When Black Is first originated in 2007, it was a tiny operation that was held together by myself and a friend, Nneka Hall. At the time, we did what we could to create a monthly e-publication and leaned on our loved ones to assist us. Nneka’s partner, Jerome Allen, was one of those loved ones, and most recently we lost him in a fatal car crash. In his memory, I am reposting the first article he wrote for Black Is. I recall him sending several revisions; he wanted to ensure it was a perfect first piece, which for me was a testament to his character. Jerome, you will be greatly missed.
The long standing relationship between blacks and whites in America has been a tumultuous one mired by the events of colonial slavery (16th – 19th century) and 20th century Jim Crow. But as we approach the end of the 1st decade of the 2nd millennium, most figure we are beyond such racist and malicious acts. I say think again. A multitude of cases have sprung renewed life into the racial tension that exist between the two, most notably the unjust prosecution of the young men of Jena Louisiana. While other events range from the widespread hanging of nooses around the country to the marking of a swastika on the body of a deaf black student, racism has reminded us that it is going nowhere anytime soon. With emotions rising high, we must work to find a resolution or become participants (willing or unwilling) in a repeat of racial uprising.
The array of incidents involving blacks and whites has invoked the spirits of the past, which was prevalent at the march in Jena last month. As one news report stated, ‘it was a page out the fifties and sixties…’ The reason why this statement is more than just an analogy is because we are still those people from the fifties and sixties. Both blacks and whites. We carry the genes of our ancestors, therefore they are always with and within us. So when we are faced with similar actions of the fifties and sixties, this reveals the associated emotions that are consistent with our treatment. But when we take to the streets, we are labeled as bitter and angry, rather than the justice seekers we are. We are told to get over the past, but my response to that would be to ask a rape victim if their rapist raped them repeatedly, then returned year after year to commit the same act, would they get over it.
We need to go no further than the internet to find out how people of opposing sides view the latest affairs between the rival races. While the majority of the backlash has been directed towards blacks, it calls into question whether whites actions are perceived as innocent and justified. One site in particular seems to think so: www.overthrow.com. As we witness the behavior exemplified by these types of people, we must ask, “Where do we go from here?” What do we do to avoid a repeat of the sixties?
As it is apparent that these problems have and still do exist, the only solution is one which is rooted in the repair of the relationship. I contend that there are three keys to the success of this quest. First, a willingness on both sides to sit down and discuss the issues. Second, open admission to the contribution to the detriment of the relationship. Third, a concrete agenda aimed at ridding the country of this ailment now as well as in the future.
The main problem has been that we have yet to make it to the first step in the process. Blacks have argued that whites won’t answer the call, while whites suggest an informal apology is a suitable settlement. While both sides will justify their position, what remains is a lack of bonafide communication. And without proper communication, no relationship can survive. The origin of the problem must be examined, otherwise problematic situations will be doomed to repeat themselves. And if that’s the case, our best bet is to be prepared to go to war.
In honor of Black History Month, I would like to remind some and expose to others the words of one of the greatest defenders of justice this world has known; Frederick Douglass.
In 1852, Douglass is asked to give a speech as part of the Fourth of July celebrations in Rochester, New York. Douglass accepted the invitation.
In his speech, however, Douglass delivered a scathing attack on the hypocrisy of a nation celebrating freedom and independence with speeches, parades and platitudes, while, within its borders, nearly four million humans were being kept as slaves.
Enjoy.
Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that the dumb might eloquently speak and the “lame man leap as an hart.”
But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.
To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn that it is dangerous to copy the example of nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can today take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people.
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! We wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”
Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorry this day, “may my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth”! To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine. I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July!
Whether we turn to the declarations of the past or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate, I will not excuse”; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, shall not confess to be right and just….
For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not as astonishing that, while we are plowing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, and secretaries, having among us lawyers doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators, and teachers; and that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hillside, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives, and children, and above all, confessing and worshiping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!
What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply….
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?
