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Alcohol

Alcohol, specifically ethanol, is a psychoactive substance commonly found in beverages such as beer, wine, and spirits. It acts as a central nervous system depressant and is consumed globally for various reasons, including socializing, relaxation, and cultural practices.
“Birds sing not because they have answers but because they have songs”
“Birds sing not because they have answers but because they have songs”

“Birds sing not because they have answers but because they have songs”
“Birds sing not because they have answers but because they have songs”

Effects on the Central Nervous System (CNS) and Body
Alcohol significantly affects the CNS. Initially, it may induce feelings of euphoria and relaxation by increasing dopamine levels. However, excessive consumption leads to impaired judgment, coordination, and reaction time. Long-term use can result in cognitive decline, memory loss, and increased risk of mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety.
Organs
Liver: The liver metabolizes alcohol, but excessive intake can overwhelm its capacity, leading to conditions such as fatty liver, alcoholic hepatitis, and cirrhosis. The liver damage significantly impairs its ability to detoxify harmful substances and regulate metabolism.
Throat and Mouth: Alcohol can irritate the mucous membranes in the throat and mouth, increasing the risk of cancers in these areas. Chronic alcohol use can also lead to conditions like esophagitis and increased risk of oral health problems.
Lungs: While alcohol is not directly harmful to the lungs, chronic use can weaken the immune system, making the body more susceptible to respiratory infections. Additionally, alcohol can exacerbate conditions like asthma and exacerbate the effects of smoking.
Cardiovascular System: Alcohol consumption can cause both short-term and long-term increases in blood pressure. Binge drinking can lead to acute spikes, whereas heavy drinking over time is associated with sustained hypertension, increasing the risk of heart disease and stroke.
Dehydrating Effect and General Bodily Function
Alcohol has a diuretic effect, leading to increased urination and potential dehydration. This can result in imbalances in electrolytes and hinder bodily functions. Dehydration from alcohol use can cause symptoms such as headaches, fatigue, and dry mouth. Chronic dehydration can also impair kidney function and skin health, exacerbating the negative effects of alcohol on overall well-being.
Physical Fitness and Muscle Development
Alcohol consumption negatively impacts physical fitness and muscle development. It can reduce athletic performance by impairing coordination, balance, and reaction time, increasing the risk of injury during exercise.
Coordination: Alcohol disrupts the brain’s communication with the body, leading to impaired muscle coordination and control.
Protein Synthesis: Alcohol consumption affects protein metabolism, inhibiting protein synthesis in muscles and impairing recovery after exercise. This can lead to reduced muscle gains and longer recovery times.
Muscle Development: Consuming alcohol can interfere with hormones crucial for muscle growth, such as testosterone. Chronic consumption can lead to decreased muscle mass and strength over time.
Summary
While moderate alcohol consumption may have some social benefits, excessive and chronic use can have severe negative effects on the central nervous system, organs, and physical fitness and performance. Understanding these impacts can help in making informed choices about alcohol use.
Frequency Asked Questions?
How Long Does It Take to Feel the Effects of Alcohol?
"The time it takes for alcohol to kick in is usually around 10 minutes, depending on the strength of your drink and how fast you drink it. The full impact can take longer, such as the blood sugar effect for people with diabetes."[3]
How Long Does it Take for Alcohol to Wear Off?
"Alcohol is mainly metabolized through the liver.
It generally takes to liver about 1 hour to metabolize one standard drink for men.
However, the length of time it takes for alcohol to wear off in the body can depend on a variety of different factors, including a person’s age, weight, and how often they drink."[1]
How to Drink Responsibly?
Once you start drinking, the effects of the alcohol can start within 10 minutes, and the effects of a single drink can last an hour or more until they go away; this depends on the characteristics and circumstances of the person drinking, such as their level of hydration, how much body fat they have.
Most people tend to have more than one drink. The responsible thing to do would be to moderate the amount you drink in respect to the last drink you’ve had. As stated, "It generally takes to liver about 1 hour to metabolize one standard drink for men"[1].
Also, alcohol may increase urination, which can lead to dehydration. To avoid dehydration, you should drink water in-between drinks of alcohol or after you have drunk alcohol.
How to Prevent or Reduce Risk of Getting a "Hangover"?
One of the main causes of a hangover is dehydration and an imbalance of electrolytes in the body. By maintaining proper hydration levels and a balance of electrolytes, the effects of a hangover may be noticeable reduced.
"Drinking water and other nonalcoholic beverages won’t help get the alcohol out of your bloodstream faster, but you may feel less sluggish and avoid a wicked hangover." [2]
In addition, you should limit the amount of alcohol you drink in respect to the time you will go to sleep and wake up.
References
Quinn, Deborah (2023, April 12). How long does alcohol stay in your system? Sandstone Care. https://www.sandstonecare.com/blog/how-long-does-alcohol-stay-in-your-system/
Santos-Longhurst, A. (2020, January 29). How long does it really take to sober up? Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health/how-long-does-being-drunk-last
Santos-Longhurst, A. (2019, October 22). How long does it take for alcohol to kick in? Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health/how-long-does-it-take-for-alcohol-to-kick-in
Alcohol. (2010). MedlinePlus; National Library of Medicine. https://medlineplus.gov/alcohol.html
Alcohol’s effects on the body | National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). (n.d.). https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/alcohols-effects-body
Hangovers | National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). (n.d.). https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sheets/hangovers
Khamisi
Khamisi

“What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?”: James Earl Jones Reads Frederick Douglass’s Historic Speech

Born into slavery around 1818, Douglass became a key leader of the abolitionist movement. On July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, he gave one of his most famous speeches, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro.” He was addressing the Rochester Ladies Antislavery Society. This is actor James Earl Jones reading the speech during a performance of historian Howard Zinn’s acclaimed book, “Voices of a People’s History of the United States.” He was introduced by Zinn.
Khamisi
Khamisi

“Where Do We Go From Here” by Martin L. King, Jr.

In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., isolated himself from the demands of the civil rights movement, rented a house in Jamaica with no telephone, and labored over his final manuscript. In this prophetic work, which has been unavailable for more than ten years, he lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America’s future, including the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education. With a universal message of hope that continues to resonate, King demanded an end to global suffering, asserting that humankind-for the first time-has the resources and technology to eradicate poverty.

Dr. Abernathy, our distinguished vice president, fellow delegates to this, the tenth annual session of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, my brothers and sisters from not only all over the South, but from all over the United States of America: ten years ago during the piercing chill of a January day and on the heels of the year-long Montgomery bus boycott, a group of approximately one hundred Negro leaders from across the South assembled in this church and agreed on the need for an organization to be formed that could serve as a channel through which local protest organizations in the South could coordinate their protest activities. It was this meeting that gave birth to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
And when our organization was formed ten years ago, racial segregation was still a structured part of the architecture of southern society. Negroes with the pangs of hunger and the anguish of thirst were denied access to the average lunch counter. The downtown restaurants were still off-limits for the black man. Negroes, burdened with the fatigue of travel, were still barred from the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. Negro boys and girls in dire need of recreational activities were not allowed to inhale the fresh air of the big city parks. Negroes in desperate need of allowing their mental buckets to sink deep into the wells of knowledge were confronted with a firm “no” when they sought to use the city libraries. Ten years ago, legislative halls of the South were still ringing loud with such words as “interposition” and “nullification.” All types of conniving methods were still being used to keep the Negro from becoming a registered voter. A decade ago, not a single Negro entered the legislative chambers of the South except as a porter or a chauffeur. Ten years ago, all too many Negroes were still harried by day and haunted by night by a corroding sense of fear and a nagging sense of nobody-ness. (Yeah)
But things are different now. In assault after assault, we caused the sagging walls of segregation to come tumbling down. During this era the entire edifice of segregation was profoundly shaken. This is an accomplishment whose consequences are deeply felt by every southern Negro in his daily life. (Oh yeah) It is no longer possible to count the number of public establishments that are open to Negroes. Ten years ago, Negroes seemed almost invisible to the larger society, and the facts of their harsh lives were unknown to the majority of the nation. But today, civil rights is a dominating issue in every state, crowding the pages of the press and the daily conversation of white Americans. In this decade of change, the Negro stood up and confronted his oppressor. He faced the bullies and the guns, and the dogs and the tear gas. He put himself squarely before the vicious mobs and moved with strength and dignity toward them and decisively defeated them. (Yes) And the courage with which he confronted enraged mobs dissolved the stereotype of the grinning, submissive Uncle Tom. (Yes) He came out of his struggle integrated only slightly in the external society, but powerfully integrated within. This was a victory that had to precede all other gains.
In short, over the last ten years the Negro decided to straighten his back up (Yes), realizing that a man cannot ride your back unless it is bent. (Yes, That’s right) We made our government write new laws to alter some of the cruelest injustices that affected us. We made an indifferent and unconcerned nation rise from lethargy and subpoenaed its conscience to appear before the judgment seat of morality on the whole question of civil rights. We gained manhood in the nation that had always called us “boy.” It would be hypocritical indeed if I allowed modesty to forbid my saying that SCLC stood at the forefront of all of the watershed movements that brought these monumental changes in the South. For this, we can feel a legitimate pride. But in spite of a decade of significant progress, the problem is far from solved. The deep rumbling of discontent in our cities is indicative of the fact that the plant of freedom has grown only a bud and not yet a flower.
And before discussing the awesome responsibilities that we face in the days ahead, let us take an inventory of our programmatic action and activities over the past year. Last year as we met in Jackson, Mississippi, we were painfully aware of the struggle of our brothers in Grenada, Mississippi. After living for a hundred or more years under the yoke of total segregation, the Negro citizens of this northern Delta hamlet banded together in nonviolent warfare against racial discrimination under the leadership of our affiliate chapter and organization there. The fact of this non-destructive rebellion was as spectacular as were its results. In a few short weeks the Grenada County Movement challenged every aspect of the society’s exploitative life. Stores which denied employment were boycotted; voter registration increased by thousands. We can never forget the courageous action of the people of Grenada who moved our nation and its federal courts to powerful action in behalf of school integration, giving Grenada one of the most integrated school systems in America. The battle is far from over, but the black people of Grenada have achieved forty of fifty-three demands through their persistent nonviolent efforts.
Slowly but surely, our southern affiliates continued their building and organizing. Seventy-nine counties conducted voter registration drives, while double that number carried on political education and get-out-the-vote efforts. In spite of press opinions, our staff is still overwhelmingly a southern-based staff. One hundred and five persons have worked across the South under the direction of Hosea Williams. What used to be primarily a voter registration staff is actually a multifaceted program dealing with the total life of the community, from farm cooperatives, business development, tutorials, credit unions, etcetera. Especially to be commended are those ninety-nine communities and their staffs which maintain regular mass meetings throughout the year.
Our Citizenship Education Program continues to lay the solid foundation of adult education and community organization upon which all social change must ultimately rest. This year, five hundred local leaders received training at Dorchester and ten community centers through our Citizenship Education Program. They were trained in literacy, consumer education, planned parenthood, and many other things. And this program, so ably directed by Mrs. Dorothy Cotton, Mrs. Septima Clark, and their staff of eight persons, continues to cover ten southern states. Our auxiliary feature of C.E.P. is the aid which they have given to poor communities, poor counties in receiving and establishing O.E.O. projects. With the competent professional guidance of our marvelous staff member, Miss Mew Soong-Li, Lowndes and Wilcox counties in Alabama have pioneered in developing outstanding poverty programs totally controlled and operated by residents of the area.
Perhaps the area of greatest concentration of my efforts has been in the cities of Chicago and Cleveland. Chicago has been a wonderful proving ground for our work in the North. There have been no earth-shaking victories, but neither has there been failure. Our open housing marches, which finally brought about an agreement which actually calls the power structure of Chicago to capitulate to the civil rights movement, these marches and the agreement have finally begun to pay off. After the season of delay around election periods, the Leadership Conference, organized to meet our demands for an open city, has finally begun to implement the programs agreed to last summer.
But this is not the most important aspect of our work. As a result of our tenant union organizing, we have begun a four million dollar rehabilitation project, which will renovate deteriorating buildings and allow their tenants the opportunity to own their own homes. This pilot project was the inspiration for the new home ownership bill, which Senator Percy introduced in Congress only recently.
The most dramatic success in Chicago has been Operation Breadbasket. Through Operation Breadbasket we have now achieved for the Negro community of Chicago more than twenty-two hundred new jobs with an income of approximately eighteen million dollars a year, new income to the Negro community. [Applause] But not only have we gotten jobs through Operation Breadbasket in Chicago; there was another area through this economic program, and that was the development of financial institutions which were controlled by Negroes and which were sensitive to problems of economic deprivation of the Negro community. The two banks in Chicago that were interested in helping Negro businessmen were largely unable to loan much because of limited assets. Hi-Lo, one of the chain stores in Chicago, agreed to maintain substantial accounts in the two banks, thus increasing their ability to serve the needs of the Negro community. And I can say to you today that as a result of Operation Breadbasket in Chicago, both of these Negro-operated banks have now more than double their assets, and this has been done in less than a year by the work of Operation Breadbasket. [applause]
In addition, the ministers learned that Negro scavengers had been deprived of significant accounts in the ghetto. Whites controlled even the garbage of Negroes. Consequently, the chain stores agreed to contract with Negro scavengers to service at least the stores in Negro areas. Negro insect and rodent exterminators, as well as janitorial services, were likewise excluded from major contracts with chain stores. The chain stores also agreed to utilize these services. It also became apparent that chain stores advertised only rarely in Negro-owned community newspapers. This area of neglect was also negotiated, giving community newspapers regular, substantial accounts. And finally, the ministers found that Negro contractors, from painters to masons, from electricians to excavators, had also been forced to remain small by the monopolies of white contractors. Breadbasket negotiated agreements on new construction and rehabilitation work for the chain stores. These several interrelated aspects of economic development, all based on the power of organized consumers, hold great possibilities for dealing with the problems of Negroes in other northern cities. The kinds of requests made by Breadbasket in Chicago can be made not only of chain stores, but of almost any major industry in any city in the country.
And so Operation Breadbasket has a very simple program, but a powerful one. It simply says, “If you respect my dollar, you must respect my person.” It simply says that we will no longer spend our money where we can not get substantial jobs. [applause]
In Cleveland, Ohio, a group of ministers have formed an Operation Breadbasket through our program there and have moved against a major dairy company. Their requests include jobs, advertising in Negro newspapers, and depositing funds in Negro financial institutions. This effort resulted in something marvelous. I went to Cleveland just last week to sign the agreement with Sealtest. We went to get the facts about their employment; we discovered that they had 442 employees and only forty-three were Negroes, yet the Negro population of Cleveland is thirty-five percent of the total population. They refused to give us all of the information that we requested, and we said in substance, “Mr. Sealtest, we’re sorry. We aren’t going to burn your store down. We aren’t going to throw any bricks in the window. But we are going to put picket signs around and we are going to put leaflets out and we are going to our pulpits and tell them not to sell Sealtest products, and not to purchase Sealtest products.”
We did that. We went through the churches. Reverend Dr. Hoover, who pastors the largest church in Cleveland, who’s here today, and all of the ministers got together and got behind this program. We went to every store in the ghetto and said, “You must take Sealtest products off of your counters. If not, we’re going to boycott your whole store.” (That’s right) A&P refused. We put picket lines around A&P; they have a hundred and some stores in Cleveland, and we picketed A&P and closed down eighteen of them in one day. Nobody went in A&P. [applause] The next day Mr. A&P was calling on us, and Bob Brown, who is here on our board and who is a public relations man representing a number of firms, came in. They called him in because he worked for A&P, also; and they didn’t know he worked for us, too. [laughter] Bob Brown sat down with A&P, and he said, they said, “Now, Mr. Brown, what would you advise us to do.” He said, “I would advise you to take Sealtest products off of all of your counters.” A&P agreed next day not only to take Sealtest products off of the counters in the ghetto, but off of the counters of every A&P store in Cleveland, and they said to Sealtest, “If you don’t reach an agreement with SCLC and Operation Breadbasket, we will take Sealtest products off of every A&P store in the state of Ohio.”
The next day [applause], the next day the Sealtest people were talking nice [laughter], they were very humble. And I am proud to say that I went to Cleveland just last Tuesday, and I sat down with the Sealtest people and some seventy ministers from Cleveland, and we signed the agreement. This effort resulted in a number of jobs, which will bring almost five hundred thousand dollars of new income to the Negro community a year. [applause] We also said to Sealtest, “The problem that we face is that the ghetto is a domestic colony that’s constantly drained without being replenished. And you are always telling us to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps, and yet we are being robbed every day. Put something back in the ghetto.” So along with our demand for jobs, we said, “We also demand that you put money in the Negro savings and loan association and that you take ads, advertise, in the Cleveland Call & Post, the Negro newspaper.” So along with the new jobs, Sealtest has now deposited thousands of dollars in the Negro bank of Cleveland and has already started taking ads in the Negro newspaper in that city. This is the power of Operation Breadbasket. [applause]
Now, for fear that you may feel that it’s limited to Chicago and Cleveland, let me say to you that we’ve gotten even more than that. In Atlanta, Georgia, Breadbasket has been equally successful in the South. Here the emphasis has been divided between governmental employment and private industry. And while I do not have time to go into the details, I want to commend the men who have been working with it here: the Reverend Bennett, the Reverend Joe Boone, the Reverend J. C. Ward, Reverend Dorsey, Reverend Greer, and I could go on down the line, and they have stood up along with all of the other ministers. But here is the story that’s not printed in the newspapers in Atlanta: as a result of Operation Breadbasket, over the last three years, we have added about twenty-five million dollars of new income to the Negro community every year. [applause]
Now as you know, Operation Breadbasket has now gone national in the sense that we had a national conference in Chicago and agreed to launch a nationwide program, which you will hear more about.
Finally, SCLC has entered the field of housing. Under the leadership of attorney James Robinson, we have already contracted to build 152 units of low-income housing with apartments for the elderly on a choice downtown Atlanta site under the sponsorship of Ebenezer Baptist Church. This is the first project [applause], this is the first project of a proposed southwide Housing Development Corporation which we hope to develop in conjunction with SCLC, and through this corporation we hope to build housing from Mississippi to North Carolina using Negro workmen, Negro architects, Negro attorneys, and Negro financial institutions throughout. And it is our feeling that in the next two or three years, we can build right here in the South forty million dollars worth of new housing for Negroes, and with millions and millions of dollars in income coming to the Negro community. [applause]
