Why reparations? The evil institution of slavery in this country was quite peculiar. It put value on black human souls and that value gave those black souls some levels of protection. While slavery was both vile and cruel. The slave owners financial wealth was based on the number of those slaves he held captive in chains. The children born from black women slaves were forever bound to the evil system of bondage. When slavery ended with the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865, it was assumed that all the evilness perpetrated on blacks in this nation would end. Yet, in many ways that evilness only increased in its deprivation. You see no longer was an economic value placed on people of color in the southern states. Our ancestors became throwaways. Once used up their lives had no value. With the end of Black Reconstruction the onslaught of white supremacy rose to a level of unimaginable terror, unbearable pain to our black ancestors. One system of slavery supposedly eliminated another far more heinous system called convict leasing created. Why Reparations?

Let’s dig a little deeper: By the late 1870s, the defining characteristics of the new involuntary servitude were clearly apparent. It would be obsessed with ensuring disparate treatment of blacks, who at all times in the ensuing fifty years would constitute the vast majority of those sold into labor. They were routinely starved and brutalized by corporations, farmers, government officials, and small-town businessmen intent on achieving the most lucrative balance between the productivity of captive labor and the cost of sustaining them. The consequences for African Americans were grim. In the first two years that Alabama leased its prisoners, nearly 20 percent of them died. In the following year, mortality rates for the leased convicts rose to 35 percent. In the fourth, nearly 45 percent of the leased convicts were killed." This was just one southern state, Alabama, just imagine this system of expansive injustice being spread across the entire southern region of a nation that was supposed to provide protection for its most vulnerable citizens. So, why reparations? One answer is convict leasing and the horrendous injustice inflicted on our black ancestors.
Please don’t allow reparations to become a side issue to be cast aside and forgotten. Don’t allow either political party to think we can forgive and forget. The lives lost by just this method of oppression deserves justice, along with the generations of lives that were forced to accept this vile treatment without a repayment.

Slavery By Another Name
The Black Blogger

The inability to read and write keeps many members of our black communities from knowing what they are rights and privileges they are entitled to. It also limits their ability and actions about how to strategically and forcefully demand those rights and privileges. Another negative limitation of this inability to read and write with comprehension is how it silences their voices politically in society. It is almost as if they become invisible, isolated from the rest of the world around them. Many of these individuals struggle with a basic understanding or simple understanding of national and world events that affect their daily lives. Ignored and shutout by institutions that control those events because those institutions understand that with that knowledge these individuals are no threat to the status quo that minimizes change. This morning a friend of mind speaks knowledge to power to why we all must ensure that everyone has the ability to gain those skills to read and write effectively, thanks Dennis Samuel Boatwright II


#universalblackliteracy

Last night I went to Barnes & Nobles in Ann Arbor, MI to buy OPEN SEASON, a newly released book authored by famed Trayvon Martin attorney, Ben Crump. While searching for the book I bumped into an incredible 82 year old retired elder African American man who was obvious very educated an in tuned with world affairs. He's the only person I know that has read every book I happened to mention to him. He was polite, yet serious. He told me at the end of our conversation that this was his third time ever having a pleasurable discussion with a total stranger. I found out that he was a former prevost of a major university, and has post doctorates in physics and economics. Before we departed, I asked him if he could recommend just one book for me to read, what would it be? He said that back in the 70s he used to carry three books in his brief case at all times,one of which is the book EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR DELUSIONS AND THE MADNESS OF CROWDS, written in 1841. He then said, they have it here, "I'll buy it for you." It is a classic eye opening book which gives readers an idea on why we hold certain beliefs, why we are willing to spend so much on diamonds, etc.Our encounter was the second time I ever met such an intelligent fellow who had a positive impact on my thinking in such a short time span.