I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms- of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
Two Mississippi sisters who had been imprisoned for 16 years were released on the condition that the younger sibling donate a kidney to her sister, whose organs are failing.
The sisters, Jamie and Gladys Scott, walked out of the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Pearl just and were greeted by their mother, their children and throngs of reporters. The case of the Scott sisters attracted widespread attention after Gov. Haley Barbour suspended their life sentences last month with the stipulation that Gladys, 36, give one of her kidneys to Jamie, 38.
At a news conference in Jackson, Miss., the sisters wore new clothes — Jamie had on pink, Gladys wore purple — and spoke about how surprised and gratified they were to go suddenly from the prospect of spending the rest of their lives in prison to being released into a world that had changed radically since 1994, when they were sentenced for their roles in a robbery.
“I never thought this day would ever come, when I’d be on the outside of the walls,” said Jamie Scott, who wiped away tears with a handkerchief. “Now I’m on the outside, and I can get some decent medical treatment. I am so very grateful for this day. ”
The kidney donation was the sisters’ idea, and was supported by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other civil rights organizations. But the unusual nature of the arrangement has been criticized by some medical ethicists.
Legal experts said suspending a prison sentence contingent on an organ donation was highly unusual and might be unprecedented.
Jamie Scott requires dialysis treatment at least three times a week, and her health has been failing for the last few months.
The women plan to live in Pensacola, Fla., with their mother and their children. Jamie Scott has three children; Gladys Scott has two.
The Scotts were arrested on Christmas Eve 1993, when Jamie was 21 and Gladys 19, and they were convicted the following year on charges that they led two men into an ambush, during which the men were robbed of about $11 at gunpoint, according to the trial transcript. The precise amount of money involved in the holdup was never established. No one was injured during the crime.
Three boys and a young man, ages 14 to 18 at the time, were also convicted; they served their sentences and were released from custody years ago, Mississippi officials said. The sisters denied playing any role in the crime but were given such heavy sentences because the judge believed they had organized the robbery.
After years of unsuccessful efforts by their family and friends to get the sisters released because of inconsistencies in testimony during the trial, Jamie Scott’s kidney failure in January 2010 led to a renewed grass-roots campaign to free them. The effort on behalf of the sisters, who are black, was first taken up by African-American-themed Internet sites, and more recently by the N.A.A.C.P. and by black politicians in Mississippi.
After considering the matter for several months, Governor Barbour announced in late December that he would not pardon the sisters, but would indefinitely suspend their sentences.
He said he had acted in part out of concern over Jamie Scott’s health, but also to relieve the state of the cost of her dialysis treatment, which is approximately $200,000 a year.
“The Mississippi Department of Corrections believes the sisters no longer pose a threat to society,” Mr. Barbour said in a Dec. 29 statement. “Their incarceration is no longer necessary for public safety or rehabilitation, and Jamie Scott’s medical condition creates a substantial cost to the State of Mississippi.”
“Either out of ignorance or out of indifference, he shifted what had been a gift into compensation,” Dr. Caplan said. “He turned it into a business contract.”
The sisters will be on parole for the rest of their lives, their lawyers said.
Many questions remain unanswered, including who will pay for the kidney transplant. The sisters’ supporters say that the family cannot afford the procedure and that it is unclear whether they will qualify for Medicaid.
Further, the sisters have not been tested to see if their blood type and immune systems are sufficiently close for a transplant operation. There are also concerns that after having spent so many years in prison that neither sister is healthy enough to undergo the procedure.
When Black Is first originated in 2007, it was a tiny operation that was held together by myself and a friend, Nneka Hall. At the time, we did what we could to create a monthly e-publication and leaned on our loved ones to assist us. Nneka’s partner, Jerome Allen, was one of those loved ones, and most recently we lost him in a fatal car crash. In his memory, I am reposting the first article he wrote for Black Is. I recall him sending several revisions; he wanted to ensure it was a perfect first piece, which for me was a testament to his character. Jerome, you will be greatly missed. 