Now there are many other things that I could tell you, but time is passing. This, in short, is an account of SCLC’s work over the last year. It is a record of which we can all be proud.
With all the struggle and all the achievements, we must face the fact, however, that the Negro still lives in the basement of the Great Society. He is still at the bottom, despite the few who have penetrated to slightly higher levels. Even where the door has been forced partially open, mobility for the Negro is still sharply restricted. There is often no bottom at which to start, and when there is there’s almost no room at the top. In consequence, Negroes are still impoverished aliens in an affluent society. They are too poor even to rise with the society, too impoverished by the ages to be able to ascend by using their own resources. And the Negro did not do this himself; it was done to him. For more than half of his American history, he was enslaved. Yet, he built the spanning bridges and the grand mansions, the sturdy docks and stout factories of the South. His unpaid labor made cotton “King” and established America as a significant nation in international commerce. Even after his release from chattel slavery, the nation grew over him, submerging him. It became the richest, most powerful society in the history of man, but it left the Negro far behind.
And so we still have a long, long way to go before we reach the promised land of freedom. Yes, we have left the dusty soils of Egypt, and we have crossed a Red Sea that had for years been hardened by a long and piercing winter of massive resistance, but before we reach the majestic shores of the promised land, there will still be gigantic mountains of opposition ahead and prodigious hilltops of injustice. (Yes, That’s right) We still need some Paul Revere of conscience to alert every hamlet and every village of America that revolution is still at hand. Yes, we need a chart; we need a compass; indeed, we need some North Star to guide us into a future shrouded with impenetrable uncertainties.
Now, in order to answer the question, “Where do we go from here?” which is our theme, we must first honestly recognize where we are now. When the Constitution was written, a strange formula to determine taxes and representation declared that the Negro was sixty percent of a person. Today another curious formula seems to declare he is fifty percent of a person. Of the good things in life, the Negro has approximately one half those of whites. Of the bad things of life, he has twice those of whites. Thus, half of all Negroes live in substandard housing. And Negroes have half the income of whites. When we turn to the negative experiences of life, the Negro has a double share: There are twice as many unemployed; the rate of infant mortality among Negroes is double that of whites; and there are twice as many Negroes dying in Vietnam as whites in proportion to their size in the population. (Yes) [applause]
In other spheres, the figures are equally alarming. In elementary schools, Negroes lag one to three years behind whites, and their segregated schools (Yeah) receive substantially less money per student than the white schools. (Those schools) One-twentieth as many Negroes as whites attend college. Of employed Negroes, seventy-five percent hold menial jobs. This is where we are.
Where do we go from here? First, we must massively assert our dignity and worth. We must stand up amid a system that still oppresses us and develop an unassailable and majestic sense of values. We must no longer be ashamed of being black. (All right) The job of arousing manhood within a people that have been taught for so many centuries that they are nobody is not easy.
Even semantics have conspired to make that which is black seem ugly and degrading. (Yes) In Roget’s Thesaurusthere are some 120 synonyms for blackness and at least sixty of them are offensive, such words as blot, soot, grim, devil, and foul. And there are some 134 synonyms for whiteness and all are favorable, expressed in such words as purity, cleanliness, chastity, and innocence. A white lie is better than a black lie. (Yes) The most degenerate member of a family is the “black sheep.” (Yes) Ossie Davis has suggested that maybe the English language should be reconstructed so that teachers will not be forced to teach the Negro child sixty ways to despise himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of inferiority, and the white child 134 ways to adore himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of superiority. [applause] The tendency to ignore the Negro’s contribution to American life and strip him of his personhood is as old as the earliest history books and as contemporary as the morning’s newspaper. (Yes)
To offset this cultural homicide, the Negro must rise up with an affirmation of his own Olympian manhood. (Yes) Any movement for the Negro’s freedom that overlooks this necessity is only waiting to be buried. (Yes) As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free. (Yes) Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery. No Lincolnian Emancipation Proclamation, no Johnsonian civil rights bill can totally bring this kind of freedom. The Negro will only be free when he reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and signs with the pen and ink of assertive manhood his own emancipation proclamation. And with a spirit straining toward true self-esteem, the Negro must boldly throw off the manacles of self-abnegation and say to himself and to the world, “I am somebody. (Oh yeah) I am a person. I am a man with dignity and honor. (Go ahead) I have a rich and noble history, however painful and exploited that history has been. Yes, I was a slave through my foreparents (That’s right), and now I’m not ashamed of that. I’m ashamed of the people who were so sinful to make me a slave.” (Yes sir) Yes [applause], yes, we must stand up and say, “I’m black (Yes sir), but I’m black and beautiful.” (Yes) This [applause], this self-affirmation is the black man’s need, made compelling (All right) by the white man’s crimes against him. (Yes)
Now another basic challenge is to discover how to organize our strength in to economic and political power. Now no one can deny that the Negro is in dire need of this kind of legitimate power. Indeed, one of the great problems that the Negro confronts is his lack of power. From the old plantations of the South to the newer ghettos of the North, the Negro has been confined to a life of voicelessness (That’s true) and powerlessness. (So true) Stripped of the right to make decisions concerning his life and destiny he has been subject to the authoritarian and sometimes whimsical decisions of the white power structure. The plantation and the ghetto were created by those who had power, both to confine those who had no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness. Now the problem of transforming the ghetto, therefore, is a problem of power, a confrontation between the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to the preserving of the status quo. Now, power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, and economic change. Walter Reuther defined power one day. He said, “Power is the ability of a labor union like UAW to make the most powerful corporation in the world, General Motors, say, ‘Yes’ when it wants to say ‘No.’ That’s power.” [applause]
Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often we have problems with power. But there is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly.
You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. It was this misinterpretation that caused the philosopher Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love.
Now, we got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. (Yes) Power at its best [applause], power at its best is love (Yes) implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. (Speak) And this is what we must see as we move on.
Now what has happened is that we’ve had it wrong and mixed up in our country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral suasion devoid of power, and white Americans to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience. It is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times. (Yes)
Now we must develop progress, or rather, a program—and I can’t stay on this long—that will drive the nation to a guaranteed annual income. Now, early in the century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual’s abilities and talents. And in the thinking of that day, the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber. We’ve come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed, I hope, from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty.
The problem indicates that our emphasis must be twofold: We must create full employment, or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position, we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available. In 1879 Henry George anticipated this state of affairs when he wrote in Progress and Poverty:
The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves driven to their tasks either by the, that of a taskmaster or by animal necessities. It is the work of men who somehow find a form of work that brings a security for its own sake and a state of society where want is abolished.
Work of this sort could be enormously increased, and we are likely to find that the problem of housing, education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor, transformed into purchasers, will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay. Negroes, who have a double disability, will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.
Beyond these advantages, a host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows that he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife, and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated.
Now, our country can do this. John Kenneth Galbraith said that a guaranteed annual income could be done for about twenty billion dollars a year. And I say to you today, that if our nation can spend thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet right here on earth. [applause]
Now, let me rush on to say we must reaffirm our commitment to nonviolence. And I want to stress this. The futility of violence in the struggle for racial justice has been tragically etched in all the recent Negro riots. Now, yesterday, I tried to analyze the riots and deal with the causes for them. Today I want to give the other side. There is something painfully sad about a riot. One sees screaming youngsters and angry adults fighting hopelessly and aimlessly against impossible odds. (Yeah) And deep down within them, you perceive a desire for self-destruction, a kind of suicidal longing. (Yes)
Occasionally, Negroes contend that the 1965 Watts riot and the other riots in various cities represented effective civil rights action. But those who express this view always end up with stumbling words when asked what concrete gains have been won as a result. At best, the riots have produced a little additional anti-poverty money allotted by frightened government officials and a few water sprinklers to cool the children of the ghettos. It is something like improving the food in the prison while the people remain securely incarcerated behind bars. (That’s right) Nowhere have the riots won any concrete improvement such as have the organized protest demonstrations.
And when one tries to pin down advocates of violence as to what acts would be effective, the answers are blatantly illogical. Sometimes they talk of overthrowing racist state and local governments and they talk about guerrilla warfare. They fail to see that no internal revolution has ever succeeded in overthrowing a government by violence unless the government had already lost the allegiance and effective control of its armed forces. Anyone in his right mind knows that this will not happen in the United States. In a violent racial situation, the power structure has the local police, the state troopers, the National Guard, and finally, the army to call on, all of which are predominantly white. (Yes) Furthermore, few, if any, violent revolutions have been successful unless the violent minority had the sympathy and support of the non-resisting majority. Castro may have had only a few Cubans actually fighting with him and up in the hills (Yes), but he would have never overthrown the Batista regime unless he had had the sympathy of the vast majority of Cuban people. It is perfectly clear that a violent revolution on the part of American blacks would find no sympathy and support from the white population and very little from the majority of the Negroes themselves.
This is no time for romantic illusions and empty philosophical debates about freedom. This is a time for action. (All right) What is needed is a strategy for change, a tactical program that will bring the Negro into the mainstream of American life as quickly as possible. So far, this has only been offered by the nonviolent movement. Without recognizing this we will end up with solutions that don’t solve, answers that don’t answer, and explanations that don’t explain. [applause]
And so I say to you today that I still stand by nonviolence. (Yes) And I am still convinced [applause], and I’m still convinced that it is the most potent weapon available to the Negro in his struggle for justice in this country.
And the other thing is, I’m concerned about a better world. I’m concerned about justice; I’m concerned about brotherhood; I’m concerned about truth. (That’s right) And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can’t murder murder. (Yes) Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can’t establish truth. (That’s right) Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate through violence. (All right, That’s right) Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that. [applause]
And I say to you, I have also decided to stick with love, for I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind’s problems. (Yes) And I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some circles today. (No) And I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love; I’m talking about a strong, demanding love. (Yes) For I have seen too much hate. (Yes) I’ve seen too much hate on the faces of sheriffs in the South. (Yeah) I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many Klansmen and too many White Citizens Councilors in the South to want to hate, myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities, and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. (Yes, That’s right) I have decided to love. [applause] If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love. And the beautiful thing is that we aren’t moving wrong when we do it, because John was right, God is love. (Yes) He who hates does not know God, but he who loves has the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality.
And so I say to you today, my friends, that you may be able to speak with the tongues of men and angels (All right); you may have the eloquence of articulate speech; but if you have not love, it means nothing. (That’s right) Yes, you may have the gift of prophecy; you may have the gift of scientific prediction (Yes sir) and understand the behavior of molecules (All right); you may break into the storehouse of nature (Yes sir) and bring forth many new insights; yes, you may ascend to the heights of academic achievement (Yes sir) so that you have all knowledge (Yes sir, Yes); and you may boast of your great institutions of learning and the boundless extent of your degrees; but if you have not love, all of these mean absolutely nothing. (Yes) You may even give your goods to feed the poor (Yes sir); you may bestow great gifts to charity (Speak); and you may tower high in philanthropy; but if you have not love, your charity means nothing. (Yes sir) You may even give your body to be burned and die the death of a martyr, and your spilt blood may be a symbol of honor for generations yet unborn, and thousands may praise you as one of history’s greatest heroes; but if you have not love (Yes, All right), your blood was spilt in vain. What I’m trying to get you to see this morning is that a man may be self-centered in his self-denial and self-righteous in his self-sacrifice. His generosity may feed his ego, and his piety may feed his pride. (Speak) So without love, benevolence becomes egotism, and martyrdom becomes spiritual pride.
I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about “Where do we go from here?” that we must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. (Yes) There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. (Yes) And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. (Yes) But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. (All right) It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, “Who owns the oil?” (Yes) You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?” (Yes) You begin to ask the question, “Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that’s two-thirds water?” (All right) These are words that must be said. (All right)
Now, don’t think you have me in a bind today. I’m not talking about communism. What I’m talking about is far beyond communism. (Yeah) My inspiration didn’t come from Karl Marx (Speak); my inspiration didn’t come from Engels; my inspiration didn’t come from Trotsky; my inspiration didn’t come from Lenin. Yes, I read Communist Manifesto andDas Kapital a long time ago (Well), and I saw that maybe Marx didn’t follow Hegel enough. (All right) He took his dialectics, but he left out his idealism and his spiritualism. And he went over to a German philosopher by the name of Feuerbach, and took his materialism and made it into a system that he called “dialectical materialism.” (Speak) I have to reject that.
What I’m saying to you this morning is communism forgets that life is individual. (Yes) Capitalism forgets that life is social. (Yes, Go ahead) And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. (Speak) [applause] It is found in a higher synthesis (Come on) that combines the truths of both. (Yes) Now, when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. (All right) These are the triple evils that are interrelated.
And if you will let me be a preacher just a little bit. (Speak) One day [applause], one night, a juror came to Jesus (Yes sir) and he wanted to know what he could do to be saved. (Yeah) Jesus didn’t get bogged down on the kind of isolated approach of what you shouldn’t do. Jesus didn’t say, “Now Nicodemus, you must stop lying.” (Oh yeah) He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, now you must not commit adultery.” He didn’t say, “Now Nicodemus, you must stop cheating if you are doing that.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, you must stop drinking liquor if you are doing that excessively.” He said something altogether different, because Jesus realized something basic (Yes): that if a man will lie, he will steal. (Yes) And if a man will steal, he will kill. (Yes) So instead of just getting bogged down on one thing, Jesus looked at him and said, “Nicodemus, you must be born again.” [applause]
In other words, “Your whole structure (Yes) must be changed.” [applause] A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them and make them things. (Speak) And therefore, they will exploit them and poor people generally economically. (Yes) And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and it will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. (Yes) [applause]
What I’m saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, “America, you must be born again!” [applause] (Oh yes)
And so, I conclude by saying today that we have a task, and let us go out with a divine dissatisfaction. (Yes)
Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. (All right)
Let us be dissatisfied (Yes) until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice. (Yes sir)
Let us be dissatisfied (Yes) until those who live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security.
Let us be dissatisfied (Yes) until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history (Yes), and every family will live in a decent, sanitary home.
Let us be dissatisfied (Yes) until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be transformed into bright tomorrows of quality integrated education.
Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity.
Let us be dissatisfied (All right) until men and women, however black they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not on the basis of the color of their skin. (Yeah) Let us be dissatisfied. [applause]
Let us be dissatisfied (Well) until every state capitol (Yes) will be housed by a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy, and who will walk humbly with his God.
Let us be dissatisfied [applause] until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. (Yes)
Let us be dissatisfied (Yes) until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together (Yes), and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid.
Let us be dissatisfied (Yes), and men will recognize that out of one blood (Yes) God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. (Speak sir)
Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout, “White Power!” when nobody will shout, “Black Power!” but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power. [applause]
And I must confess, my friends (Yes sir), that the road ahead will not always be smooth. (Yes) There will still be rocky places of frustration (Yes) and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. (Yes) And there will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. (Well) Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. (Yes) We may again, with tear-drenched eyes, have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs. (Well) But difficult and painful as it is (Well), we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future. (Well) And as we continue our charted course, we may gain consolation from the words so nobly left by that great black bard, who was also a great freedom fighter of yesterday, James Weldon Johnson:
Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod, felt in the days when hope unborn had died. 
Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet come to the place for which our fathers sighed? We have come over a way that with tears has been watered. We have come treading our paths through the blood of the slaughtered.
Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last where the bright gleam of our bright star is cast.
Let this affirmation be our ringing cry. (Well) It will give us the courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. (Yes) When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair (Well), and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights (Well), let us remember (Yes) that there is a creative force in this universe working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil (Well), a power that is able to make a way out of no way (Yes) and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. (Speak)
Let us realize that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Let us realize that William Cullen Bryant is right: “Truth, crushed to earth, will rise again.” Let us go out realizing that the Bible is right: “Be not deceived. God is not mocked. (Oh yeah) Whatsoever a man soweth (Yes), that (Yes) shall he also reap.” This is our hope for the future, and with this faith we will be able to sing in some not too distant tomorrow, with a cosmic past tense, “We have overcome! (Yes) We have overcome! Deep in my heart, I did believe (Yes) we would overcome.” [applause]
Khamisi
Khamisi

“Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases” by Ida B. Wells

Wells first published a version this speech on June 25, 1892, in the New York Age. She delivered this speech at Lyric Hall in New York City on October 5, 1892, and published the speech as a pamphlet on Oct. 26, 1892. She delivered a similar speech twice in February 1893, at the Tremont Temple in Boston, Massachusetts, and by invitation of Frederick Douglass at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, Washington, D.C.
Preface
The greater part of what is contained in these pages was published in the New York Age June 25, 1892, in explanation of the editorial which the Memphis whites considered sufficiently infamous to justify the destruction of my paper, the Free Speech.
Since the appearance of that statement, requests have come from all parts of the country that “Exiled” (the name under which it then appeared) be issued in pamphlet form. Some donations were made, but not enough for that purpose. The noble effort of the ladies of New York and Brooklyn Oct. 5 have enabled me to comply with this request and give the world a true, unvarnished account of the causes of lynch law in the South.
This statement is not a shield for the despoiler of virtue, nor altogether a defense for the poor blind Afro-American Sampsons who suffer themselves to be betrayed by white Delilahs. It is a contribution to truth, an array of facts, the perusal of which it is hoped will stimulate this great American Republic to demand that justice be done though the heavens fall.
It is with no pleasure I have dipped my hands in the corruption here exposed. Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so. The awful death-roll that Judge Lynch is calling every week is appalling, not only because of the lives it takes, the rank cruelty and outrage to the victims, but because of the prejudice it fosters and the stain it places against the good name of a weak race.
The Afro-American is not a bestial race. If this work can contribute in any way toward proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service. Other considerations are of minor importance.
Ida B. Wells
New York City, Oct. 26, 1892
To the Afro-American women of New York and Brooklyn, whose race love, earnest zeal and unselfish effort at Lyric Hall, in the City of New York, on the night of October 5, 1892—made possible its publication, this pamphlet is gratefully dedicated by the author.
Hon. Fred. Douglass's Letter
Dear Miss Wells:
Let me give you thanks for your faithful paper on the lynch abomination now generally practiced against colored people in the South. There has been no word equal to it in convincing power. I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison. You give us what you know and testify from actual knowledge. You have dealt with the facts with cool, painstaking fidelity and left those naked and uncontradicted facts to speak for themselves.
Brave woman! you have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured. If American conscience were only half alive, if the American church and clergy were only half christianized, if American moral sensibility were not hardened by persistent infliction of outrage and crime against colored people, a scream of horror, shame and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read.
But alas! even crime has power to reproduce itself and create conditions favorable to its own existence. It sometimes seems we are deserted by earth and Heaven yet we must still think, speak and work, and trust in the power of a merciful God for final deliverance.
Very truly and gratefully yours,
Frederick Douglass
Cedar Hill, Anacostia, D.C., Oct. 25, 1892
The Offense
Wednesday evening May 24, 1892, the city of Memphis was filled with excitement. Editorials in the daily papers of that date caused a meeting to be held in the Cotton Exchange Building; a committee was sent for the editors of the Free Speech an Afro-American journal published in that city, and the only reason the open threats of lynching that were made were not carried out was because they could not be found. The cause of all this commotion was the following editorial published in the Free Speech May 21, 1892, the Saturday previous.
The Daily Commercial of Wednesday following, May 25, contained the following leader:
The Evening Scimitar of same date, copied the Commercial’s editorial with these words of comment:
Acting upon this advice, the leading citizens met in the Cotton Exchange Building the same evening, and threats of lynching were freely indulged, not by the lawless element upon which the deviltry of the South is usually saddled—but by the leading business men, in their leading business centre. Mr. Fleming, the business manager and owning a half interest the Free Speech, had to leave town to escape the mob, and was afterwards ordered not to return; letters and telegrams sent me in New York where I was spending my vacation advised me that bodily harm awaited my return. Creditors took possession of the office and sold the outfit, and the Free Speech was as if it had never been.
The editorial in question was prompted by the many inhuman and fiendish lynchings of Afro-Americans which have recently taken place and was meant as a warning. Eight lynched in one week and five of them charged with rape! The thinking public will not easily believe freedom and education more brutalizing than slavery, and the world knows that the crime of rape was unknown during four years of civil war, when the white women of the South were at the mercy of the race which is all at once charged with being a bestial one.
Since my business has been destroyed and I am an exile from home because of that editorial, the issue has been forced, and as the writer of it I feel that the race and the public generally should have a statement of the facts as they exist. They will serve at the same time as a defense for the Afro-Americans Sampsons who suffer themselves to be betrayed by white Delilahs.
The whites of Montgomery, Ala., knew J.C. Duke sounded the keynote of the situation—which they would gladly hide from the world, when he said in his paper, the Herald, five years ago: “Why is it that white women attract negro men now more than in former days? There was a time when such a thing was unheard of. There is a secret to this thing, and we greatly suspect it is the growing appreciation of white Juliets for colored Romeos.” Mr. Duke, like the Free Speech proprietors, was forced to leave the city for reflecting on the “honah” of white women and his paper suppressed; but the truth remains that Afro-American men do not always rape(?) white women without their consent.
Mr. Duke, before leaving Montgomery, signed a card disclaiming any intention of slandering Southern white women. The editor of the Free Speech has no disclaimer to enter, but asserts instead that there are many white women in the South who would marry colored men if such an act would not place them at once beyond the pale of society and within the clutches of the law. The miscegnation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races; they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women. White men lynch the offending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women.
The Black and White of It
The Cleveland Gazette of January 16, 1892, publishes a case in point. Mrs. J.S. Underwood, the wife of a minister of Elyria, Ohio, accused an Afro-American of rape. She told her husband that during his absence in 1888, stumping the State for the Prohibition Party, the man came to the kitchen door, forced his way in the house and insulted her. She tried to drive him out with a heavy poker, but he overpowered and chloroformed her, and when she revived her clothing was torn and she was in a horrible condition. She did not know the man but could identify him. She pointed out William Offett, a married man, who was arrested and, being in Ohio, was granted a trial.
The prisoner vehemently denied the charge of rape, but confessed he went to Mrs. Underwood’s residence at her invitation and was criminally intimate with her at her request. This availed him nothing against the sworn testimony of a ministers wife, a lady of the highest respectability. He was found guilty, and entered the penitentiary, December 14, 1888, for fifteen years. Some time afterwards the woman’s remorse led her to confess to her husband that the man was innocent.
These are her words:
When asked by her husband why she told him she had been outraged, she said: “I had several reasons for telling you. One was the neighbors saw the fellows here, another was, I was afraid I had contracted a loathsome disease, and still another was that I feared I might give birth to a Negro baby. I hoped to save my reputation by telling you a deliberate lie.” Her husband horrified by the confession had Offett, who had already served four years, released and secured a divorce.
There are thousands of such cases throughout the South, with the difference that the Southern white men in insatiate fury wreak their vengeance without intervention of law upon the Afro-Americans who consort with their women. A few instances to substantiate the assertion that some white women love the company of the Afro-American will not be out of place. Most of these cases were reported by the daily papers of the South.
In the winter of 1885-86 the wife of a practicing physician in Memphis, in good social standing whose name has escaped me, left home, husband and children, and ran away with her black coachman. She was with him a month before her husband found and brought her home. The coachman could not be found. The doctor moved his family away from Memphis, and is living in another city under an assumed name.
In the same city last year a white girl in the dusk of evening screamed at the approach of some parties that a Negro had assaulted her on the street. He was captured, tried by a white judge and jury, that acquitted him of the charge. It is needless to add if there had been a scrap of evidence on which to convict him of so grave a charge he would have been convicted.
Sarah Clark of Memphis loved a black man and lived openly with him. When she was indicted last spring for miscegenation, she swore in court that she was not a white woman. This she did to escape the penitentiary and continued her illicit relation undisturbed. That she is of the lower class of whites, does not disturb the fact that she is a white woman. “The leading citizens” of Memphis are defending the “honor” of all white women, demi-monde included.
Since the manager of the Free Speech has been run away from Memphis by the guardians of the honor of Southern white women, a young girl living on Poplar St., who was discovered in intimate relations with a handsome mulatto young colored man, Will Morgan by name, stole her father’s money to send the young fellow away from that father’s wrath. She has since joined him in Chicago.
The Memphis Ledger for June 8 has the following:
Note the wording. “The truth might reveal fearful depravity or rank outrage.” If it had been a white child or Lillie Bailey had told a pitiful story of Negro outrage, it would have been a case of woman’s weakness or assault and she could have remained at the Woman’s Refuge. But a Negro child and to withhold its father’s name and thus prevent the killing of another Negro “rapist.” A case of “fearful depravity.”
The very week the “leading citizens” of Memphis were making a spectacle of themselves in defense of all white women of every kind, an Afro-American, M. Stricklin, was found in a white woman’s room in that city. Although she made no outcry of rape, he was jailed and would have been lynched, but the woman stated she bought curtains of him (he was a furniture dealer) and his business in her room that night was to put them up. A white woman’s word was taken as absolutely in this case as when the cry of rape is made, and he was freed.
What is true of Memphis is true of the entire South. The daily papers last year reported a farmer’s wife in Alabama had given birth to a Negro child. When the Negro farm hand who was plowing in the field heard it he took the mule from the plow and fled. The dispatches also told of a woman in South Carolina who gave birth to a Negro child and charged three men with being its father, every one of whom has since disappeared. In Tuscumbia, Ala., the colored boy who was lynched there last year for assaulting a white girl told her before his accusers that he had met her there in the woods often before.
Frank Weems of Chattanooga who was not lynched in May only because the prominent citizens became his body guard until the doors of the penitentiary closed on him, had letters in his pocket from the white woman in the case, making the appointment with him. Edward Coy who was burned alive in Texarkana, January 1, 1892, died protesting his innocence. Investigation since as given by the Bystander in the Chicago Inter Ocean, October 1, proves:
In Natchez, Miss., Mrs. Marshall, one of the creme de la creme of the city, created a tremendous sensation several years ago. She has a black coachman who was married, and had been in her employ several years. During this time she gave birth to a child whose color was remarked, but traced to some brunette ancestor, and one of the fashionable dames of the city was its godmother. Mrs. Marshall’s social position was unquestioned, and wealth showered every dainty on this child which was idolized with its brothers and sisters by its white papa. In course of time another child appeared on the scene, but it was unmistakably dark. All were alarmed, and “rush of blood, strangulation” were the conjectures, but the doctor, when asked the cause, grimly told them it was a Negro child. There was a family conclave, the coachman heard of it and leaving his own family went West, and has never returned. As soon as Mrs. Marshall was able to travel she was sent away in deep disgrace. Her husband died within the year of a broken heart.
Ebenzer Fowler, the wealthiest colored man in Issaquena County, Miss., was shot down on the street in Mayersville, January 30, 1885, just before dark by an armed body of white men who filled his body with bullets. They charged him with writing a note to a white woman of the place, which they intercepted and which proved there was an intimacy existing between them.
Hundreds of such cases might be cited, but enough have been given to prove the assertion that there are white women in the South who love the Afro-American’s company even as there are white men notorious for their preference for Afro-American women.
There is hardly a town in the South which has not an instance of the kind which is well known, and hence the assertion is reiterated that “nobody in the South believes the old thread bare lie that negro men rape white women.” Hence there is a growing demand among Afro-Americans that the guilt or innocence of parties accused of rape be fully established. They know the men of the section of the country who refuse this are not so desirous of punishing rapists as they pretend. The utterances of the leading white men show that with them it is not the crime but the class. Bishop Fitzgerald has become apologist for lynchers of the rapists of white women only. Governor Tillman, of South Carolina, in the month of June, standing under the tree in Barnwell, S.C., on which eight Afro-Americans were hung last year, declared that he would lead a mob to lynch a negro who raped a white woman. So say the pulpits, officials and newspapers of the South. But when the victim is a colored woman it is different.
Last winter in Baltimore, Md., three white ruffians assaulted a Miss Camphor, a young Afro-American girl, while out walking with a young man of her own race. They held her escort and outraged the girl. It was a deed dastardly enough to arouse Southern blood, which gives its horror of rape as excuse for lawlessness, but she was an Afro-American. The case went to the courts, an Afro-American lawyer defended the men and they were acquitted.
In Nashville, Tenn., there is a white man, Pat Hanifan, who outraged a little Afro-American girl, and, from the physical injuries received, she has been ruined for life. He was jailed for six months, discharged, and is now a detective in that city. In the same city, last May, a white man outraged an Afro-American girl in a drug store. He was arrested, and released on bail at the trial. It was rumored that five hundred Afro-Americans had organized to lynch him. Two hundred and fifty white citizens armed themselves with Winchesters and guarded him. A cannon was placed in front of his home, and the Buchanan Rifles (State Militia) ordered to the scene for his protection. The Afro-American mob did not materialize. Only two weeks before Eph. Grizzard, who had only been charged with rape upon a white woman, had been taken from the jail, with Governor Buchanan and the police and militia standing by, dragged through the streets in broad daylight, knives plunged into him at every step, and with every fiendish cruelty a frenzied mob could devise, he was at last swung out on the bridge with hands cut to pieces as he tried to climb up the stanchions. A naked, bloody example of the blood-thirstiness of the nineteenth-century civilization of the Athens of the South! No cannon or military was called out in his defense. He dared to visit a white woman.
At the very moment these civilized whites were announcing their determination “to protect their wives and daughters,” by murdering Grizzard, a white man was in the same jail for raping eight-year-old Maggie Reese, an Afro-American girl. He was not harmed. The “honor” of grown women who were glad enough to be supported by the Grizzard boys and Ed Coy, as long as the liaison was not known, needed protection; they were white. The outrage upon helpless childhood needed no avenging in this case; she was black.
A white man in Guthrie, Oklahoma Territory, two months ago inflicted such injuries upon another Afro-American child that she died. He was not punished, but an attempt was made in the same town in the month of June to lynch an Afro-American who visited a white woman.
In Memphis, Tenn., in the month of June, Ellerton L. Dorr, who is the husband of Russell Hancock’s widow, was arrested for attempted rape on Mattie Cole, a neighbors cook; he was only prevented from accomplishing his purpose, by the appearance of Mattie’s employer. Dorr’s friends say he was drunk and not responsible for his actions. The grand jury refused to indict him and he was discharged.
The New Cry
The appeal of Southern whites to Northern sympathy and sanction, the adroit, insiduous plea made by Bishop Fitzgerald for suspension of judgment because those “who condemn lynching express no sympathy for the white woman in the case,” falls to the ground in the light of the foregoing.
From this exposition of the race issue in lynch law, the whole matter is explained by the well-known opposition growing out of slavery to the progress of the race. This is crystalized in the oft-repeated slogan: “This is a white man’s country and the white man must rule.” The South resented giving the Afro-American his freedom, the ballot box and the Civil Rights Law. The raids of the Ku-Klux and White Liners to subvert reconstruction government, the Hamburg and Ellerton, S.C., the Copiah County, Miss., and the Layfayette Parish, La., massacres were excused as the natural resentment of intelligence against government by ignorance.
Honest white men practically conceded the necessity of intelligence murdering ignorance to correct the mistake of the general government, and the race was left to the tender mercies of the solid South. Thoughtful Afro-Americans with the strong arm of the government withdrawn and with the hope to stop such wholesale massacres urged the race to sacrifice its political rights for sake of peace. They honestly believed the race should fit itself for government, and when that should be done, the objection to race participation in politics would be removed.
But the sacrifice did not remove the trouble, nor move the South to justice. One by one the Southern States have legally(?) disfranchised the Afro-American, and since the repeal of the Civil Rights Bill nearly every Southern State has passed separate car laws with a penalty against their infringement. The race regardless of advancement is penned into filthy, stifling partitions cut off from smoking cars. All this while, although the political cause has been removed, the butcheries of black men at Barnwell, S.C., Carrolton, Miss., Waycross, Ga., and Memphis, Tenn., have gone on; also the flaying alive of a man in Kentucky, the burning of one in Arkansas, the hanging of a fifteen-year-old girl in Louisiana, a woman in Jackson, Tenn., and one in Hollendale, Miss., until the dark and bloody record of the South shows 728 Afro-Americans lynched during the past eight years. Not fifty of these were for political causes; the rest were for all manner of accusations from that of rape of white women, to the case of the boy Will Lewis who was hanged at Tullahoma, Tenn., last year for being drunk and “sassy” to white folks.
These statistics compiled by the Chicago Tribune were given the first of this year (1892). Since then, not less than one hundred and fifty have been known to have met violent death at the hands of cruel bloodthirsty mobs during the past nine months.
To palliate this record (which grows worse as the Afro-American becomes intelligent) and excuse some of the most heinous crimes that ever stained the history of a country, the South is shielding itself behind the plausible screen of defending the honor of its women. This, too, in the face of the fact that only one-third of the 728 victims to mobs have been charged with rape, to say nothing of those of that one-third who were innocent of the charge. A white correspondent of the Baltimore Sun declares that the Afro-American who was lynched in Chestertown, Md., in May for assault on a white girl was innocent; that the deed was done by a white man who had since disappeared. The girl herself maintained that her assailant was a white man. When that poor Afro-American was murdered, the whites excused their refusal of a trial on the ground that they wished to spare the white girl the mortification of having to testify in court.
This cry has had its effect. It has closed the heart, stifled the conscience, warped the judgment and hushed the voice of press and pulpit on the subject of lynch law throughout this “land of liberty.” Men who stand high in the esteem of the public for Christian character, for moral and physical courage, for devotion to the principles of equal and exact justice to all, and for great sagacity, stand as cowards who fear to open their mouths before this great outrage. They do not see that by their tacit encouragement, their silent acquiescence, the black shadow of lawlessness in the form of lynch law is spreading its wings over the whole country.
Men who, like Governor Tillman, start the ball of lynch law rolling for a certain crime, are powerless to stop it when drunken or criminal white toughs feel like hanging an Afro-American on any pretext.
Even to the better class of Afro-Americans the crime of rape is so revolting they have too often taken the white man’s word and given lynch law neither the investigation nor condemnation it deserved.
They forget that a concession of the right to lynch a man for a certain crime, not only concedes the right to lynch any person for any crime, but (so frequently is the cry of rape now raised) it is in a fair way to stamp us a race of rapists and desperadoes. They have gone on hoping and believing that general education and financial strength would solve the difficulty, and are devoting their energies to the accumulation of both.
The mob spirit has grown with the increasing intelligence of the Afro-American. It has left the out-of-the-way places where ignorance prevails, has thrown off the mask and with this new cry stalks in broad daylight in large cities, the centers of civilization, and is encouraged by the “leading citizens” and the press.
The Malicious and Untruthful White Press
The Daily Commercial and Evening Scimitar of Memphis, Tenn., are owned by leading business men of that city, and yet, in spite of the fact that there had been no white woman in Memphis outraged by an Afro-American, and that Memphis possessed a thrifty law-abiding, property-owning class of Afro-Americans the Commercial of May 17, under the head of “More Rapes, More Lynchings” gave utterance to the following:
In its issue of June 4, the Memphis Evening Scimitar gives the following excuse for lynch law:
The Negro tough, on the contrary, is given to just that kind of offending, and he almost invariably singles out white people as his victims.
On March 9, 1892, there were lynched in this same city three of the best specimens of young since-the-war Afro-American manhood. They were peaceful, law-abiding citizens and energetic business men.
They believed the problem was to be solved by eschewing politics and putting money in the purse. They owned a flourishing grocery business in a thickly populated suburb of Memphis, and a white man named Barrett had one on the opposite corner. After a personal difficulty which Barrett sought by going into the “People’s Grocery” drawing a pistol and was thrashed by Calvin McDowell, he (Barrett) threatened to “clean them out.” These men were a mile beyond the city limits and police protection; hearing that Barrett’s crowd was coming to attack them Saturday night, they mustered forces, and prepared to defend themselves against the attack.
When Barrett came he led a posse of officers, twelve in number, who afterward claimed to be hunting a man for whom they had a warrant. That twelve men in citizen’s clothes should think it necessary to go in the night to hunt one man who had never before been arrested, or made any record as a criminal has never been explained. When they entered the back door the young men thought the threatened attack was on, and fired into them. Three of the officers were wounded, and when the defending party found it was officers of the law upon whom they had fired, they ceased and got away.
Thirty-one men were arrested and thrown in jail as “conspirators,” although they all declared more than once they did not know they were firing on officers. Excitement was at fever beat until the morning papers, two days after, announced that the wounded deputy sheriffs were out of danger. This hindered rather than helped the plans of the whites. There was no law on the statute books which would execute an Afro-American for wounding a white man, but the “unwritten law” did. Three of these men, the president, the manager and clerk of the grocery—”the leaders of the conspiracy”—were secretly taken from jail and lynched in a shockingly brutal manner. “The Negroes are getting too independent,” they say, “we must teach them a lesson.”
What lesson? The lesson of subordination. “Kill the leaders and it will cow the Negro who dares to shoot a white man, even in self-defense.”
Although the race was wild over the outrage, the mockery of law and justice which disarmed men and locked them up in jails where they could be easily and safely reached by the mob—- the Afro-American ministers, newspapers and leaders counselled obedience to the law which did not protect them.
Their counsel was heeded and not a hand was uplifted to resent the outrage; following the advice of the Free Speech, people left the city in great numbers.
The dailies and associated press reports heralded these men to the country as “toughs,” and “Negro desperadoes who kept a low dive.” This same press service printed that the Negro who was lynched at Indianola, Miss., in May, had outraged the sheriff’s eight-year-old daughter. The girl was more than eighteen years old, and was found by her father in this man’s room, who was a servant on the place.
Not content with misrepresenting the race, the mob-spirit was not to be satisfied until the paper which was doing all it could to counteract this impression was silenced. The colored people were resenting their bad treatment in a way to make itself felt, yet gave the mob no excuse for further murder, until the appearance of the editorial which is construed as a reflection on the “honor” of the Southern white women. It is not half so libelous as that of the Commercial which appeared four days before, and which has been given in these pages. They would have lynched the manager of the Free Speech for exercising the right of free speech if they had found him as quickly as they would have hung a rapist, and glad of the excuse to do so. The owners were ordered not to return, the Free Speech was suspended with as little compunction as the business of the “People’s Grocery” broken up and the proprietors murdered.
The South’s Position
Henry W. Grady in his well-remembered speeches in New England and New York pictured the Afro-American as incapable of self-government. Through him and other leading men the cry of the South to the country has been “Hands off! Leave us to solve our problem.” To the Afro-American the South says, “the white man must and will rule.” There is little difference between the Antebellum South and the New South.
Her white citizens are wedded to any method however revolting, any measure however extreme, for the subjugation of the young manhood of the race. They have cheated him out of his ballot, deprived him of civil rights or redress therefor in the civil courts, robbed him of the fruits of his labor, and are still murdering, burning and lynching him.
The result is a growing disregard of human life. Lynch law has spread its insiduous influence till men in New York State, Pennsylvania and on the free Western plains feel they can take the law in their own hands with impunity, especially where an Afro-American is concerned. The South is brutalized to a degree not realized by its own inhabitants, and the very foundation of government, law and order, are imperilled.
Public sentiment has had a slight “reaction” though not sufficient to stop the crusade of lawlessness and lynching. The spirit of christianity of the great M.E. Church was aroused to the frequent and revolting crimes against a weak people, enough to pass strong condemnatory resolutions at its General Conference in Omaha last May. The spirit of justice of the grand old party asserted itself sufficiently to secure a denunciation of the wrongs, and a feeble declaration of the belief in human rights in the Republican platform at Minneapolis, June 7. Some of the great dailies and weeklies have swung into line declaring that lynch law must go. The President of the United States issued a proclamation that it be not tolerated in the territories over which he has jurisdiction. Governor Northern and Chief Justice Bleckley of Georgia have proclaimed against it. The citizens of Chattanooga, Tenn., have set a worthy example in that they not only condemn lynch law, but her public men demanded a trial for Weems, the accused rapist, and guarded him while the trial was in progress. The trial only lasted ten minutes, and Weems chose to plead guilty and accept twenty-one years sentence, than invite the certain death which awaited him outside that cordon of police if he had told the truth and shown the letters he had from the white woman in the case.
Col. A.S. Colyar, of Nashville, Tenn., is so overcome with the horrible state of affairs that he addressed the following earnest letter to the Nashville American.
These efforts brought forth apologies and a short halt, but the lynching mania was raged again through the past three months with unabated fury.
The strong arm of the law must be brought to bear upon lynchers in severe punishment, but this cannot and will not be done unless a healthy public sentiment demands and sustains such action.
The men and women in the South who disapprove of lynching and remain silent on the perpetration of such outrages, are particeps criminis, accomplices, accessories before and after the fact, equally guilty with the actual lawbreakers who would not persist if they did not know that neither the law nor militia would be employed against them.
Self-Help
In the creation of this healthier public sentiment, the Afro-American can do for himself what no one else can do for him. The world looks on with wonder that we have conceded so much and remain law-abiding under such great outrage and provocation.
To Northern capital and Afro-American labor the South owes its rehabilitation. If labor is withdrawn capital will not remain. The Afro-American is thus the backbone of the South. A thorough knowledge and judicious exercise of this power in lynching localities could many times effect a bloodless revolution. The white man’s dollar is his god, and to stop this will be to stop outrages in many localities.
The Afro-Americans of Memphis denounced the lynching of three of their best citizens, and urged and waited for the authorities to act in the matter and bring the lynchers to justice. No attempt was made to do so, and the black men left the city by thousands, bringing about great stagnation in every branch of business. Those who remained so injured the business of the street car company by staying off the cars, that the superintendent, manager and treasurer called personally on the editor of the Free Speech, asked them to urge our people to give them their patronage again. Other business men became alarmed over the situation and the Free Speech was run away that the colored people might be more easily controlled. A meeting of white citizens in June, three months after the lynching, passed resolutions for the first time, condemning it. But they did not punish the lynchers. Every one of them was known by name, because they had been selected to do the dirty work, by some of the very citizens who passed these resolutions. Memphis is fast losing her black population, who proclaim as they go that there is no protection for the life and property of any Afro-American citizen in Memphis who is not a slave.
The Afro-American citizens of Kentucky, whose intellectual and financial improvement has been phenomenal, have never had a separate car law until now. Delegations and petitions poured into the Legislature against it, yet the bill passed and the Jim Crow Car of Kentucky is a legalized institution. Will the great mass of Negroes continue to patronize the railroad? A special from Covington, Ky., says:
A call to a State Conference in Lexington, Ky., last June had delegates from every county in the State. Those delegates, the ministers, teachers, heads of secret and others orders, and the head of every family should pass the word around for every member of the race in Kentucky to stay oil railroads unless obliged to ride. If they did so, and their advice was followed persistently the convention would not need to petition the Legislature to repeal the law or raise money to file a suit. The railroad corporations would be so effected they would in self-defense lobby to have the separate car law repealed. On the other hand, as long as the railroads can get Afro-American excursions they will always have plenty of money to fight all the suits brought against them. They will be aided in so doing by the same partisan public sentiment which passed the law. White men passed the law, and white judges and juries would pass upon the suits against the law, and render judgment in line with their prejudices and in deference to the greater financial power.
The appeal to the white man’s pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is to be gained by a further sacrifice of manhood and self-respect. By the right exercise of his power as the industrial factor of the South, the Afro-American can demand and secure his rights, the punishment of lynchers, and a fair trial for accused rapists.
Of the many inhuman outrages of this present year, the only case where the proposed lynching did not occur, was where the men armed themselves in Jacksonville, Fla., and Paducah, Ky, and prevented it. The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.
The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.
The assertion has been substantiated throughout these pages that the press contains unreliable and doctored reports of lynchings, and one of the most necessary things for the race to do is to get these facts before the public. The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press.
The Afro-American papers are the only ones which will print the truth, and they lack means to employ agents and detectives to get at the facts. The race must rally a mighty host to the support of their journals, and thus enable them to do much in the way of investigation.
A lynching occurred at Port Jarvis, N.Y., the first week in June. A white and colored man were implicated in the assault upon a white girl. It was charged that the white man paid the colored boy to make the assault, which he did on the public highway in broad day time, and was lynched. This, too was done by “parties unknown.” The white man in the case still lives. He was imprisoned and promises to fight the case on trial. At the preliminary examination, it developed that he had been a suitor of the girl’s. She had repulsed and refused him, yet had given him money, and he had sent threatening letters demanding more.
The day before this examination she was so wrought up, she left home and wandered miles away. When found she said she did so because she was afraid of the man’s testimony. Why should she be afraid of the prisoner! Why should she yield to his demands for money if not to prevent him exposing something he knew! It seems explainable only on the hypothesis that a liaison existed between the colored boy and the girl, and the white man knew of it. The press is singularly silent. Has it a motive? We owe it to ourselves to find out.
The story comes from Larned, Kansas, Oct. 1, that a young white lady held at bay until daylight, without alarming any one in the house, “a burly Negro” who entered her room and bed. The “burly Negro” was promptly lynched without investigation or examination of inconsistant stories.
A house was found burned down near Montgomery, Ala., in Monroe County, Oct. 13, a few weeks ago; also the burned bodies of the owners and melted piles of gold and silver.
These discoveries led to the conclusion that the awful crime was not prompted by motives of robbery. The suggestion of the whites was that “brutal lust was the incentive, and as there are nearly 200 Negroes living within a radius of five miles of the place the conclusion was inevitable that some of them were the perpetrators.”
Upon this “suggestion” probably made by the real criminal, the mob acted upon the “conclusion” and arrested ten Afro-Americans, four of whom, they tell the world, confessed to the deed of murdering Richard L. Johnson and outraging his daughter, Jeanette. These four men, Berrell Jones, Moses Johnson, Jim and John Packer, none of them twenty-five years of age, upon this conclusion, were taken from jail, hanged, shot, and burned while yet alive the night of Oct. 12. The same report says Mr. Johnson was on the best of terms with his Negro tenants.
The race thus outraged must find out the facts of this awful hurling of men into eternity on supposition, and give them to the indifferent and apathetic country. We feel this to be a garbled report, but how can we prove it?
Near Vicksburg, Miss., a murder was committed by a gang of burglars. Of course it must have been done by Negroes, and Negroes were arrested for it. It is believed that two men, Smith Tooley and John Adams belonged to a gang controlled by white men and, fearing exposure, on the night of July 4, they were hanged in the Court House yard by those interested in silencing them. Robberies since committed in the same vicinity have been known to be by white men who had their faces blackened. We strongly believe in the innocence of these murdered men, but we have no proof. No other news goes out to the world save that which stamps us as a race of cutthroats, robbers and lustful wild beasts. So great is Southern hate and prejudice, they legally(?) hung poor little thirteen-year-old Mildrey Brown at Columbia, S.C., Oct. 7, on the circumstantial evidence that she poisoned a white infant. If her guilt had been proven unmistakably, had she been white, Mildrey Brown would never have been hung.
The country would have been aroused and South Carolina disgraced forever for such a crime. The Afro-American himself did not know as he should have known as his journals should be in a position to have him know and act.
Nothing is more definitely settled than he must act for himself. I have shown how he may employ the boycott, emigration and the press, and I feel that by a combination of all these agencies can be effectually stamped out lynch law, that last relic of barbarism and slavery. “The gods help those who help themselves.”
Khamisi
Khamisi

