1968, just 54 years ago 3 years after the passage of The Voting Rights Bill by Congress and 4 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Bill by Congress. The supposed year of hopefulness for Black Americans across the United States became a year of renewed oppression and violence that was focused on black communities across the country.  People will tell you that the myth of American Exceptionalism was on full display in 1968. When this nation should’ve been wrapping its arms around the message of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. you had a cadre of white folks plotting his demise. His murder coming in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968.  The political landscape was seared not to hope but to racial hatred and bigotry. After Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June, 1968. It all but assured that Richard Nixon and his goons of injustice were going to replace an inept Democratic President Lyndon Johnson. Who care more about securing victory in the jungles of Vietnam than building hope in suffering Americans cities and towns, especially those cities that housed black Americans. The southern strategy enacted by the Nixon team was blatantly racist and violently oppressive against black Americans. So just as Jim Crow was being beaten down Nixon decided that another Crow that filled the jail cells and killed dreams and hopes for black Americans needed to be created. That strategy directly lead to the widening of the economic gap that existed due to the so-called end of the nation’s Jim Crow policies. The need for economic reparations didn’t end at the close of the Civil War or the passing of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Bills of the mid 1960s’ they continued with the policies of the goonish  Nixon administration. Just read the image of what one of the most powerful members of the Nixon team wrote about the created war on drugs and crime that was directed at black communities to appease southern white Americans who were trained to elicit and accept racism as a balm for their economic struggles. #reparationsnow

Can you just think for a moment about hopelessness of being enslaved in the world’s most insidious form of slavery. Being caught in a web of evil that saw black mothers and daughters ravaged sexually by plantation masters, white plantation workers without any hope of being able to escape the harm or prosecute the guilty. Seeing black fathers and sons terrorized and humiliated by those plantation owners and white and sometimes even black plantation workers without any hope of escaping that abuse. Because in actuality the actual number of those who actually escaped enslavement was miniscule in relationship to the actual number of our ancestors enslaved. Mothers and fathers seeing sons and daughters snatched away from the bonds of family for the benefit only of building wealth for those white slave owners who controlled the iron bars of captivity. Imagine the darkness of total illiteracy, the lack of understanding the language of those who were the oppressors which lead to acts of brutal oppression because of that ignorance. Imagine, the absence of hope and the only escape was sometimes only at the end of a noose’s rope. Imagine seeing and surrounded by the planter’s libraries and knowing that the only book allowed was a bible that only reinforced the master’s grip. So, when I read the quote about a total moral midnight I can understand that quote with a deep, sickening feeling in the pit of my gut. Being rear a slave in this nation of supposed democracy meant the total absence of morality by those who controlled the bars and restricted the understanding of morality by those enslaved. My historical provoked thoughts for the day. Just get it together United States of America and repair the harm that oppressed our ancestors. Forgive can only be given when those actions are never forgotten by all and reparations are paid along with a true apology.