AFRICA'S GREATEST LOSS

AFRICA'S REAL "GREATEST LOSS" The greatest of Africa 's stolen resources, lost treasures, are and were its people: more than its gold, silver, diamonds, copper, rare metals; or its ancient intellectual legacies of astronomy, engineering, mathematics, writing, philosophy, religion; more than Africa's many fine arts and applied methodical sciences: or its myriad crafts and inventions--are/were millions of exported African people: all Africa's greatest loss and others' gain: most prominently Europe and Arabia! Its primordial people are Africa's greatest loss!

DUSK OF DAWN AND 'KINSHIP'

The real essence of "kinship" is social heritage. Not common blood. Not genes. But, rather our human kinship comes from common living, from common experiences: shared joys, disappointments, triumphs, tragedies, meals, home, memories. This reality is obscured by familial, kinship ties . But, beneath blood ties are social ties, if not above such ties, in day-to-day living. "There is a friend who is closer than a brother," in other words. Prov. 18:24 This thought was engendered by one written by Dr. W.E.B. DuBois. He wrote: "But the physical bond is least and the badge of color relatively unimportant save as a badge ; the real essence of this kinship is its social heritage of slavery; the discrimination and the insult; and this heritage binds together not simply the children of Africa, but extends through yellow Asia and into the South Seas. It is this unity that draws me to Africa." P. 640, "Dusk of Dawn, DUBOIS WRITINGS (1986) I had long wrestled with the ties that bind. Happily this solves it.

TRAITORS

WHEN YOU TAKE THE BAIT YOU GET THE HOOK. SUCH IS THE STATE OF AFFAIRS WITH THE "ALT-RIGHT," "TEA-PARTY," "CONSERVATIVES," WHO ARE NOTHING BUT TRAITORS TO THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION, AS AMENDED BY CIVIL WAR.

DELIVERANCE

Talking about divine deliverance! Levi Coffin, a renown abolitionist and Quaker of antebellum Indiana, writes in his classic underground railroad memoir, REMINISCENCES about a poor, illiterate black woman from Mississippi who escaped from slavery, by hiding out in swamps, forests, by living off the land, kind contributions, and by her faith in God, as she made her way North. In one especially thrilling episode, she hears the hounds baying and approaching, she has no means of escape, other options than to pray for deliverance. She prays quickly! Her fears fall away. She pulls bread crumbs from her pockets and holds them in her hands, awaiting the slave catching dogs, completely at ease. The dogs licked the bread crumbs from her hands and went off bouncing through the woods. She continued on her way, was directed to the home of the great friend of fugitives, Levi Coffin, and was safely delivered to Canada. The Bible stories of Daniel in the Lion's Den, the fiery furnace, and Jonah, if allegorical, are rendered historical, in the many lives and tales of the Underground Railroad!

DUSK OF DAWN

"An insurance agent published in 1890 incontrovertible statistics showing how the Negro race was dying out in the United States through sheer physical inferiority. I lived to see every assumption of Hoffman's 'Race Traits and Tendencies ' contradicted; but even before that I doubted the statistical method he had used... "It was not until I was long out of school and indeed after the World War that there came the hurried use of the new technique of psychological tests, which were quickly adjusted so as to put black folk absolutely beyond the possibility of civilization. By this time, I was unimpressed. I had too often seen science made the slave of caste and race hate. And it was interesting to see Odum, McDougall and Brigham eventually turn somersaults from absolute proof of Negro inferiority to repudiation of the limited and questionable application of any test which pretended to measure innate human intelligence." P.626-627, "The Concept of Race," inside of his autobiography DUSK of DAWN. DUBOIS :WRITINGS (1986)

RECIPROCAL RESPECT

Long as I get mine, why deny you yours? Long as you get yours, why deny me mine? Each to its own!

AT THE CROSS, AT THE CROSS....

AT THE CROSS, AT THE CROSS.... Our black people have had to bear the grievous cross of racism during our American sojourn, even in the Christian Church , especially there! "Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing . My sisters and brothers this should not be . Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring ?" James 3:10-11 This text, pericope of scripture, came to mind, as I reflected upon black and white Christianity in America, and the different paths that each have trod, and yet tread, in the redeeming gospel of Jesus. In his AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FUGITIVE NEGRO (1855, 1970), Rev. Samuel Ringgold Ward, an early black abolitionist lecturer, has written: "The American Tract Society not only publishes no tract against slavery, but they favor that abominable system in the two following ways... No poor slave: dumb as thou art, dumb shalt thou ever be, so far as this Society is concerned. "The American Bible Society distributes no Bibles among the slave population. To do so, it is freely admitted, were contrary to law in some States--not in all. It is so in nine of the fifteen Slave States, but not in the other six... "Slaveholders and their abettors belong to and are officers of the American Bible Society, and they control it. That slavery forbids the searchings of the Scriptures, which Christ enjoins, is to them not even a matter of complaint .... "The American Sunday-school and Union stands in precisely the same category, and is controlled by precisely the same influences; and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions is, and always has been , both in its policy and officers, of the very same character.... But the most lamentable fact is, that in Congregational New England the sons of Puritan sires are as guilty as the guiltiest enemies of the downtrodden slave. Such was the state of the case in 1839, when my labors began; such I regret to say, continues to be the case at this moment..." P.48-49 Black and white Christians have surely had to tread separate paths to arrive at their present locations, given the account of Samuel Ward. Or, if we have somehow trod the same path, we blacks, like our North African brother, Simon of Cyrene, must have carried the cross of Jesus Christ, while the white Christian folks rode atop it!