“The Other America” by Martin Luther King Jr.

On April 14, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech at Stanford University called “The Other America”. He gave the speech in both 1967 and 1968 to a variety of audiences. In the speech, King describes the two Americas that exist alongside one another and made a bold claim that America as a whole was a racist country.

Members of the faculty and members of the student body of this great institution of learning; ladies and gentlemen.
Now there are several things that one could talk about before such a large, concerned, and enlightened audience. There are so many problems facing our nation and our world, that one could just take off anywhere. But today I would like to talk mainly about the race problems since I’ll have to rush right out and go to New York to talk about Vietnam tomorrow. and I’ve been talking about it a great deal this week and weeks before that.
But I’d like to use a subject from which to speak this afternoon, the Other America.
And I use this subject because there are literally two Americas. One America is beautiful for situation. And, in a sense, this America is overflowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of opportunity. This America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies; and culture and education for their minds; and freedom and human dignity for their spirits. In this America, millions of people experience every day the opportunity of having life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in all of their dimensions. And in this America millions of young people grow up in the sunlight of opportunity.
But tragically and unfortunately, there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the ebulliency of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this America millions of work-starved men walk the streets daily in search for jobs that do not exist. In this America millions of people find themselves living in rat-infested, vermin-filled slums. In this America people are poor by the millions. They find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.
In a sense, the greatest tragedy of this other America is what it does to little children. Little children in this other America are forced to grow up with clouds of inferiority forming every day in their little mental skies. As we look at this other America, we see it as an arena of blasted hopes and shattered dreams. Many people of various backgrounds live in this other America. Some are Mexican Americans, some are Puerto Ricans, some are Indians, some happen to be from other groups. Millions of them are Appalachian whites. But probably the largest group in this other America in proportion to its size in the Population is the American Negro.
The American Negro finds himself living in a triple ghetto. A ghetto of race, a ghetto of poverty, a ghetto of human misery. So what we are seeking to do in the Civil Rights Movement is to deal with this problem. To deal with this problem of the two Americas. We are seeking to make America one nation, Indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Now let me say that the struggle for Civil Rights and the struggle to make these two Americas one America, is much more difficult today than it was five or ten years ago. For about a decade or maybe twelve years, we’ve struggled all across the South in glorious struggles to get rid of legal, overt segregation and all of the humiliation that surrounded that system of segregation.
In a sense this was a struggle for decency; we could not go to a lunch counter in so many instances and get a hamburger or a cup of coffee. We could not make use of public accommodations. Public transportation was segregated, and often we had to sit in the back and within transportation — transportation within cities — we often had to stand over empty seats because sections were reserved for whites only. We did not have the right to vote in so many areas of the South. And the struggle was to deal with these problems.
And certainly they were difficult problems, they were humiliating conditions. By the thousands we protested these conditions. We made it clear that it was ultimately more honorable to accept jail cell experiences than to accept segregation and humiliation. By the thousands students and adults decided to sit in at segregated lunch counters to protest conditions there. When they were sitting at those lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and seeking to take the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
Many things were gained as a result of these years of struggle. In 1964 the Civil Rights Bill came into being after the Birmingham movement which did a great deal to subpoena the conscience of a large segment of the nation to appear before the judgment seat of morality on the whole question of Civil Rights. After the Selma movement in 1965 we were able to get a Voting Rights Bill. And all of these things represented strides.
But we must see that the struggle today is much more difficult. It’s more difficult today because we are struggling now for genuine equality. It’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good solid job. It’s much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary, decent housing conditions. It is much easier to integrate a public park than it is to make genuine, quality, integrated education a reality. And so today we are struggling for something which says we demand genuine equality.
It’s not merely a struggle against extremist behavior toward Negroes. And I’m convinced that many of the very people who supported us in the struggle in the South are not willing to go all the way now. I came to see this in a very difficult and painful way. In Chicago the last year where I’ve lived and worked. Some of the people who came quickly to march with us in Selma and Birmingham weren’t active around Chicago. And I came to see that so many people who supported morally and even financially what we were doing in Birmingham and Selma, were really outraged against the extremist behavior of Bull Connor and Jim Clark toward Negroes, rather than believing in genuine equality for Negroes. And I think this is what we’ve gotta see now, and this is what makes the struggle much more difficult.
So as a result of all of this, we see many problems existing today that are growing more difficult. It’s something that is often overlooked, but Negroes generally live in worse slums today than 20 or 25 years ago. In the North schools are more segregated today than they were in 1954 when the Supreme Court’s decision on desegregation was rendered. Economically the Negro Is worse off today than he was 15 and 20 years ago. And so the unemployment rate among Whites at one time was about the same as the unemployment rate among Negroes. But today the unemployment rate among Negroes is twice that of Whites. And the average income of the Negro is today 50% less than Whites.
As we look at these problems we see them growing and developing every day. We see the fact that the Negro economically is facing a depression in his everyday life that is more staggering than the depression of the 30’s. The unemployment rate of the nation as a whole is about 4%. Statistics would say from the Labor Department that among Negroes it’s about 8.4%. But these are the persons who are in the labor market, who still go to employment agencies to seek jobs, and so they can be calculated. The statistics can be gotten because they are still somehow in the labor market.
But there are hundreds of thousands of Negroes who have given up. They’ve lost hope. They’ve come to feel that life is a long and desolate corridor for them with no Exit sign, and so they no longer go to look for a job. There are those who would estimate that these persons, who are called the Discouraged Persons, these 6 or 7% in the Negro community, that means that unemployment among Negroes may well be 16%. Among Negro youth in some of our larger urban areas it goes to 30 and 40%. So you can see what I mean when I say that, in the Negro community, there is a major, tragic and staggering depression that we face in our everyday lives.
Now the other thing that we’ve gotta come to see now that many of us didn’t see too well during the last ten years — that is that racism is still alive in American society. And much more wide-spread than we realized. And we must see racism for what it is. It is a myth of the superior and the inferior race. It is the false and tragic notion that one particular group, one particular race is responsible for all of the progress, all of the insights in the total flow of history. And the theory that another group or another race is totally depraved, innately impure, and innately inferior.
In the final analysis, racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide. Hitler was a sick and tragic man who carried racism to its logical conclusion. He ended up leading a nation to the point of killing about 6 million Jews. This is the tragedy of racism because its ultimate logic is genocide. If one says that I am not good enough to live next door to him; if one says that I am not good enough to eat at a lunch counter, or to have a good, decent job, or to go to school with him merely because of my race, he is saying consciously or unconsciously that I do not deserve to exist.
To use a philosophical analogy here, racism is not based on some empirical generalization; it is based rather on an ontological affirmation. It is not the assertion that certain people are behind culturally or otherwise because of environmental conditions. It is the affirmation that the very being of a people is inferior. And this is the great tragedy of it.
I submit that however unpleasant it is we must honestly see and admit that racism is still deeply rooted all over America. It is still deeply rooted in the North, and it’s still deeply rooted in the South.
And this leads me to say something about another discussion that we hear a great deal, and that is the so-called “white backlash”. I would like to honestly say to you that the white backlash is merely a new name for an old phenomenon. It’s not something that just came into being because of shouts of Black Power, or because Negroes engaged in riots in Watts, for instance. The fact is that the state of California voted a Fair Housing bill out of existence before anybody shouted Black Power, or before anybody rioted in Watts.
It may well be that shouts of Black Power and riots in Watts and the Harlems and the other areas, are the consequences of the white backlash rather than the cause of them. What it is necessary to see is that there has never been a single solid monistic determined commitment on the part of the vast majority of white Americans on the whole question of Civil Rights and on the whole question of racial equality. This is something that truth impels all men of good will to admit.
It is said on the Statue of Liberty that America is a home of exiles. It doesn’t take us long to realize that America has been the home of its white exiles from Europe. But it has not evinced the same kind of maternal care and concern for its black exiles from Africa. It is no wonder that in one of his sorrow songs, the Negro could sing out, “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.” What great estrangement, what great sense of rejection caused a people to emerge with such a metaphor as they looked over their lives.
What I’m trying to get across is that our nation has constantly taken a positive step forward on the question of racial justice and racial equality. But over and over again at the same time, it made certain backward steps. And this has been the persistence of the so called white backlash.
In 1863 the Negro was freed from the bondage of physical slavery. But at the same time, the nation refused to give him land to make that freedom meaningful. And at that same period America was giving millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant that America was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor that would make it possible to grow and develop, and refused to give that economic floor to its black peasants, so to speak.
This is why Frederick Douglas could say that emancipation for the Negro was freedom to hunger, freedom to the winds and rains of heaven, freedom without roofs to cover their heads. He went on to say that it was freedom without bread to eat, freedom without land to cultivate. It was freedom and famine at the same time. But it does not stop there.
In 1875 the nation passed a Civil Rights Bill and refused to enforce it. In 1964 the nation passed a weaker Civil Rights Bill and even to this day, that bill has not been totally enforced in all of its dimensions. The nation heralded a new day of concern for the poor, for the poverty stricken, for the disadvantaged. And brought into being a Poverty Bill and at the same time it put such little money into the program that it was hardly, and still remains hardly, a good skirmish against poverty. White politicians in suburbs talk eloquently against open housing, and in the same breath contend that they are not racist. And all of this, and all of these things tell us that America has been backlashing on the whole question of basic constitutional and God-given rights for Negroes and other disadvantaged groups for more than 300 years.
So these conditions, existence of widespread poverty, slums, and of tragic conniptions in schools and other areas of life, all of these things have brought about a great deal of despair, and a great deal of desperation. A great deal of disappointment and even bitterness in the Negro communities. And today all of our cities confront huge problems. All of our cities are potentially powder kegs as a result of the continued existence of these conditions. Many in moments of anger, many in moments of deep bitterness engage in riots.
Let me say as I’ve always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. I’m still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice. I feel that violence will only create more social problems than they will solve. That in a real sense it is impracticable for the Negro to even think of mounting a violent revolution in the United States. So I will continue to condemn riots, and continue to say to my brothers and sisters that this is not the way. And continue to affirm that there is another way.
But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities as it is for me to condemn riots. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.
Now let me go on to say that if we are to deal with all of the problems that I’ve talked about, and if we are to bring America to the point that we have one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, there are certain things that we must do. The job ahead must be massive and positive. We must develop massive action programs all over the United States of America in order to deal with the problems that I have mentioned. Now in order to develop these massive action programs we’ve got to get rid of one or two false notions that continue to exist in our society. One is the notion that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice. I’m sure you’ve heard this idea. It is the notion almost that there is something in the very flow of time that will miraculously cure all evils. And I’ve heard this over and over again. There are those, and they are often sincere people, who say to Negroes and their allies In the white community, that we should slow up and just be nice and patient and continue to pray, and in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out because only time can solve the problem.
I think there is an answer to that myth. And it is that time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. And I’m absolutely convinced that the forces of ill-will in our nation, the extreme rightists in our nation, have often used time much more effectively than the forces of good will. And it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words of the bad people and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say wait on time. Somewhere we must come to see that social progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated Individuals. And without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. And so we must help time, and we must realize that the time is always right to do right.
Now there’s another notion that gets out, it’s around everywhere. It’s in the South, it’s in the North, it’s In California, and all over our nation. It’s the notion that legislation can’t solve the problem, it can’t do anything in this area. And those who project this argument contend that you’ve got to change the heart and that you can’t change the heart through legislation. Now I would be the first one to say that there is real need for a lot of heart changing in our country, and I believe in changing the heart. I preach about it. I believe in the need for conversion in many instances, and regeneration, to use theological terms. And I would be the first to say that if the race problem In America is to be solved, the white person must treat the Negro right, not merely because the law says it, but because it’s natural, because It’s right, and because the Negro is his brother. And so I realize that if we are to have a truly integrated society, men and women will have to rise to the majestic heights of being obedient to the unenforceable.
But after saying this, let me say another thing which gives the other side, and that is that although it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. Even though it may be true that the law cannot change the heart, it can restrain the heartless. Even though it may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, it can restrain him from lynching me. And I think that’s pretty important also. And so while the law may not change the hearts of men, it can and it does change the habits of men. And when you begin to change the habits of men, pretty soon the attitudes will be changed; pretty soon the hearts will be changed. And I’m convinced that we still need strong civil rights legislation. And there is a bill before Congress right now to have a national or federal Open Housing Bill. A federal law declaring discrimination in housing unconstitutional.
And also a bill to make the administration of justice real all over our country. Now nobody can doubt the need for this. Nobody can doubt the need if he thinks about the fact that since 1963 some 50 Negroes and white Civil Rights workers have been brutally murdered in the state of Mississippi alone, and not a single person has been convicted for these dastardly crimes. There have been some indictments but no one has been convicted. And so there is a need for a federal law dealing with the whole question of the administration of justice.
There is a need for fair housing laws all over our country. And it is tragic indeed that Congress last year allowed this bill to die. And when that bill died in Congress, a bit of democracy died, a bit of our commitment to justice died. If it happens again in this session of Congress, a greater degree of our commitment to democratic principles will die. And I can see no more dangerous trend in our country than the constant developing of predominantly Negro central cities ringed by white suburbs. This is only inviting social disaster. And the only way this problem will be solved is by the nation taking a strong stand, and by state governments taking a strong stand against housing segregation and against discrimination in all of these areas.
Now there’s another thing that I’d like to mention as I talk about the massive action program and time will not permit me to go into specific programmatic action to any great degree. But it must be realized now that the Negro cannot solve the problems by himself. There again, there are those who always say to Negroes, “Why don’t you do something for yourself? Why don’t you lift yourselves by your own bootstraps?” And we hear this over and over again.
Now certainly there are many things that we must do for ourselves and that only we can do for ourselves. Certainly we must develop within a sense of dignity and self-respect that nobody else can give us. A sense of manhood, a sense of personhood, a sense of not being ashamed of our heritage, not being ashamed of our color. It was wrong and tragic of the Negro ever to allow himself to be ashamed of the fact that he was black, or ashamed of the fact that his ancestral home was Africa. And so there is a great deal that the Negro can do to develop self respect. There is a great deal that the Negro must do and can do to amass political and economic power within his own community and by using his own resources. And so we must do certain things for ourselves but this must not negate the fact, and cause the nation to overlook the fact, that the Negro cannot solve the problem himself.
A man was on the plane with me some weeks ago and he came up to me and said, “The problem, Dr. King, that I see with what you all are doing is that every time I see you and other Negroes, you’re protesting and you aren’t doing anything for yourselves.” And he went on to tell me that he was very poor at one time, and he was able to make by doing something for himself. “Why don’t you teach your people,” he said, “to lift themselves by their own bootstraps?” And then he went on to say other groups faced disadvantages, the Irish, the Italian, and he went down the line.
And I said to him that it does not help the Negro, it only deepens his frustration, upon feeling insensitive people to say to him that other ethnic groups who migrated or were immigrants to this country less than a hundred years or so ago, have gotten beyond him and he came here some 344 years ago. And I went on to remind him that the Negro came to this country involuntarily in chains, while others came voluntarily. I went on to remind him that no other racial group has been a slave on American soil. I went on to remind him that the other problem we have faced over the years is that this society placed a stigma on the color of the Negro, on the color of his skin because he was black. Doors were closed to him that were not closed to other groups.
And I finally said to him that it’s a nice thing to say to people that you oughta lift yourself by your own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he oughta lift himself by his own bootstraps. And the fact is that millions of Negroes, as a result of centuries of denial and neglect, have been left bootless. They find themselves impoverished aliens in this affluent society. And there is a great deal that the society can and must do if the Negro is to gain the economic security that he needs.
Now one of the answers it seems to me, is a guaranteed annual income, a guaranteed minimum income for all people, and for our families of our country. It seems to me that the Civil Rights movement must now begin to organize for the guaranteed annual income. Begin to organize people all over our country, and mobilize forces so that we can bring to the attention of our nation this need, and this is something which I believe will go a long long way toward dealing with the Negro’s economic problem and the economic problem which many other poor people confront in our nation. Now I said I wasn’t going to talk about Vietnam, but I can’t make a speech without mentioning some of the problems that we face there because I think this war has diverted attention from civil rights. It has strengthened the forces of reaction in our country and has brought to the forefront the military-industrial complex that even President Eisenhower warned us against at one time. And above all, it is destroying human lives. It’s destroying the lives of thousands of the young promising men of our nation. It’s destroying the lives of little boys and little girls In Vietnam.
But one of the greatest things that this war is doing to us in Civil Rights is that it is allowing the Great Society to be shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam every day. And I submit this afternoon that we can end poverty in the United States. Our nation has the resources to do it. The National Gross Product of America will rise to the astounding figure of some $780 billion this year. We have the resources: The question is, whether our nation has the will, and I submit that if we can spend $35 billion a year to fight an ill-considered war in Vietnam, and $20 billion to put a man on the moon, our nation can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet right here on earth.
Let me say another thing that’s more in the realm of the spirit I guess, that is that if we are to go on in the days ahead and make true brotherhood a reality, it is necessary for us to realize more than ever before, that the destinies of the Negro and the white man are tied together. Now there are still a lot of people who don’t realize this. The racists still don’t realize this. But it is a fact now that Negroes and whites are tied together, and we need each other. The Negro needs the white man to save him from his fear. The white man needs the Negro to save him from his guilt. We are tied together in so many ways, our language, our music, our cultural patterns, our material prosperity, and even our food are an amalgam of black and white.
So there can be no separate black path to power and fulfillment that does not intersect white groups. There can be no separate white path to power and fulfillment short of social disaster. It does not recognize the need of sharing that power with black aspirations for freedom and justice. We must come to see now that integration is not merely a romantic or esthetic something where you merely add color to a still predominantly white power structure. Integration must be seen also in political terms where there is shared power, where black men and white men share power together to build a new and a great nation.
In a real sense, we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. John Donne placed it years ago in graphic terms, “No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” And he goes on toward the end to say, “Any man’s death diminishes me because I’m Involved in mankind. Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.” And so we are all in the same situation: the salvation of the Negro will mean the salvation of the white man. And the destruction of life and of the ongoing progress of the Negro will be the destruction of the ongoing progress of the nation.
Now let me say finally that we have difficulties ahead but I haven’t despaired. Somehow I maintain hope in spite of hope. And I’ve talked about the difficulties and how hard the problems will be as we tackle them. But I want to close by saying this afternoon, that I still have faith in the future. And I still believe that these problems can be solved. And so I will not join anyone who will say that we still can’t develop a coalition of conscience.
I realize and understand the discontent and the agony and the disappointment and even the bitterness of those who feel that whites in America cannot be trusted. And I would be the first to say that there are all too many who are still guided by the racist ethos. And I am still convinced that there are still many white persons of good will. And I’m happy to say that I see them every day in the student generation who cherish democratic principles and justice above principle, and who will stick with the cause of justice and the cause of Civil Rights and the cause of peace throughout the days ahead. And so I refuse to despair. I think we’re gonna achieve our freedom because however much America strays away from the ideals of justice, the goal of America is freedom.
Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up in the destiny of America. Before the pilgrim fathers landed at Plymouth we were here. Before Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. Before the beautiful words of the Star Spangled Banner were written, we were here. For more than two centuries, our forebearers labored here without wages. They made cotton king. They built the homes of their masters in the midst of the most humiliating and oppressive conditions. And yet out of a bottomless vitality, they continued to grow and develop.
And I say that if the inexpressible cruelties of slavery couldn’t stop us, the opposition that we now face, including the so-called white backlash, will surely fail. We’re gonna win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the Almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands.
And so I can still sing “We Shall Overcome.” We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward Justice. We shall overcome because Carlyle is right, “No lie can live forever.” We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right, “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.” We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right, “Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne — Yet that scaffold sways the future.” With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.
With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discourse of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to speed up the day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and live together as brothers and sisters, all over this great nation. That will be a great day, that will be a great tomorrow. In the words of the Scripture, to speak symbolically, that will be the day when the morning stars will sing together and the sons of God will shout for joy.
Khamisi
Khamisi

