The first African slaves were transported from Africa to the New World in the late 1400s to serve on plantations under wretched conditions. The sugar crops ate up the Africans as fast as the Europeans could feed them to the Sugar Colonies. Tens of thousands provided free labor to earn wealth for the merchants of the Old world in order to fight the Religious Wars in Europe.
Vengeful uprisings in Brazil, Jamaica, and Gaspar Yanga’s San Lorenzo de los Negros stuck fear throughout slave-holding lands. The White man ruthlessly suppressed any attempt to gain freedom without any hope of emancipation for the lost tribes of Africa for centuries.
The unthinkable occurred in 1863. The Union declared all men free. Black troops fought for the cause of liberty, however the Reconstruction failed, as the KKK terrorized the newly-freed slaves and re-instituted the old regime with the rise of Jom Crow.
Black freedmen and their families fled the south and settle in towns and cities offering freedom only to discover the lords of racism had followed them to the North. The Black section of Tulsa was burned to the round during the Uprising of 1919.
Protest marchers at Selma were beaten by Alabama State Troopers and attacked by dogs at the order their governor.
At the height of the Vietnam War US soldiers occupied Newark in 1965 with ordered to shoot to kill.
Attica.
Watts.
South Central.
And Kenosha, Wisconsin, where an eighteen year-old boy used deadly force to show his belief in White Power. Kyle Rittenhouse killed two people and gravely wounded another, claiming self-defense.
The teenaged murderer was found not guilty by a jury of his peers i.e. eleven whites and one black after blubbering out his innocence like Ned Beatty’s character in DELIVERANCE. The dead are dead. Same as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and scores of innocent men and women of color, whose only crime had been the color of their skin.
This is America.
The Home of the Unfree
But one day we will all be free.
And our dreams will come true.
