Reparations
Reparations
Reparations
Those cotton fields were bushy white
But the bolls and plants were bloody red
The bushels of cotton were packed so tight
The black souls were packed in blood and toil
The whites who welded those bloodied leather straps
Swung relentlessly on the backs of those black souls
Black souls that sought a better day
Black souls that never got a day of pay
So relentless was that quest for profits
It even turned their white Jesus into a cash seeking prophet
Something about those bloodied cotton fields just wasn’t right
So now it’s 2021 white denial is in the air
Yet cotton’s wealth and bloodied fields
Took millions of souls of black folks with bushy locks
But dammit America whose price is it to pay
When will Black America’s black lost black souls have their say
Why does White America continue to say it no longer has a debt to pay
A simply sorry America just won’t do
Only by paying descendants of those black souls lost can America
pay the debt that is now due
Only then America will your founding principles then stand true
Reparations
Reparations
Reparations

March 5, 1770
Ready, Aim, Fire, British muskets balls hurtling through the Boston city streets striking down rebellious citizens of a British colony. The very first person taken down on that day was a Blackman, Crispus Attucks, who took two muskets balls to the chest on that uprising 251 years ago today. Ancestor Attucks died on the streets of Boston knowing that he no longer wanted to be a subject of an oppressive monarchy. His ultimate sacrifice was the initial blow in this nation’s fight for independence in what came to be known as the Boston Massacre. Crispus Attucks gave his life understanding that he was 5/5 a man willing to face down armed British soldiers within no more than rocks, and chunks of ice. Why? Because he believed that in the hotbed of revolutionary talk . There was something worth fighting for a chance to have control of his life. Crispus Attucks wasn’t a slave he was a freeman. After America secured it’s freedom in 1781. By 1787, men, women, and children of similar skin color as Crispus Attucks were no longer considered human. They were now chattel, property, capable of being owned in perpetually. Crispus Attucks died 5/5 a man only to have future generations of Attucks become 3/5 property or human chattel. One must wonder if Mr. Attucks would’ve been on those streets if he could’ve forecasted the future?

FERNANDO WOOD, MAYOR OF NEW YORK CITY IN 1860 THOUGHT HIS TIMING WAS PERFECT. The election of an antislavery president had finally forced the South to make good on years of threats, and the exodus of 11 states from the Union had begun. Militant South Carolina was the first to secede, after a convention in Charleston five days before Christmas of 1860. Within weeks, 6 more states had broken off from the Union, and by the end of May, the Confederacy was complete.
As the most profound crisis in our young nation’s history unrolled, Wood, the mayor of New York, America’s most powerful city, made a stunning proposal: New York City should secede from the United States, too.
“With our aggrieved brethren of the Slave States, we have friendly relations and a common sympathy,” Wood told the New York Common Council in his State of the City message on January 7, 1861. “As a free city,” he said, New York “would have the whole and united support of the Southern States, as well as all other States to whose interests and rights under the constitution she has always been true.”
Although many in the city’s intelligentsia rolled their eyes, and the mayor was slammed in much of the New York Press. Wood’s proposal made a certain kind of sense. The mayor was reacting to tensions with Albany, but there was far more behind his secession proposal, particularly if one understood that the lifeblood of New York City’s economy was cotton, the product most closely identified with the South and its defining system of labor: the slavery of millions of people of African descent.”


Complicity