“The Police and the Press”, “Who Taught You to Hate Yourself?”, and “The Most Disrespected Person in America”: Excepts from Speech by Malcolm X

The following are excerpts from a speech that Malcolm X gave on May 5, 1962 at the funeral service of Ronald Stokes in Los Angeles, who was killed by the LAPD. The incident occurred on April 27, 1962 at a mosque that previously been monitored by the police department. Then one night there was a disputed altercation between the police and the members of the mosque that resulted in an overwhelming police force killing of seven members of the Nation of Islam that night, including Stokes.
The Police and the Press
The controlled press, the White press inflames the White public against Negroes. The police are able to use it to paint the Negro community as a criminal element. The police are able to use the press to make the White public think that 90%, or 99%, of the Negroes in the Negro community are criminals. And once the White public is convinced that most of the Negro community is a criminal element, then this automatically paves the way for the police to move into the Negro  community, exercising Gestapo tactics stopping any Black man who is in this… on the sidewalk, whether he is guilty or whether he is innocent. Whether he is well dressed or whether he is poorly dressed. Whether he is educated or whether he is dumb. Whether he’s a Christian or whether he’s a Muslim. As long as he is Black and a member of the Negro community, the White public thinks that the White policeman is justified in going in there and trampling on that man’s civil rights and on that man’s human rights.
Once the police have convinced the White public that the so-called Negro community is a criminal element, they can go in and question, brutalize, murder, unarmed innocent Negroes and the White public is gullible enough to back them up. This makes the Negro community a police state. This makes the negro neighborhood a police state. It’s the most heavily patrolled. It has more police in it than any other neighborhood, yet it has more crime in it than any other neighborhood. How can you have more cops and more crime? Why? It shows you that the cops must be in cahoots with the criminals.
Who Taught You to Hate Yourself?
(They hate) the texture of the hair that God… Please… That God gave them so much that they put lye on it.  (laughter) Do you realize… now, you know brother; lye will eat a hole in steel and you know your head is not that hard. (applause) Who taught you… Please. Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin to such extent that you bleach to get like the White man? Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind? Who taught you to hate the race that you belong to? So much so that you don’t want to be around each other. You know, before you come asking Mr. Muhammed does he teach hate? You should ask who, yourself, who taught you to hate being what God gave you. We teach you to love the hair that God gave you…
White Men’s Dealing in Corruption
We don’t steal. We don’t gamble. We don’t lie, and we don’t cheat. And that also deprives the government of revenue because you can’t get into a whiskey bottle without getting past the government seal. You can’t open a deck of cards without getting past the government seal. Hell, the White man makes the whiskey then puts you in jail for getting drunk. He sells you the cards and the dice and puts you in jail when he catches you using ’em. So, he’s against us because we fix it where he can’t catch you anymore. We take the dice outta your hands and the cards out of your hands and the whiskey out of your head.
The Most Disrespected Person in America
The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman. And as Muslims, the honorable Elijah Mohammad teaches us to respect our women and to protect our women. And the only time a Muslim really gets real violent is when someone goes to molest his woman. We will kill you for our woman. I’m making it plain. Yes. We will kill you for our woman. We believe that if the White man will do whatever is necessary to see that his woman gets respect and protection then you and I will never be recognized as men until we stand up like men and place the same penalty over the head of anyone who puts his filthy hands in the direction of our women. 
Khamisi
Khamisi

Speech by Malcolm X on May 5, 1962, in Los Angeles at Mosque No. 27

On April 27, 1962, a confrontation initiated by Los Angeles Police Department officers against members of the Nation of Islam (NOI) at their Mosque No. 27 (located near downtown Los Angeles) turned deadly. What began as police harassment of two NOI members (falsely suspected of selling stolen clothing) escalated when officers used a racial epithet and attempted to place one of the men in a chokehold. Amid the physical struggle, NOI members inside of the mosque rushed outside to assist. 70 LAPD officers were ultimately deployed to the melee, where they conducted a brutal raid of the mosque. Unarmed NOI member Ronald Stokes, a Korean War veteran, was shot and killed by police from behind as he reportedly held his hands up in the air. Six other unarmed Muslims were shot by police, including William X Rogers, who was left paralyzed from a bullet wound to the back.
In the direct wake of the violent police attack, New York-based NOI minister and human rights activist Malcolm X, founder of Los Angeles’ Mosque No. 27 in 1957 and a friend of Stokes, rushed to L.A. On May 4, 1962, Malcom X held a press conference at the Los Angeles Statler-Hilton Hotel to bring international attention to the deadly LAPD actions and the gross mischaracterizations of events in the press by LAPD Chief William H. Parker. Unedited and unidentified footage obtained from the Los Angeles City Archives contains substantial excerpts of what appears to be the Statler-Hilton Hotel press conference. The footage documents Malcolm X fielding questions from reporters, and directly assailing the racism and extreme brutality of the April 27, 1962 raid. In his remarks, Malcolm X presents graphic photos that illustrate the fatal injuries inflicted upon Stokes by police. The next day, May 5, Malcolm X delivered a powerful eulogy to an estimated crowd of 2,000 at a memorial service for Stokes, which was held at Mosque No. 27.
In the name of Allah, the beneficent, the merciful to whom all praise is due, whom we forever thank for giving us the honorable Elijah Mohammad as our leader, teacher, and guide. And I specifically, ladies and gentlemen, and brothers and sisters, open up like that because I am a representative of the honorable Elijah Mohammad. And were it not for him, you and I wouldn’t be here today.
In order for you and me to devise some kind of method or strategy to offset some of the events or the repetition of the events that have taken place here in Los Angeles recently, we have to go to the root. We have to go to the cause. Dealing with the condition itself is not enough. We have to get to the cause of it all. (crowd concurs) Or the root of it all. And it is because of our effort toward getting straight to the root that people oft times think we’re dealing in hate.
But first I would like to congratulate and give praise to the Negro, so-called negro leaders and so-called negro organizations and, excuse me if I say so-called, it’s hard for me to just outright say Negro when I know what that word Negro really means. (thunderous applause)
The person whom you have come to know as Ronald Stokes, we know him as Brother Ron – one of the most religious persons to display the highest form of morals of any Black person anywhere on this Earth. And as one of the previous speakers pointed out, who knew him, everyone who knew him had to give him credit for being a good man. A clean man, an intelligent man, and an innocent man when he was murdered.
The Negro, so-called Negro, organizations and leaders should be given great credit for their failure or refusal to let the White man divide them and use them, one against the other, during this crisis. (thunderous applause) As Reverend [Walkard] Wilson pointed out, I think it was eight years ago today that the Supreme Court handed down the desegregation decision. And despite the fact that eight years have gone past, that decision hasn’t been implemented yet. (applause from audience)
I don’t have that much faith. I don’t have that much confidence. I don’t have that much patience. And I don’t have that much ignorance to… (thunderous applause) If the Supreme Court, which is the highest lawmaking body in the country, can pass a decision that can’t get even eight percent compliance within eight years, because it’s for Black people, then my patience has run out. (applause)
When Black people who are being oppressed become impatient, they say that’s emotional. (murmuring) Please… When Black people who are being deprived of their citizenship… not only of their civil rights, but their human rights, become impatient, become fed up, don’t wanna wait any longer, then they say that’s emotional. (laughter and applause)
The Negro, so-called Negro, leaders and organizations should be praised. They should be congratulated. They should be complimented because out of all of them combined, the White man has not yet found one who will play the role of Uncle Tom. (thunderous applause) But yet he has found no Tom, no puppet, no parrot, who is still dumb enough in 1962 to represent the injustices that he is inflicting against our people. (applause)
We don’t care what your religion is. We don’t care what organization you belong to. We don’t care how far in school you went or didn’t go. We don’t care what kind of job you have. We have to give you credit for shocking the White man by not letting him divide you and use you one against the other. (applause)
In the past, the greatest weapon the White man has had has been his ability to divide and conquer. As Jackie Robinson pointed out beautifully on the television last night, 4/5 of the world isn’t White. Isn’t that what Jackie said? (applause) And if 4/5 of the world is dark, how is it possible for 1/5 to rule, oppress, exploit, dominate, and brutalize the 4/5 who are in the majority? How did they do it? Divide and conquer.
If I take my hand and slap you, you don’t even feel it. It might sting you, because these digits are separated. But all I have to do to put you back in your place is bring those digits together. (applause) This is what the White man has done to you and me. He has divided us and used us one against the other. But today, thanks to Allah… You can say thanks to God, or thanks to Jesus, or thanks to Jehovah – whatever you want. (applause) But as a follower of the honorable Elijah Muhammad, we have been taught to say thanks to Allah. And that’s what Jesus said. Jesus called on Allah. He said, “Allah! Allah! Allah [Inaudible]” I believe what’s good for Jesus is good for you. If Allah was good enough for Jesus to call upon, I think He should be good enough for you to call upon. (man: That’s right!)
Since the so-called Negro community has shocked the White man by resisting all efforts to divide us, I think that you and I should continue to shock him by singing and working together in unity. Despite religious, political, economic, or educational, or social differences, let us remember that we are not brutalized because we’re Baptists. We’re not brutalized because we’re Methodists. We’re not brutalized because we’re Muslims. We’re not brutalized because we’re Catholics. We’re brutalized because.. because we are Black people in America. (applause)
Here your mother is being raped, and you’re not supposed to be emotional. Your women – please – your woman can’t walk the street without some cracker putting his hands on her, and you’re not supposed to be emotional! (applause) If you say that you’re fed up, if you teach the Negro… (film skips)
They don’t even know their own name (woman: That’s right!) Why? Because he took took it away from her. Please, please. 20 million Black people don’t even know their own language. Why? Because he took it away from us. 20 million Black people who don’t even know the history of their ancestors. Why? Because he took it away from us! And if you try and tell them how thoroughly and completely they’ve been robbed, he says you’re teaching hate. (applause) That’s something to think about. (murmuring)
Today we’re coming out of college, you’re coming out of the leading universities. You’re trying to go in a good direction. But you don’t know which direction to go in. And if somebody tries to take you right to the root of your problem they say that that man’s a hate teacher. If I ask why should the Senators in Washington… and, then again, if we tell you that Negroes are being hung on the tree, or being shot down illegally, unjustly… and those Negroes should do something to protect themselves, you say you’re advocating violence.
The White man is tricking you! He’s trapping you. He doesn’t call it violence when he lands troops in South Vietnam. (applause) Please, please, please! He doesn’t call it violence when he lands troops in Berlin. When the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, he didn’t say get non-violent. He said, “Praise the Lord, but pass the ammunition.” (applause) But when someone attacks you, when someone comes at you with a club, when someone comes you with a rope, when someone comes at you with a gun, despite the fact that you’ve done nothing he tells you, “Suffer peacefully.” (murmuring) “Pray for those who use you to spite me.” “Be long suffering.” And how long can you suffer after suffering for 400 years? (applause)
So I just wanna play up that little point right there because he said that we play on your emotions. And when you turn on your television tonight, or your radio, or read the newspaper, they’re gonna tell you in that paper that I was playing on your emotions. Imagine you, a second class citizen. That’s not getting emotional! It’s getting intelligent.
And as far as your mayor is concerned, I see… (I) should say their mayor. A man named Yorty, who has been slandering the Muslims, a professional liar… a professional liar. (applause) Who has mastered the art of using half-truths. Put in the paper that they break into our religious place of worship and got records that they can use to prove that most of us have criminal records. You can’t be a Negro in America and not have a criminal record. (thunderous applause) Martin Luther King has been to jail. (applause) Please. James Farmer has been to jail. Why, you can’t name a Black man in this country who was sick and tired of the hell that he’s catching who hasn’t been to jail. Charged him with being seditious.
They put Moses in jail! (woman: Yeah!) They put Daniel in jail. (woman: Yeah!) Why, you haven’t got a man of God in the Bible that wasn’t put to jail when they started speaking up against exploitation and oppression. (applause) They charged Jesus with sedition. Didn’t they do that? (crowd concurs) They said he was against Caesar. They said he was discriminating because he told his disciples, “Go not the way of the gentiles, but rather go to the lost sheep.” He discriminated! Don’t go near the gentiles, go to the lost sheep. Go to the oppressed. Go the downtrodden. Go to the exploited. Go the people who don’t know who they are, who are lost from the knowledge of themselves and who are strangers in a land that is not theirs. Go to those people! Go to the slaves. Go the second-class citizens. Go to the ones who are suffering the brunt of Caesar’s brutality.
And if Jesus were here in America today, he wouldn’t be going to the White man. The White man is the oppressor! He would be going to the oppressed. He would be going to the humble. He would be going to the lowly. He would be going to the rejected and the despised. He would be going to the so-called American Negro. (applause)
To have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace. I formally was a criminal. I formally was in prison. I’m not ashamed of that. You never can use that over my head. And he’s using the wrong stick! I don’t feel that stick. (laughter and applause) I went to a prison because I believed in men like Sam Yorty. I went to prison because I trusted men like Sam Yorty. I went to prison following the philosophy of men like Sam Yorty. But since I’ve been following the honorable Elijah Muhammad, I have been reformed and that’s more… Please… That’s more than Sam Yorty and Chief Parker and all these other White politicians that have been able to do with the inmates in the prisons of this State. They should give Mr. Muhammad credit. They should give Mr. Muhammad credit for reforming and rehabilitating men whom they have failed to reform and rehabilitate. (thunderous applause)
Mayor Yorty went forward to some press report that Mr. Muhammad had once been found guilty of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He failed to explain, purposely, that in 1934, the honorable Elijah Muhammad refused to send his children to White schools in Detroit, Michigan, that were teaching you about Little Black Sambo. That’s the minor that he contributed to the delinquency of. You see this vicious, fork-tongue White man has been able to take lies and make you turn against those who want to help you and make others turn against you. This is the contributing to the delinquency of a minor that this mayor, or a man who calls himself mayor, is talking about.
In the same article he said that the Muslims are the same people who rioted in the United Nations. Someone should pull his coat and let him know that at the present moment there’s six million dollars worth of suits [inaudible] levelled against two of New York’s leading newspapers for making a mistake of charging the Muslims as being involved in those United Nations riots. We were not involved! And if this fork-tongued man who calls himself your mayor had taken the time to find that out, he wouldn’t be walking into the trap that he’s letting his ignorance lead him into! (applause) And if you take the time to read the Washington Post that came out the Sunday after that incident took place, the Washington Post pointed out on the front page that the Muslims had nothing to do with the UN riots and they quoted, in saying so, the person who was at that time the Commissioner of Police in New York City. See, it’s lies that the White man has spread about the Muslims to try and make you afraid of the Muslims, or to try and make you think that the Muslims were a criminal element, an uncouth element in things that you have not liked to be associated with.
Also, they say that… I’m just clearing these things up and then we’re going to get into what happened. They also say that the honorable Elijah Muhammad was draft dodger. No, he wasn’t. He just refused to go to the army because he was a man of peace. He was a minister of a religion of peace. He was teaching peace. So he outright refused to go to the army. That’s not draft dodging. That’s intelligence. (cheering)
Here, before the grand jury, because the coroner’s jury is stacked against Negros. (cheers and applause) The Grand Jury is stacked against Negros. The press, the radio, the television and the newspapers are stacked against negros. (crowd concurs) But, please, the Los Angeles Police department is stacked against all Negroes, all except those he has appointed to high positions.
The controlled press, the White press inflames the White public against Negroes. The police are able to use it to paint the Negro community as a criminal element. The police are able to use the press to make the White public think that 90%, or 99%, of the Negroes in the Negro community are criminals. And once the White public is convinced that most of the Negro community is a criminal element, then this automatically paves the way for the police to move into the Negro community, exercising Gestapo tactics stopping any Black man who is in this… on the sidewalk, whether he is guilty or whether he is innocent. Whether he is well dressed or whether he is poorly dressed. Whether he is educated or whether he is dumb. Whether he’s a Christian or whether he’s a Muslim. As long as he is Black and a member of the Negro community, the White public thinks that the White policeman is justified in going in there and trampling on that man’s civil rights and on that man’s human rights. (applause)
Once the police have convinced the White public that the so-called Negro community is a criminal element, they can go in and question, brutalize, murder, unarmed innocent Negroes and the White public is gullible enough to back them up. This makes the Negro community a police state. This makes the negro neighborhood a police state. It’s the most heavily patrolled. It has more police in it than any other neighborhood, yet it has more crime in it than any other neighborhood. How can you have more cops and more crime? (laughter) Why? It shows you that the cops must be in cahoots with the criminals. (laughter, applause)
(They hate) the texture of the hair that God… Please… That God gave them so much that they put lye on it.  (laughter) Do you realize… now, you know brother; lye will eat a hole in steel and you know your head is not that hard. (applause) Who taught you… Please. Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin to such extent that you bleach to get like the White man? Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind? Who taught you to hate the race that you belong to? So much so that you don’t want to be around each other. You know, before you come asking Mr. Muhammed does he teach hate? You should ask who, yourself, who taught you to hate being what God gave you. (applause)
We teach you to love the hair that God gave you. Here you, way out in the middle of the ocean, can’t swim and you worried about someone that’s in the bathtub and can’t swim. (laughter and applause) We don’t steal. We don’t gamble. We don’t lie, and we don’t cheat. And that also deprives the government of revenue (laughter) because you can’t get into a whiskey bottle without getting past the government seal. You can’t open a deck of cards without getting past the government seal. Hell, the White man makes the whiskey then puts you in jail for getting drunk. (cheering) He sells you the cards and the dice and puts you in jail when he catches you using ’em. So, he’s against us because we fix it where he can’t catch you anymore. We take the dice outta your hands and the cards out of your hands and the whiskey out of your head.
The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman. And as Muslims, the honorable Elijah Mohammad teaches us to respect our women and to protect our women. And the only time a Muslim really gets real violent is when someone goes to molest his woman. (man: Right!) (applause) We will kill you for our woman. I’m making it plain. Yes. We will kill you for our woman. (applause) We believe that if the White man will do whatever is necessary to see that his woman gets respect and protection then you and I will never be recognized as men until we stand up like men and place the same penalty over the head of anyone who puts his filthy hands in the direction of our women. (thunderous applause)
We respect them, but we want them to respect us. We think that the law should respect the Negro community. The law should protect the Negro community. The law should approach the negro community with intelligence if it expects the negro community to react intelligently. So, the honorable Elijah Mohammed teaches us to always avoid anything that smacks of disrespect for the law. And if the police department tells the truth, they will have to admit that they have never had any, uh, experiences with Muslims that have ever been anything other than honorable unless they themselves come at us in a dishonorable way.
There’s no case against the Muslims. It has no case against these brothers whom they shot down. And because it has no case, it’s trying to create a case. It’s trying to manufacture a case. And therefore they set up a grand jury hearing of the case so that they could hear it behind closed doors, and after hearing what we have to say then they’ll… their particular strategy or defense against the actions that they committed on that April the 27th. So, at the advice of our attorneys, we purposefully, the victims, those who have been indicted, or rather those who have been arrested and are out on bond, have purposefully refrained and refused from making any statement whatsoever until after the case appears in court.
And when you hear their story it will be in a public trial. We have already been… had experience with these private hearings behind closed doors. Anything that the White man has to do to the Muslim, he has to do it in the open. He has to do it in public, or he has to put every single one of us behind bars for the rest our lives. (applause)
When Mayor Yorty called for a government investigation of a religious group that have the highest moral standards of any group in the Negro community, Mayor Yorty was giving you an example of what Hitler did in Nazi Germany when he began to go on the rampage. (applause)
We feel, we have confidence that the White public and the Black public, if they hear our case, if they hear and have access to the investigation, will never be fooled by this phony set up that’s stacked from the top all the way down. And if you doubt it, when you leave home tonight, when you go home tonight, look for the press. I’d like at this time to call forth these brothers who are under, uh, who were arrested. The brothers who were arrested. Come up here behind these chairs, please. (applause) They were suspects. (laughter) This wouldn’t happen in a White neighborhood. White man can walk down the street with packages on his head, packages under his arm and packages anywhere else and won’t anybody question his right to carry those packages. But a negro is suspect because the press makes you suspect. Yes, the White press makes Negroes suspect. (murmuring) (video skips)
… all the information you need, Officer. And the Officer made one stay at the rear of the car and the other go to the front of the car, and while he was taking the one to the front of the car, the polite attitude, the humble if, the submissive, intelligent peaceful spirit that he unexpectedly found in this Negro infuriated him. And he began to… He told the brother; ‘Put down your hands.’ Brother was talking, he’s not a criminal. A man has a right on the sidewalk to talk with his hands. ‘Put down your hands, don’t talk with your hands.’ And when the brother continued to gesture with his hands the Officer grabbed his hand, twisted it around, ’round behind his back flung him up against the car and then that’s when hell broke loose. That was when hell broke loose. A struggle ensued, shots were fired by the police and by a Negro door checker. (laughter)
An alarm went out. When the alarm went out, instead of the police going to the place where the incident occurred, the police went one block away to the temple. When they arrived there, they got out of their cars with their guns smokin’. You woulda thought it was Wyatt… What’s his name? Wyatt Earp. I’m telling you, they came out of those cars, and we have enough witnesses to hang ’em. With their guns smokin’. Chief Parker knows this, Mayor Yorty knows this and every police official in the city knows that. They didn’t fire no warning shots in the air they fired warning shots point blank at innocent, unarmed, defenseless Negroes. As I say, two of the brothers were shot in the back. Another was shot in the shoulder. Another was shot, two of them were shot, excuse the expression, through the penis. (murmuring) Another was shot in the hip and the bullet came out the other side. But Arthur here was shot 1/4 of an inch from his heart.
Let me tell you something, and I’ll tell you why you say, ‘we hate White people’. We don’t hate anybody. We love our own people so much; they think we hate the ones who are inflicting injustice against them. (applause) (video skips)
… who has been shot, the bullet having passed a 1/4 of an inch through his heart. I’m not gonna let him talk, which I think you can understand why. You should listen to the conversation of the police officers while it was going on. Two of the brothers who had been shot, who were lying hand in hand, the officer said they were chanting a death chant. You read that. They were saying ‘Allahu Akbar’. What does that mean? It means that God is the greatest. It means that God is the greatest. (applause)
Understand what the White officer called a death chant was a prayer. They were praying when they were shot down. They were saying Allhu Akbar. And it shook the officer up that they haven’t heard Black people talk any kinda talk but what they taught ’em. And two of the brothers who were shot in the back were telling me that as they lay on the sidewalk, they were holding hands. They held hands with each other saying Allahu Akbar. And the blood was seeping out of them where the police bullets had torn into their insides. Still, they said Allahu Akbar and the police came and kicked them in the head. Police kicked them in the head telling them to shut up that noise while they were laying on the sidewalk in front of our temple. Kicked them in the head. Shut up that noise.
And one of them, when he was on his way to the police station in the ambulance, one of the ambulance attendants told the White cop, ‘Why don’t you kill the nigger?’ He said, ‘I’ll tell them that he tried to get away. Why don’t you kill the nigger? While you got a chance. I’ll swear that he tried to get away.’ If he didn’t say this, then I need to be put in jail, and I’ll gladly go. (applause)
One of them who was being taken to jail in a police car as the ambulance sirens were coming to the place, one of the policemen said to the other: ‘What are the ambulances rushing for? Nothing but some niggers.’ So, he looked then and saw the Muslim brothers sitting beside him and he shut up. But after he got to the jail, the same officer that said this turned to the brother and said; ‘I hope that you didn’t get offended by what I said back there under the heat of emotion, because some of my best friends are colored.’ (roaring) That’s what he said. That’s his password: ‘Some of my best friends are colored.’
And I for one, as a Muslim, believe that the White man is intelligent enough, if he were made to realize how Black people really feel and how fed up we are without that whole compromising sweet talk. Why you’re the one that make it hard for yourself. The White man believes you when you go to him with that old sweet talk ’cause you been sweet talkin’ him ever since he brought you here. Stop sweet talking him. Tell him how you feel. Tell him how or what kinda hell you been catching and let him know that if he’s not ready to clean his house up, if he’s not ready to clean his house up, he shouldn’t have a house. It should catch on fire. And burn down. (applause)
As Muslims, we identify ourselves with the dark world. So we’re not any minority. We’re a part of the majority and the White man is the minority. (applause) You have to know this to understand us: we don’t think any odds are against us. We don’t fight a battle like the odds are against us. Why, the whole dark world today is in unity. It’s one. If you don’t think so, look at the United Nations. When the dark world votes, they vote as one. They gettin’ the colonialists out of Africa, and out of Asia. Tellin’ them to get out. They don’t have any nuclear weapons, but they got a solid, united voice and their unity alone is sufficient to drive the oppressor and exploiter of their people out of their own country.
You and I need to learn a lesson from that right there. In the UN, the dark world consists of Buddhist’s, Hindu’s, Shinto’s, Taoist’s, Christian’s, Muslims, everything. But they’re together. They forget their religious and political differences. They think as one. They move as one against a common enemy. And [the French occupier] of Algeria, he’s going, don’t think he’s not going, he’s going. (applause) They’re getting him out of Angola, out of Tanganyika, out of Uganda, out of Kenya. He’s going from South Africa, too. He hasn’t got long to be there. All over this earth, dark people who have been oppressed and exploited by those who are not their own kind, strangers, are coming together to get the oppressor off their back. You and I learn a lesson from that.
We are oppressed. We are exploited. We are downtrodden. We are denied, not only civil rights, but even human rights. So, the only way we’re going to get some of this oppression and exploitation away from us, or aside from us is come together against the common enemy. (applause) When they sat down at the Bandung conference, everyone there had this in common: a dark skin. Some of those who were sitting there were socialists, some were communists, somewhere capitalists, some were Christian, some were Buddhist. They were everything! But all of ’em was dark skinned. And they looked at that dark skin and agreed that this is one thing they had in common.
Forget that you’re a Methodist, forget that you’re a Catholic, forget that you’re a Protestant, forget that you’re a Muslim. Remember that all of us are Black, and we’re catching h… [end of video].
Khamisi
Khamisi

