham-lincoln-…/
Neither were blacks the 'enemy' in the early Reconstruction period when they were freed from slavery, given citizenship by birth, and given the right to vote, 1866-1870, by the 13-15th Amendments to the United States Constitution and their enabling statutory laws.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_Amendments
Perhaps 'enemy' is in the "nadir" as historian Rayford Logan has termed it, the period after 1876, with the Hayes-Tilden Compromise . This was the reconciled political agreement between unidentifiable leaders of the North and South that federal troops were to be withdrawn from the South as consideration for the Presidency going to Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio, a Republican, and the North assuming a "hands-off" approach to the South's handling of its black folks: socially, legally, economically.
"Enemy" status, if extant, for we black Americans lasted well-beyond the 1896 "Atlanta Exposition Speech" of Tuskegee's founder Booker T. Washington (who replaced Frederick Douglass as national black leader who died that year) and lasted equally well-beyond that same year's Plessy v. Ferguson U. S. Supreme Court decision that mandated "separate but equal" Jim Crow-segregation in every public venue as lawful all over the nation. As this draconian decision was not reversed until 1954, to the extent that "enemy status" yet existed or pertained, it lasted at least until then.
But given Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's civil rights labors, victories and 1968 assassination, plus the strong efforts of others, it is clear that the same "enemy status" obtained through 1968. For, it was then that Richard M. Nixon revived the Dixiecrat "Southern Strategy" to enable the Republican Party to win the Presidency, then, and again in 1972.
Now in January 2018, with Donald "shithole" Trump as our President, with mass incarceration and with lawful police killings of black justified in federal courts by the cops' subjective "fears," whether blacks are still enemies of the United States of America, is a question well-worth considering!