“The Atlanta Compromise” by Booker T. Washington

What came to be known as the Atlanta Compromise stemmed from a speech given by Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute, to the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 18, 1895.
In the speech, also known as the Atlanta Exposition Speech, Washington promoted vocational education, industrial occupations, and the learning of other practical trades that would give African Americans opportunities for economic advancement and wealth creation rather than other more intellectual pursuits such as higher education.
Essential elements of the compromise articulated in Washington’s speech were that—at least for the present—blacks would work and submit to white political rule, i.e. not ask for the right to vote, they would not retaliate against racist behavior, they would tolerate segregation and discrimination, and they should receive free basic education, particularly vocational or industrial training.
Booker_T_Washington_atlanta-compromse-Speech_1895_edit.mp3
Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Board of Directors and Citizens:
One-third of the population of the South is of the Negro race. No enterprise seeking the material, civil, or moral welfare of this section can disregard this element of our population and reach the highest success. I but convey to you, Mr. President and Directors, the sentiment of the masses of my race when I say that in no way have the value and manhood of the American Negro been more fittingly and generously recognized than by the managers of this magnificent Exposition at every stage of its progress. It is a recognition that will do more to cement the friendship of the two races than any occurrence since the dawn of our freedom.
Not only this, but the opportunity here afforded will awaken among us a new era of industrial progress. Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the state legislature was more sought than real estate or industrial skill; that the political convention or stump speaking had more attractions than starting a dairy farm or truck garden.
A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal,“Water, water; we die of thirst!” The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” A second time the signal, “Water, water; send us water!” ran up from the distressed vessel, and was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” And a third and fourth signal for water was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River. To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are”— cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded.
Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. And in this connection it is well to bear in mind that whatever other sins the South may be called to bear, when it comes to business, pure and simple, it is in the South that the Negro is given a man’s chance in the commercial world, and in nothing is this Exposition more eloquent than in emphasizing this chance. Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.
To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race,“Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South. Casting down your bucket among my people, helping and encouraging them as you are doing on these grounds, and to education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your factories. While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.
There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all. If anywhere there are efforts tending to curtail the fullest growth of the Negro, let these efforts be turned into stimulating, encouraging, and making him the most useful and intelligent citizen. Effort or means so invested will pay a thousand per cent interest. These efforts will be twice blessed—blessing him that gives and him that takes. There is no escape through law of man or God from the inevitable:
The laws of changeless justice bind Oppressor with oppressed;
And close as sin and suffering joined We march to fate abreast…
Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upward, or they will pull against you the load downward. We shall constitute one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or one-third [of] its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic.
Gentlemen of the Exposition, as we present to you our humble effort at an exhibition of our progress, you must not expect overmuch. Starting thirty years ago with ownership here and there in a few quilts and pumpkins and chickens (gathered from miscellaneous sources), remember the path that has led from these to the inventions and production of agricultural implements, buggies, steam-engines, newspapers, books, statuary, carving, paintings, the management of drug stores and banks, has not been trodden without contact with thorns and thistles. While we take pride in what we exhibit as a result of our independent efforts, we do not for a moment forget that our part in this exhibition would fall far short of your expectations but for the constant help that has come to our educational life, not only from the Southern states, but especially from Northern philanthropists, who have made their gifts a constant stream of blessing and encouragement.
The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.
In conclusion, may I repeat that nothing in thirty years has given us more hope and encouragement, and drawn us so near to you of the white race, as this opportunity offered by the Exposition; and here bending, as it were, over the altar that represents the results of the struggles of your race and mine, both starting practically empty-handed three decades ago, I pledge that in your effort to work out the great and intricate problem which God has laid at the doors of the South, you shall have at all times the patient, sympathetic help of my race; only let this be constantly in mind, that, while from representations in these buildings of the product of field, of forest, of mine, of factory, letters, and art, much good will come, yet far above and beyond material benefits will be that higher good, that, let us pray God, will come, in a blotting out of sectional differences and racial animosities and suspicions, in a determination to administer absolute justice, in a willing obedience among all classes to the mandates of law. This, coupled with our material prosperity, will bring into our beloved South a new heaven and a new earth.
Khamisi
Khamisi

Afrikan Folktales

General Afrikan Folktales
The Man Who Never Lied
An Afrikan Folktale
Once upon a time there lived a wise man by the name of Mamad. He never lied. All the people in the land, even the ones who lived twenty days away, knew about him.
The king heard about Mamad and ordered his subjects to bring him to the palace. He looked at the wise man and asked:
“Mamad, is it true, that you have never lied?”
“It’s true.”
“And you will never lie in your life?”
“I’m sure in that.”
“Okay, tell the truth, but be careful! The lie is cunning and it gets on your tongue easily.”
Several days passed and the king called Mamad once again. There was a big crowd: the king was about to go hunting. The king held his horse by the mane, his left foot was already on the stirrup. He ordered Mamad:
“Go to my summer palace and tell the queen I will be with her for lunch. Tell her to prepare a big feast. You will have lunch with me then.”
Mamad bowed down and went to the queen. Then the king laughed and said:
“We won’t go hunting and now Mamad will lie to the queen. Tomorrow we will laugh on his behalf.” But the wise Mamad went to the palace and said:
“Maybe you should prepare a big feast for lunch tomorrow, and maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe the king will come by noon, and maybe he won’t.”
“Tell me will he come, or won’t he?” – asked the queen.
“I don’t know whether he put his right foot on the stirrup, or he put his left foot on the ground after I left.”
Everybody waited for the king. He came the next day and said to the queen:
“The wise Mamad, who never lies, lied to you yesterday.”
But the queen told him about the words of Mamad. And the king realized, that the wise man never lies, and says only that, which he saw with his own eyes.
Ghanaian Folktales
Anansi Does the Impossible
By Lisa Desimini, Verna Aardema
The continent of Africa is in a shape of a parrot and at its throat height lies a country of Nigeria. The country’s coast borders with the Gulf of Guinea. And this is where two major rivers of Nigeria come together and empty into the Niger Delta. It is one of the largest river deltas in the world. In this area of the Gulf of Guinea indigenous people called Ashantiland tell many tales about a cunning spider, who is their hero. And here is one of those stories.
A long time ago, all folktales where owned by the Sky God.
One day, Anansi the Spider announced to his wife Aso that he would win all those folktales and gift them to the earth people.
The next day, Anansi set to meet with the Sky God. As he reached the highest peak, he raised his head toward the sky and spoke loudly, “The highest deity in the bluest sky, how can I win all your folktales for our earth people?”
“What makes you think you can win it,” bellowed the voice from high above. Not waiting for an answer he continued, “I’ll give you three most impossible tasks if you think you’re so smart. Bring me a live python, a real fairy, and thirty-seven stinging hornets.”
“I can manage that,” answered Anansi confidently, then hurried home.
As soon as he arrived home, all his confidence was gone, “Oh dear wife, how am I supposed to achieve all those impossible tasks?”
“Hmm, let me think. Remember one task at time…one task at a time,” she kept repeating as she was hatching a plan in her head. “I know how to catch a python,” and she whispered into his ear.
They ran into a nearby river and sat on a log. Soon after a python slithered its way to the water’s edge. As he sipped water, he overhead the couple arguing, “What is the problem?”
“There is no problem,” retorted Anansi. “Only my wife says that you’re not as long as this log and I begged to differ.”
The snake hissed, “I know I am longer than this log.” Without any further convincing, he stretched his long body along the log.
“Your tail is a bit too short, let me stretch it,” proclaimed Aso tying the snake to the log at one end.
At the other end, Anansi declared, “You need to stretch your nose a bit towards me. Let me help you.” He quickly tied the snake to the log on his end. “Keep stretching,” encouraged Anansi while winding the rope and moving toward the middle where he met his wife.
“Done,” they whispered and smiled. And off Anansi was with a life python trotting his way to the Sky God.
The Sky God darkened the sky into a navy blue color and sent a bright lightning as he couldn’t believe that Anansi had achieved his first task. “Well, you have two more impossible tasks to perform.”
Upon his return home, Anansi asked his wife, “But how are we going to catch a fairy?”
“Hmm let me think…let me think,” after taking a few deep breaths and scratching her head, she announced, “I have an idea.” And she whispered it to Anansi’s ear.
Anansi not wasting any time, followed his wife’s directions and carved a wooden fairy and covered it with sticky gum from a mimosa tree. Aso placed a tiny dish of banana between two wooden hands of the fairy. And when the sky was dark and the moon was bright, Anansi placed the wooden-fairy on the odum tree and hid behind bushes.
Shortly after some fairies came and surrounded the wooden-fairy. “She is pretty quiet and she doesn’t flap her wings,” said one.
“No, she doesn’t,” nodded another, “But she has something sweet in her basket. Shall we try it?” No waiting for an answer, she reached for the sweet, “Oh, no my hands are stuck to the sweet. I can’t pull them.”
“Oh, no,” lamented the fairies.
Meanwhile, Anansi pulled the strings and the real fairy attached to the wooden one flew straight into his hands. He then rushed to the Sky God.
The Sky God roared, “I really don’t know how you perform those impossible tasks, but you still have one more left.”
Anansi went back home and said to his wife, “I have no idea how we are going to catch forty-seven hornets.”
Aso thought and thought and finally whispered the plan into Anansi’s ear.
As suggested Anansi picked a bottle guard in a shape of long melon with a wooden cork and walked to the cold stream to fill it with water. Then he climbed high up a nearby tree and tipped the bottle letting the water gurgle down upon the hornets. The hornets immediately flew in all directions. “My dear hornets here is a bottle guard where you can find a safe and dry shelter here,” encouraged Anansi.
The hornets buzzed around. As one entered the bottle, another followed and then some more. Anansi kept a count of each hornet entering the bottle. As soon as he counted forty-seven of them, he popped the stopper in and off he was to the Sky God.
Upon seeing Anansi, the furious Sky God flashed his lightning and beat his thunder.
Anansi tasting his victory, kept calm and with extreme politeness announced, “The dearest Sky God, here are the forty-seven stinging hornets. Would you like to count them?”
“No!” thundered the Sky God. “You have won the stories. Now take your leave,” boomed the Sky God.
Anansi thanked the Sky God and took his leave.
That night, the people of the village gathered in a circle around a bonfire and listened to the stories told by Anansi.
People upon hearing how Anansi won the stories for them rejoiced, singing, “Honor to Anansi! Honor to Anansi and Aso!”
And from that day on, the folktales of West Africa have been called Anansi Tales.
Nigerian Folktales
The Cock Who Caused a Fight Between Two Towns
Ekpo and Etim were half-brothers, that is to say they had the same mother, but different fathers. Their mother first of all had married a chief of Duke Town, when Ekpo was born; but after a time she got tired of him and went to Old Town, where she married Ejuqua and gave birth to Etim.
Both of the boys grew up and became very rich. Ekpo had a cock, of which he was very fond, and every day when Ekpo sat down to meals the cock used to fly on to the table and feed also. Ama Ukwa, a native of Old Town, who was rather poor, was jealous of the two brothers, and made up his mind if possible to bring about a quarrel between them, although he pretended to be friends with both.
One day Ekpo, the elder brother, gave a big dinner, to which Etim and many other people were invited. Ama Ukwa was also present. A very good dinner was laid for the guests, and plenty of palm wine was provided. When they had commenced to feed, the pet cock flew on to the table and began to feed off Etim’s plate. Etim then told one of his servants to seize the cock and tie him up in the house until after the feast. So the servant carried the cock to Etim’s house and tied him up for safety.
After much eating and drinking, Etim returned home late at night with his friend Ama Ukwa, and just before they went to bed, Ama Ukwa saw Ekpo’s cock tied up. So early in the morning he went to Ekpo’s house, who received him gladly.
About eight o’clock, when it was time for Ekpo to have his early morning meal, he noticed that his pet cock was missing. When he remarked upon its absence, Ama Ukwa told him that his brother had seized the cock the previous evening during the dinner, and was going to kill it, just to see what Ekpo would do. When Ekpo heard this, he was very vexed, and sent Ama Ukwa back to his brother to ask him to return the cock immediately. Instead of delivering the message as he had been instructed, Ama Ukwa told Etim that his elder brother was so angry with him for taking away his friend, the cock, that he would fight him, and had sent Ama Ukwa on purpose to declare war between the two towns.
Etim then told Ama Ukwa to return to Ekpo, and say he would be prepared for anything his brother could do. Ama Ukwa then advised Ekpo to call all his people in from their farms, as Etim would attack him, and on his return he advised Etim to do the same. He then arranged a day for the fight to take place between the two brothers and their people. Etim then marched his men to the other side of the creek, and waited for his brother; so Ama Ukwa went to Ekpo and told him that Etim had got all his people together and was waiting to fight. Ekpo then led his men against his brother, and there was a big battle, many men being killed on both sides. The fighting went on all day, until at last, towards evening, the other chiefs of Calabar met and determined to stop it; so they called the Egbo men together and sent them out with their drums, and eventually the fight stopped.
Three days later a big palaver was held, when each of the brothers was told to state his case. When they had done so, it was found that Ama Ukwa had caused the quarrel, and the chiefs ordered that he should be killed. His father, who was a rich man, offered to give the Egbos five thousand rods, five cows, and seven slaves to redeem his son, but they decided to refuse his offer.
The next day, after being severely flogged, he was left for twenty-four hours tied up to a tree, and the following day his head was cut off.
Ekpo was then ordered to kill his pet cock, so that it should not cause any further trouble between himself and his brother, and a law was passed that for the future no one should keep a pet cock or any other tame animal.

Master Man
A Tell of Nigeria
Once there was a man who was strong.
When he gathered firewood, he hauled twice as much as anyone else in the village. When he hunted, he carried home two antelopes at once.
This man’s name was Shadusa, and his wife was named Shettu. One day he said to her, “Just look at these muscles. I must be the strongest man in the world. From now on, just call me Master Man.”
But Shettu said, “Quit your foolish boasting. No matter how strong you are, there will always be someone stronger. And watch out, or someday you may meet him.”
The next day, Shettu paid a visit to a neighboring village. On the walk home she grew thirsty, so she stopped by a well. She threw in the bucket—splash—then she pulled on the rope. But though she tugged and she heaved, she could not lift the bucket.
Just then a woman walked up with a baby strapped to her back. Balanced on her head was a calabash, a hollow gourd for carrying water.
“You’ll get no water here today,” said Shettu. “The bucket won’t come up.”
The two women pulled together, but still the bucket would not budge.
“Wait a moment,” said the woman. She untied her baby and set him on the ground. “Pull up the bucket for Mama.”
The baby quickly pulled up the bucket and filled his mother’s calabash. Then he threw in the bucket and pulled it up once more for Shettu.
Shettu gasped. “I don’t believe it!”
“Oh, it’s not so strange,” said the woman. “After all, my husband is Master Man.”
When Shettu got home, she told Shadusa what had happened.
“Master Man?” yelled Shadusa. “He can’t call himself that! I’m Master Man. I’ll have to teach that fellow a lesson.”
“Oh, husband, don’t!” pleaded Shettu. “If the baby is so strong, think what the father must be like. You’ll get yourself killed.”
But Shadusa said, “We’ll see about that!”
The next morning, Shadusa set out early and walked till he came to the well. He threw in the bucket—splash—then he pulled on the rope. But though he tugged and he heaved, he could not lift the bucket.
Just then the woman with the baby walked up.
“Wait a minute,” said Shadusa. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m getting water, of course,” answered the woman.
“Well, you can’t,” said Shadusa. “The bucket won’t come up.”
The woman set down the baby, who quickly pulled up the bucket and filled his mother’s calabash.
“Wah!” yelled Shadusa. “How did he do that?”
“It’s easy,” said the woman, “when your father is Master Man.”
Shadusa gulped and thought about going home. But instead he thrust out his chest and said, “I want to meet this fellow, so I can show him who’s the real Master Man.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” said the woman. “He devours men like you! But suit yourself.”
So Shadusa followed the woman back to her compound. Inside the fenced yard was a gigantic fireplace, and beside it was a pile of huge bones.
“What’s all this?” asked Shadusa.
“Well, you see,” said the woman, “our hut is so small that my husband must come out here to eat his elephants.”
Just then they heard a great ROAR, so loud that Shadusa had to cover his ears. Then the ground began to shake, until Shadusa could hardly stand.
“What’s that?” he shouted.
“That’s Master Man.”
“Oh, no!” wailed Shadusa. “You weren’t fooling. I’ve got to get out of here!”
“It’s too late now,” said the woman. “But let me hide you.”
By the fence were some large clay pots, each as tall as a man, for storing grain. She helped him climb into one, then set the lid in place.
Shadusa raised the lid a crack to peek out. And there he was, coming into the compound with a dead elephant across his shoulders. It was Master Man!
“Did you have a good day, dear?” asked the woman.
“Yes!” bellowed Master Man. “But I forgot my bow and arrows. I had to kill this elephant with my bare hands.”
As Shadusa watched in terror, Master Man built a huge fire in the fireplace, roasted the elephant, and devoured every bit of it but the bones.
Suddenly he stopped and sniffed. “Wife! I smell a man!”
“Oh, there’s no man here now,” said the woman. “One passed by while you were gone. That must be what you smell.”
“Too bad,” thundered Master Man. “He would have been tasty.” Then he rolled over on the ground, and before long the leaves were trembling from his snores.
The woman hurried over to the pot and slid off the lid. “Quick!” she whispered. “Get away while you can.”
Shadusa leaped out and bolted down the path. But he hadn’t gone too far when he heard a distant ROAR and felt the ground tremble beneath him. Master Man was coming!
Shadusa ran till he came upon five farmers hoeing a field.
“What’s your hurry?” called one.
“Master Man is after me!”
“Take it easy,” said the farmer. “We won’t let anyone hurt you.”
Just then they heard a terrible ROAR. The farmers all dropped their hoes and covered their ears.
“What was that?” asked the farmer.
“That was Master Man!”
“Well, then,” said the farmer, “you’d better keep running!” And the five farmers fled across the field.
Shadusa ran on till he met ten porters carrying bundles.
“What’s your hurry?” called one.
“Master Man is after me!”
“Relax,” said the porter. “No one can fight us all.”
Just then the ground quaked, and they all bounced into the air. The porters fell in a heap, all mixed up with their bundles.
“What was that?” asked the porter.
“That was Master Man!”
“Then run for your life!” And the ten porters bolted from the path.
Shadusa ran on till he rounded a bend—then he stopped short. There beside the path sat a stranger, and there beside the stranger lay a huge pile of elephant bones.
“What’s your hurry?” growled the stranger.
“Master Man is after me,” moaned Shadusa.
“You better not say so—’cause I’m Master Man!”
From behind Shadusa came another ROAR, and once again he bounced into the air. The stranger caught him in one hand as Master Man ran up.
“Let me have him!” bellowed Master Man.
“Come and get him!” growled the stranger.
Master Man lunged, but the stranger tossed Shadusa into a tree. Then the two strong men wrapped themselves around each other and wrestled across the ground.
The noise of the battle nearly deafened Shadusa. The dust choked him. The trembling of the tree nearly shook him down.
As Shadusa watched, the two men struggled to their feet, still clutching each another. Then each gave a mighty leap, and together they rose into the air. Higher and higher they went, till they passed through a cloud and out of sight.
Shadusa waited and waited, but the men never came back down. At last he climbed carefully from the tree, then ran and ran and never stopped till he got home safe and sound. And he never called himself Master Man again.
As for those other two, they’re still in the clouds, where they battle on to this day. Of course, they rest whenever they’re both worn out. But sooner or later they start up again, and what a noise they make!
Some people call that noise thunder. But now you know what it really is—two fools fighting forever to see which one is Master Man.
The Tortoise, the Dog and the Farmer
Once upon a time, there was a famine in the land of Kurumi in southwestern Nigeria, everyone was looking rather thin and unhealthy because very limited food was available. However the tortoise observed that his friend, the dog has looking very rosy and fat. He wondered what the secret of the dog?s well being was and decided to pay him a visit and find out:
Tortoise: My good friend, you know we have been friends for a very long time, please tell me the secret of your rosy cheeks and your fat stomach so that I do not die of hunger.
Dog: There is no secret to it my good friend, it’s just hard work and living a peaceful and serene life.
Tortoise: My friend, do you like as I?m looking haggard, I know that you have found a way to beat this general hunger, please tell me, I can keep a secret.
Dog: Tortoise my friend, I have told you there is no secret or do you think I?d lie to you?
The tortoise wasn?t satisfied, he knew that somehow, the dog had managed to find a source of living not known to anyone. So he decided to shadow the dog?s movements the next day. He observed the dog leave home very early in the morning with a basket and tailed him all the way to the neighboring village making sure he was at some safe distance behind the dog all the time.
The dog made way to a farm and after looking around to make sure that no one was watching started harvesting yam off the farm into his basket. The tortoise then made his presence known to the Dog:
Tortoise: (shouting) So my friend, this is the secret of your rosy living and you refused to tell me!!
Dog: (Jumping up in fright) Tortoise, why did you follow me here? Well now you know my secret. But if you want to come with me you must come only with me and leave before 6pm when the farmer comes.
Tortoise: I promise! I promise
So did the tortoise follow the dog each day to the farm and came back with a basket full of yam. However each day the quantity of yam harvested by the tortoise increased and with the increase both the dog and the tortoise had left the farm for home a little later each day than the day before. The dog then decided to caution the tortoise:
Dog: My good friend tortoise, The quantity of yam you take home each day is becoming too much, yesterday, we left for home at 5.45pm, the farmer may catch us and then we are done for.
Tortoise: Don?t worry my friend, I?m storing enough yam at home for the rainy day. The farmer will never catch us.
Dog: I don?t think you should be greedy; you could get us killed if we harvest too much yam than we can carry easily enough to escape being caught by the farmer.
Tortoise: You dare call me greedy! I don?t? think it’s any of your business how much yam I carry.
So the next day, at 5.30 prompt the dog announced that he was leaving for home. But the tortoise pleaded for some more time to harvest yam. At ten minutes to six the dog put his basket on his head and started heading home. The tortoise noticed this shouted after the dog.
Tortoise: Wait for me, wait for me, I can?t carry my basket alone, it?s to heavy. I need you to assist me put it on my head.
However the dog refused to listen and made haste to avoid the farmer, then the tortoise started crying and singing asking the dog to come back to help him lift his basket or else he (the tortoise) would start a raucous that will attract he farmer?s attention which will mean the death of both of them.
But the dog by then had long gone. The farmer arrived his farm and met the tortoise with a basketful of his yam crying and singing. He promptly descended on the tortoise crying THIEF!! THIEF!!
Immediately a crowd gathered around and the tortoise was brought before the king who decreed that the tortoise be hanged in the market square.
Tanzanian Folktales
The Ape, the Snake, and the Lion
Long, long ago there lived, in a village called Keejee′jee, a woman whose husband died, leaving her with a little baby boy. She worked hard all day to get food for herself and child, but they lived very poorly and were most of the time half-starved.
When the boy, whose name was ’Mvoo′ Laa′na, began to get big, he said to his mother, one day: “Mother, we are always hungry. What work did my father do to support us?”
His mother replied: “Your father was a hunter. He set traps, and we ate what he caught in them.”
“Oho!” said ’Mvoo Laana; “that’s not work; that’s fun. I, too, will set traps, and see if we can’t get enough to eat.”
The next day he went into the forest and cut branches from the trees, and returned home in the evening.
The second day he spent making the branches into traps.
The third day he twisted cocoanut fiber into ropes.
The fourth day he set up as many traps as time would permit.
The fifth day he set up the remainder of the traps.
The sixth day he went to examine the traps, and they had caught so much game, beside what they needed for themselves, that he took a great quantity to the big town of Oongoo′ja, where he sold it and bought corn and other things, and the house was full of food; and, as this good fortune continued, he and his mother lived very comfortably.
But after a while, when he went to his traps he found nothing in them day after day.
One morning, however, he found that an ape had been caught in one of the traps, and he was about to kill it, when it said: “Son of Adam, I am Neea′nee, the ape; do not kill me. Take me out of this trap and let me go. Save me from the rain, that I may come and save you from the sun someday.”
So ’Mvoo Laana took him out of the trap and let him go.
When Neeanee had climbed up in a tree, he sat on a branch and said to the youth: “For your kindness I will give you a piece of advice: Believe me, men are all bad. Never do a good turn for a man; if you do, he will do you harm at the first opportunity.”
The second day, ’Mvoo Laana found a snake in the same trap. He started to the village to give the alarm, but the snake shouted: “Come back, son of Adam; don’t call the people from the village to come and kill me. I am Neeo′ka, the snake. Let me out of this trap, I pray you. Save me from the rain to-day, that I may be able to save you from the sun to-morrow, if you should be in need of help.”
So the youth let him go; and as he went he said, “I will return your kindness if I can, but do not trust any man; if you do him a kindness he will do you an injury in return at the first opportunity.”
The third day, ’Mvoo Laana found a lion in the same trap that had caught the ape and the snake, and he was afraid to go near it. But the lion said: “Don’t run away; I am Sim′ba Kong′way, the very old lion. Let me out of this trap, and I will not hurt you. Save me from the rain, that I may save you from the sun if you should need help.”
So ’Mvoo Laana believed him and let him out of the trap, and Simba Kongway, before going his way, said: “Son of Adam, you have been kind to me, and I will repay you with kindness if I can; but never do a kindness to a man, or he will pay you back with unkindness.”
The next day a man was caught in the same trap, and when the youth released him, he repeatedly assured him that he would never forget the service he had done him in restoring his liberty and saving his life.
Well, it seemed that he had caught all the game that could be taken in traps, and ’Mvoo Laana and his mother were hungry every day, with nothing to satisfy them, as they had been before. At last he said to his mother, one day: “Mother, make me seven cakes of the little meal we have left, and I will go hunting with my bow and arrows.” So she baked him the cakes, and he took them and his bow and arrows and went into the forest.
The youth walked and walked, but could see no game, and finally he found that he had lost his way, and had eaten all his cakes but one.
And he went on and on, not knowing whether he was going away from his home or toward it, until he came to the wildest and most desolate looking wood he had ever seen. He was so wretched and tired that he felt he must lie down and die, when suddenly he heard someone calling him, and looking up he saw Neeanee, the ape, who said, “Son of Adam, where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” replied ’Mvoo Laana, sadly; “I’m lost.”
“Well, well,” said the ape; “don’t worry. Just sit down here and rest yourself until I come back, and I will repay with kindness the kindness you once showed me.”
Then Neeanee went away off to some gardens and stole a whole lot of ripe paw-paws and bananas, and brought them to ’Mvoo Laana, and said: “Here’s plenty of food for you. Is there anything else you want? Would you like a drink?” And before the youth could answer he ran off with a calabash and brought it back full of water. So the youth ate heartily, and drank all the water he needed, and then each said to the other, “Good-bye, till we meet again,” and went their separate ways.
When ’Mvoo Laana had walked a great deal farther without finding which way he should go, he met Simba Kongway, who asked, “Where are you going, son of Adam?”
And the youth answered, as dolefully as before, “I don’t know; I’m lost.”
“Come, cheer up,” said the very old lion, “and rest yourself here a little. I want to repay with kindness to-day the kindness you showed me on a former day.”
So ’Mvoo Laana sat down. Simba Kongway went away, but soon returned with some game he had caught, and then he brought some fire, and the young man cooked the game and ate it. When he had finished he felt a great deal better, and they bade each other good-bye for the present, and each went his way.
After he had traveled another very long distance the youth came to a farm, and was met by a very, very old woman, who said to him: “Stranger, my husband has been taken very sick, and I am looking for someone to make him some medicine. Won’t you make it?” But he answered: “My good woman, I am not a doctor, I am a hunter, and never used medicine in my life. I cannot help you.”
When he came to the road leading to the principal city he saw a well, with a bucket standing near it, and he said to himself: “That’s just what I want. I’ll take a drink of nice well-water. Let me see if the water can be reached.”
As he peeped over the edge of the well, to see if the water was high enough, what should he behold but a great big snake, which, directly it saw him, said, “Son of
Adam, wait a moment.” Then it came out of the well and said: “How? Don’t you know me?”
“I certainly do not,” said the youth, stepping back a little.
“Well, well!” said the snake; “I could never forget you. I am Neeoka, whom you released from the trap. You know I said, ‘Save me from the rain, and I will save you from the sun.’ Now, you are a stranger in the town to which you are going; therefore hand me your little bag, and I will place in it the things that will be of use to you when you arrive there.”
So ’Mvoo Laana gave Neeoka the little bag, and he filled it with chains of gold and silver, and told him to use them freely for his own benefit. Then they parted very cordially.
When the youth reached the city, the first man he met was he whom he had released from the trap, who invited him to go home with him, which he did, and the man’s wife made him supper.
As soon as he could get away unobserved, the man went to the sultan and said: “There is a stranger come to my house with a bag full of chains of silver and gold, which he says he got from a snake that lives in a well. But although he pretends to be a man, I know that he is a snake who has power to look like a man.”
When the sultan heard this he sent some soldiers who brought ’Mvoo Laana and his little bag before him. When they opened the little bag, the man who was released from the trap persuaded the people that some evil would come out of it, and affect the children of the sultan and the children of the vizir.
Then the people became excited, and tied the hands of ’Mvoo Laana behind him.
But the great snake had come out of the well and arrived at the town just about this time, and he went and lay at the feet of the man who had said all those bad things about ’Mvoo Laana, and when the people saw this they said to that man: “How is this? There is the great snake that lives in the well, and he stays by you. Tell him to go away.”
But Neeoka would not stir. So they untied the young man’s hands, and tried in every way to make amends for having suspected him of being a wizard.
Then the sultan asked him, “Why should this man invite you to his home and then speak ill of you?”
And ’Mvoo Laana related all that had happened to him, and how the ape, the snake, and the lion had cautioned him about the results of doing any kindness for a man.
And the sultan said: “Although men are often ungrateful, they are not always so; only the bad ones. As for this fellow, he deserves to be put in a sack and drowned in the sea. He was treated kindly, and returned evil for good.”
Khamisi
Khamisi

Caribbean Folktales

Haitian Folktales
Wheeeeeeai
One hot summer day, Uncle Bouki was working hard in his garden. He had been digging and plowing for hours when at long last he decided it was time to quit.
“I’ve spent enough time in the garden,”, he said. “It’s time to make a little money for my labor.”
He then packed a big burlap sack with a great many yams and peas, and he set off for the market.
Uncle Bouki forgot to eat before he started walking, and when he was only halfway to the village, his stomach began to growl with hunger.
“My, my, I’ll have to find something to eat very soon,”, he said. He walked a little farther, and he came upon a man squatting by the side of the road.
When Uncle Bouki saw that the old man was eating, his stomach nearly leapt out of his body. You see, the old man was eating a bowl of calalou — crabmeat, pork, onion, okra and, naturally, a great many peppers. The old man was clearly relishing his feast, licking his lips and fingers.
“Hello,”, Uncle Bouki called, “how are you?”, He was dreaming of tasting some of that crabmeat — and perhaps some onions, too. Maybe, he thought, the old man would share the bowl with him.
But the old man was deaf, so he didn’t hear Uncle Bouki. He was so wrapped up in a haze of happiness as he devoured his food that he didn’t even notice poor Uncle Bouki.
“Please, sir,”, Uncle Bouki stepped closer, “could you tell me where I can get some of that fine food you’re feasting upon?”
Again, the old man didn’t answer, and Uncle Bouki’s mouth began to water. “Please,”, he begged, “just tell me what you call that fine repast you seem to be enjoying so?”
It just so happened that right at that moment, the old man bit down on a hot pepper, a pepper so hot that he felt as if his tongue had caught fire. He opened his mouth wide and wailed, “Wheeeeeeai!”
“Thank you!” said Uncle Bouki, “I’ve never heard of Wheeeeeeai.”
He smiled and hurried off to the market, determined to buy himself a big bowl of the stuff — or at least as much as 10 coins would purchase.
When Uncle Bouki reached the market, he hurried to sell his yams and peas. Then he began to walk from stall to stall, searching for this food discovery. At each stall he pulled out his coins and said, “Excuse me, I’d like to buy some Wheeeeeeai.”
Each time the vendor only laughed and said, “You must be mad!”
Everybody laughed at him and whispered behind his back, and that’s how Ti Malice heard the story.
When he learned that Uncle Bouki was searching for a treat called Wheeeeeeai, he had an idea. He hurried home, ahead of Uncle Bouki, and just around the bend from Uncle Bouki’s house, Ti Malice climbed down to the river and cut some cactus leaves and stuffed them into a burlap bag.
By the time Uncle Bouki had turned to walk home, he could think of nothing but finding some of that Wheeeeeeai. His stomach growled, and his mouth watered. His imagination soared. And all the way home he thought about Wheeeeeeai. He dreamed of how good it must taste!
Just before he rounded the last bend in the road, he saw Ti Malice.
“Good day, Uncle Bouki,”, Ti Malice said. “And how are you today?”
“I’m fine,”, Uncle Bouki said, “except I’m dying to eat a bowl of Wheeeeeeai. Do you know where I could find some, Ti Malice?”
Naturally, Ti Malice said he did. While Uncle Bouki was still walking home from the market, Ti Malice had placed a few oranges atop the cactus leaves in his burlap sack. And on top of these oranges he put a pineapple. And at the very top he placed a big potato.
“I just happen to have some Wheeeeeeai in this bag,”, he said. “Here you go.”
Uncle Bouki could not believe his great luck, and without thinking of all the tricks Ti Malice had played on him in the past, he reached into the sack.
He pulled out the potato. “This isn’t Wheeeeeeai,”, he complained.
“Reach in again,”, Ti Malice said. So Uncle Bouki did.
This time he pulled out the pineapple. “This isn’t Wheeeeeeai,”, he said, but he reached in again. Next he brought out the oranges. “And this isn’t Wheeeeeeai, Ti Malice. You’re making fun of me!”
“I’d never do that,”, Ti Malice said, smiling. “Reach in once more. I’m sure you’ll be surprised at what you find!”
So Uncle Bouki reached in one more time, and this time he touched those cactus leaves. The sharp needles pierced his hands, and he jumped into the air and cried, “Wheeeeeeai!”
Ti Malice grinned. “There you go, my friend,”, he said. “You’ve found your Wheeeeeeai!”
Jamaican Folktales
Anansi Stories
Anansi and Snake
Tiger was the undisputed king of the forest. Tiger Lilies were named after him. Tiger Moths were named after him. And the stories of the forest were called Tiger Stories.
Anansi was a nobody in the forest hierarchy. When the animals gathered together, they would ask idle questions like “Who is the strongest animal?”, or “Who is the bravest?”
All together, they would chorus “Tiger!”. And just to poke fun, they would say, “Who is the weakest?”, Like a church choir, they would all sing out “Anansi!”.
Anansi got sick and tired of it all.
One day he met Tiger face to face in the forest. Anansi bowed low to Tiger, but Tiger did not acknowledge Anansi in the least. He had no time to waste on such an insignificant speck.
“Tiger,”, said Anansi, “you have it all. Can’t you just ease me up and let me have one thing named after me?”
Tiger wanted to ignore Anansi, but his curiosity got the better of him. “And just what is it you want to bear your name, Anansi?”
“The stories,”, replied Anansi. “I want them to be called Anansi stories.”
Now Tiger loved those stories, and did not intend to give them up to this crawling nobody. Still, even the undisputed king of the forest needed a laugh sometimes. So he said to Anansi, “If you can do one small thing for me, I will let you call the stories Anansi stories or any other name you like.”
Anansi didn’t like the sound of this. “What one thing would that be, Tiger?”, he asked cautiously.
“Nothing too hard… just capture Snake for me by the end of the week, and all the stories will be known as Anansi stories forever more.”
Good thing Anansi had eight legs to stand on, because at least four of them buckled same time! This Snake was not your flimsy garden variety snake. Snake of the jungle was big. Very big. And Anansi was small. Very small.
But Anansi could think big, so he said “I’ll do it.”
At that, there was a huge burst of laughter from all the other animals who had been eavesdropping on the conversation. They went home, tears of amusement rolling down their faces.
Anansi went home, very worried. But thinking.
This was on Monday.
Next day…
Anansi went on the trail he knew Snake travelled on every day. He made a large noose out of a strong vine, and placed some of Snake’s favorite berries inside it. He hid in the bushes, holding the other end of the vine.
Snake came slithering along the path. He spied the berries and his mouth watered. But he also spied the noose. He lay the weight of his body on the vine, then reached in and ate the berries quickly. Anansi tried and tried but he could not pull the vine to close the noose. Snake’s body was too heavy!
Next day…
Anansi went a little further down Snake’s favorite trail, and dug a pit in the ground. He placed a luscious hand of ripe bananas in it, then smeared the sides of the pit with grease, so that Snake would slip in when he tried to get the bananas.
Snake came along the path. He spied the bananas and his mouth watered. But he also spied the grease. So he wrapped his tail around a thick tree trunk, then reached into the hole with his head and ate the bananas. If he had lips he would have licked them. He raised his head out of the pit, unwrapped his tail, and slithered away.
Next day…
Anansi made a square trap out of sticks, with spaces on three sides, and a door on the other. He put some mangoes inside. Soon a piglet came along and went straight for the mangoes. He didn’t notice when Anansi shut the door behind him. Anansi figured that Snake could get inside the trap through the spaces, but that he would be too fat to get out after he had eaten the piglet.
Snake came along, and saw the piglet. The creature was so terrified when he saw Snake that he went berserk, squealing at the top of his lungs and smashing the trap into pieces. The piglet fled into the bushes, and Snake’s mouth did not even get the chance to water. Anansi muttered to himself, “Fool-fool, good for nuttn pig.”
Next day…
It was Friday, the end of the week, and Anansi was still Snakeless. He went directly to Snake’s house, and sat outside, looking dejected. Snake came out and looked at Anansi in surprise. “But you bright, eeh? All week long you trying to catch me, and now you sitting here barefaced in mi yard?”
Anansi looked at Snake and sighed. “Yes, is true. But I was trying to catch you for a worthy cause. Now the other animals will continue to talk behind your back.”
“What you talking about, Anansi? What they saying about me?”
Anansi said, “Well, I really shouldn’t be telling you, but they saying that you believe you are the longest thing around, and that you think you are God’s gift to longness, when even the shortest bamboo around here is longer than you!”
Snake was outraged. “Measure me, Anansi, measure me! Cut down the longest bamboo you can find and let me shut up those backbiters!”
Anansi ran and cut down the longest bamboo. He rested it on the ground and Snake stretched out beside it. “Call them, Anansi. Let them see that nothing around here can test me!”
Anansi scratched his chin. “Well, Snake, there’s a problem. You look longer than the bamboo, but how do I know that when I go up by your head you not crawling up to look longer, and when I go down by your tail you not shifting down on that end?”
“Tie mi tail, then Anansi. if you don’t believe me.”
By this time curious animals were gathering around to watch.
Anansi tied Snake’s tail tightly to the bamboo with some vines. Then he said to Snake, “Stretch, Snake, Stretch. You almost there. Stretch till you eyes shut and you can’t stretch no more.”
Anansi had never seen a snake sweat. Snake stretched till his eyes were squeezed shut, and in a flash Anansi tied his head to the pole, then his middle.
The animals who had been watching were silent. There was no laughing at Anansi this time. He had said he would capture Snake, and he did.
And from that day to this, the stories have been called Anansi stories.
Jack Mandora, mi nuh choose none!
General Anansi Stories
How Anansi Came to America
By Michael Auld
The tale below is based on the artist’s 1980’s comic strip story “How Anansi Came to the Americas”. It is the first illustrated explanation of how Anansi came to the “New World”.
Anansi walked for many miles into the bush until he came upon some fresh tracks of a warthog. He followed the tracks deep into the grassland. Sometime later he saw signs which indicated that the warthog was not too far away. His mouth began to water. His stomach started to grumble. He dreamed of sinking his teeth into juicy roasted meat.
Upon reaching a patch of tall grass, Anansi saw the warthog lying on its side. The warthog had been killed by someone else. However, there was nobody around to claim it.
“Ah, I wonder who was so kind to leave this meat for me? Maybe it was my father Nyame the Sky God. Nyame must have seen that his son was tired and hungry”, Anansi thought to himself. “He took pity on me and struck the beast down with his lightening so that I would not have to do the hard work of killing it. I must thank Nyame.”, Anansi said.
Without giving thanks to Nyame, he quickly picked up some dry sticks and made a fire. Soon the warthog was roasting.
Before the roasted meat had time to cool, Anansi began to eat. He did not stop eating until he had eaten almost all of the meat, except for a piece of the foot.
Suddenly, Osebo the Leopard appeared out of the bushes carrying some firewood, a large gourd filled with water, and a cooking pot. He looked around for the warthog that he had killed. It was gone. However, in its place was Anansi the Spider, stuffed and pleased.
The story continues when Osebo pursues Anansi who hides out in a medicine bag around the neck of a captive woman on her wretched march into slavery. Anansi is unwittingly transported on to a slave ship bound for the Spanish Americas.
During his perilous journey in the hold of the ship, he has an encounter with Nyame. Anansi pleads with Nyame to return him home to Asanti. However, Nyame has another plan for Anansi.
“I am sending you somewhere, Anansi, but not to Asanti. You must go with these captives to the place called the New World.”, Nyame said.
“But, Nyame… These people are slaves! I did not have anything to do with them being here. They were the ones who brought me here. It is their misfortune to fall into the hands of the slave traders. Oh, Nyame, punish the people who deal in slavery… But send me back to my people.”, Anansi pleaded.
Anansi was not sent back to Asanti. Instead, he ended up in the New World. He arrived in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 against his will. There he became “The Comforter of the Enslaved”.
Source: Michael Auld. How Anansi Came to America. Anansi Stories. ‹http://www.anansistories.com/Anansi_Came_to_America.html›.
Khamisi
Khamisi

Largest African Diaspora Population (2018)

Countries with Largest African Diaspora Populations
Country
Total Population
Percent
Region
United States[1]
43,840,436
13.4
N. America
Brazil
14,517,961
8
S. America
Haiti
10,114,378
95
The Caribbean
Colombia[2]
4,944,400
10.6
S. America
France
2,694,574 – 5,389,148
4–8
Europe
Jamaica[2]
2,589,935
92.1
The Caribbean
United Kingdom[2]
1,953,157
3
Europe
Mexico
1,386,556
1
N. America
Canada[3]
1,198,540
3.5
N. America
Peru[2]
1,127,924
3.6
S. America
Cuba[2]
1,034,044
9.3
The Caribbean
Dominican Republic (Mulatto/ Multi-Raced)
1,029,535 (7,985,991)
10.9 (15.8)
The Caribbean
Venezuela
953,000
3.5[4]
N. America
Puerto Rico
879,121
9.8[1] – 12.4[4]
The Caribbean
Top Countries of African Diaspora by Percentage
Country
Percent
Total Population
Region
Haiti
95
10,114,378
The Caribbean
St. Kitts and Nevis (Racial Mixed)
92.5 (95.5)
(50,704)
The Caribbean
Barbados[2]
92.4
270,853
The Caribbean
Jamaica[2]
92.1
2,589,935
The Caribbean
The Bahamas[2]
90.6
301,366
The Caribbean
Turks and Caicos Islands (Racial Mixed)
87.6 (90.1)
(48,384)
The Caribbean
Antigua and Barbuda (Racial Mixed)
87.3 (92)
(88,211)
The Caribbean
Dominica (Racial Mixed)
86.6 (95.7)
(61,882)
The Caribbean
Grenada (Racial Mixed)
82.4 (95.7)
(107,382)
The Caribbean
St. Vincent and the Grenadines
72.8 (92.8)
94,511
The Caribbean
Netherlands Antilles
85
259,759
The Caribbean
Dominican Republic (Mulatto/ Multi-Raced)
84 (72.9)
8,475,600 (7,365,700)
The Caribbean
British Virgin Islands
76.3
27,317
The Caribbean
Virgin Islands (United States)
76
81,302
The Caribbean
French Guiana
66
186,602
S. America
References
SourceCanada.ca. "Statistics Canada." Statisitics. 2016. ‹https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/prof/details/page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo1=PR&Code1=01&Geo2=PR&Code2=01&Data=Count&SearchText=Canada&SearchType=Begins&SearchPR=01&B1=Visible%20minority&TABID=1›.
C.I.A. "The World Fact Book." Demographics. n.d. 2019. ‹https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html›.
U.S. Census Bureau. Quick Facts. Washington, D.C., 2018. ‹https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045218›.
WorldAtlas. Society. 2017. ‹https://www.worldatlas.com/society/›.
Khamisi
Khamisi

Adinkra Symbols

The adinkra symbols are originated and designed through the handiwork and tireless effort of Gyaman hene Nana Kwadwo Agyemang Adinkra of Gyaman people who originated from the Akan, Bono people of modern-day Ghana and the Ivory Coast.
Name
Symbol
Represents
Meaning
Aban

Strength, Seat of power, Authority, Magnificence
“Fortress" or "Castle”
Abe Dua

A symbol of wealth, resourcefulness, and self-sufficiency
“Palm tree”
Abusua Pa

A symbol that represents the strong bond shared by family members
“Good Family”
Adinkrahene

Greatness, Charisma, Leadership
“Chief of Adinkra Symbols”
Adwo

A symbol of peace, tranquility, and quiet
“Calmness”
Agyindawuru

Faithfulness, Alertness, Dutifulness

Akoben

A symbol of a call to action; Readiness, Vigilance, Wariness
“War Horn”
Akofena

Courage, Valor
“Sword of War”
Akoko Nan

Mercy, Nurturing
“The Leg of a Hen”
Akoma

Patience, Tolerance
“The Heart”
Akoma Ntoso

Understanding, Agreement
“Linked Hearts”
Ananse Ntontan

Wisdom, Creativity
“Spider's Web”
Ani Bere Enso Gya

A symbol of patience, self-containment, self-discipline, and self-control

Anyi Me Aye A

This symbol warns against ingratitude and disrespect.
“If You Will Not Praise Me”
Asaawa

A symbol of pleasure, sweetness and tenderness
“Sweet Berry”
Asase Ye Duru

Divinity Of Mother Earth
“The Earth has weight”
Asetena Pa

Affluent, Prosperity
“Good Living”
Awurade Baatanfo

A symbol that denotes nurturing and other motherlike nature of God to his people.
“God the Mother”
Aya

Endurance, Resourcefulness
“Fern”
Bese Saka

Affluence, Abundance, Unity
“Sack of cola nuts”
Bi Nka Bi

Peace, Harmony
“No one should bite the other”
Boa Me Na Me Mmoa Wo

Cooperation, Interdependence
“Help me and let me help you”
Boafo Ye Na

This symbol exemplifies concerned individuals who are passionate about helping out one another.
“Willing Helper”
Dame-Dame

Intelligence, Ingenuity
Name of a Board Game “Chequered”
Denkyem

Adaptability, Ceverness
“Crocodile”
Dono

Sppellation, Parise, Goodwill, Rhythm

Dono Ntoaso

A symbol of united action, communication and jubilation.

Duafe

Beauty, Hygiene, Feminine Qualities
“Wooden Comb”; A symbol of feminine consideration or good feminine qualities such as patience, prudence, fondness, love, and care.
Dwennimmen

Humility, Strength
“Ram's Horns”
Eban

Love, Safety, Security
“Fence”
Epa

Law, Justice, Slavery
“Handcuffs”; A symbol of captivity and slavery.
Ese Ne Tekrema

Friendship, Interdependence
“The Teeth And The Tongue”
Esono Anantam

This symbol signifies leadership, power and protective nature of the elephant.
“Elephant’s Footprint”
Fafanto

Tenderness, Gentleness
“Butterfly”; A symbol of tenderness, gentleness, honesty, and fragility.
Fawohodie

Independence, Freedom, Emancipation
“Independence”
Fihankra

Security, Safety
“House / Compound”; A symbol of brotherhood, safety, security, completeness, and solidarity.
Fofo

Jealousy, Envy
“A Yellow-Flowered Plant”; A symbole of warning against jealousy and covetousness.
Funtunfunefu Denkyemfunefu

Democracy, Unity In Diversity
“Siamese Crocodiles”; A symbol of democracy and cooperation.
Gye Nyame

Supremacy Of God
“Except for God”; Expresses the omnipotence and supremacy of God.
Gye Wani

This symbol represents fun, dance, and merry making.
“Enjoy Yourself”
Hwe Mu Dua

Examination, Quality Control
“Measuring Stick”; Represents best quality or quality control.
Hye Won Hye

Imperishability, Endurance
“What Which Cannot Be Burnt”; Represents forgiveness, endurance, and imperishability.
Kete Pa

Good Marriage
“Good Bed”
Kintinkantan

Arrogance, Extravagance
“Puffed up extravagance”; A symbol of arrogance and pompous.
Kokuromotie

Participation, Cooperation
“Thumb”; A symbol of participation or cooperation in what is happening.
Kramo Bone Amma Yeanhu Kramo Pa

Represents warning against deception and hypocrisy.

Kuronti Ne Akwamu

Democracy, Sharing Ideas, and Taking Counsel

Kwatakye Atiko

Bravery, Valor
“Hairstyle Of Kwatakye, A War Hero”
Kyemfere

Knowledge, Rarity, Heritage
“Potsherds”; A symbol that represents knowledge, experience, rarity, heritage, and heirloom.
Mako

Inequality
“Pepper”; A symbol of inequality and uneven development.
Mate Masie

Wisdom, Knowledge, Prudence
“What I hear, I keep”
Me Ware Wo

Commitment, Perseverance
“I shall marry you”
Mekyia Wo

Respect, Recognition
“I salute you”; A symbol of respect, recognition, and greeting.
Menso Wo Kenten

Self-Reliance, Economic Self-Determination
A symbol of industry, self-reliance, and economic self-determination.
Mframadan

Fortitude, Preparedness
“Wind-resistant house”; Depicts a well-ventilated, wind-resistant house, fortitude, and ability to confront and manage change.
Mmere Dane

Change, Life's Dynamics
“Time changes”
Mmusuyidee

Good Fortune, Sanctity
“That which removes ill luck”; A symbol of good fortune, sanctity, and spiritual strength.
Mo No Yo

Recognition, Praise
“Congratulations”
Mpatapo

Peacemaking, Reconciliation, Forgiveness
“Knot of reconciliation”
Mpuannum

Priestly Office, Loyalty, Adroitness
“Five tufts”
Mrammuo

Symbolizes life’s challenges.
“Crossing Paths”
Nante Yie

A symbol of farewell and leave.
“Goodbye”
Nea Onnim

Knowledge, Life-Long Education
Derived from the Akan proverb, Nea Onnim No Sua A Ohu, which translates to “He who does not know can know from learning”
Nea Ope Se Obedi Hene

Service, Leadership
“He who wants to be king”
Nkonsonkonson

Unity, Human Relations, Community
A symbol of unity, community, strength and human relations; “Chain links”
Nkotimsefo Mpua

Service, Loyalty, Adroitness, and Readiness to serve
“The hair style of court attendants”
Nkrabea

Destiny, Fate
“Destiny”
Nkyimu

Skillfulness, Precision
“Tree of god”
Nkyinkyim

Initiative, Dynamism, Versatility
Represents the tortous nature of life’s journey. It is derived from the Akan proverb, Obra kwan ye nkyinkyimii, which translates to “The path of life is a twist” or “Twisted”.
Nnampo Pa Baanu

Friendship, Fellowship, Interdependence
“Two Good Friends”
Nokore


A symbol meant to inspire truthfulness in people. It's transliteral meaning is “Truth”.
Nsaa

Excellence, Genuineness, Authenticity
Derived from the Akan proverb Nea onnim nsaa na oto n’ago, which translates to “he who does not know quality”. Nsaa is A type of woven cloth.
Nserewa

Abundance, Wealth, Affluence
“Cowry Shells”
Nsoromma

Guardianship, Faith, Dependency
Derived from the Akan word for “star”. It literally translates to “child of the heavens”. It is a symbol of faith, the belief in patronage, and dependency on a supreme being.
Nteasee

Cooperation, Understanding, Harmony

Nya Gyidie

Faith, Hope
“Have Faith”
Nyame Biribi Wo Soro

Hope, Inspiration
“God is in the heavens”
Nyame Dua

God's Protection And Presence
“Chain links”
Nyame Nnwu Na Mawu


Immortality of the human soul, faith in God to preserve one’s soul. The transliteral meaning is “God never dies, therefore I cannot die”.
Nyame Nti

Faith, Trust In God
“By God's grace”
Nyame Ye Ohene

Majesty / Supremacy Of God
“God is King”
Nyansapo

Wisdom, Ingenuity, Intelligence, Patience
“Wisdom knot”
Obohemmaa

Preciousness, Treasure, Rarity
“Diamond”
Odo Nnyew Fie Kwan

Power of love
“Love never loses its way home”
Okodee Mmowere

Bravery, Strength, Power
“Talons of the eagle”
Okuafo Pa

Diligence, Hard work, Entrepreneurship
“Good farmer”
Onyankopon Adom Nti Biribiara Beye Yie

Hope, Providence, Faith
“By God's grace, all will be well”
Osram Ne Nsoromma

Love, Faithfulness, Harmony
Symbolizes the significance of love, bonding and faithfulness in marriage. The tranliteral meaning is “The moon and the star”.
Owo Foro Adobe

Steadfastness, Prudence, Diligence
“Snake climbing the raffia tree”
Owuo Atwedee

Mortality of man
This symbol is derived from the Akan proverb, Owuo atwedee baakofoo moforo, which translates to “Dealth’s ladder is not climbed by just one person” or “The ladder of death”.
Pempamsie

Readiness, Steadfastness, Hardiness, Strength of unity
“Sew in readiness”
Sankofa



“Go back and get it”
Sepow

Authority, Justice
“Executioner’s knife”
Sesa Wo Suban

Transformation, Personal reflection
“Change your behavior”
Som Onyankopon

Devotion, the supremacy God
“Worship God”
Sunsum

The human spirit
“Soul”
Tabono

Strength, Persistence, Hard work, Unity of purpose
“Oars”
Tamfo Bebre

Ill will, Jealousy, Envy
Derived from the Akan phrase Otanfo Bebre, which literally means “an enemy will suffer” or “The enemy will stew in his own juice”.
Uac Nkanea

Technological advancement
“UAC lights”
Wawa Aba

Hardiness, Toughness, Perseverance
“Seed of the wawa tree”
Woforo Dua Pa A

Support, Cooperation, Encouragement
Derived from the Akan proverb, Woforo dua pa a na yepia wo, which translates to “it is when you climb a good tree that we give you a push”.
Wo Nsa Da Mu

Democracy, Pluralism, Inclusion, Participatory goverance
Derived from the Akan proverb, Wo nsa da mu a, wonni nnya wo, which translates to “if your hands are in the dish, people do not eat everything and leave you nothing”.
References
Graham, Y., & Hagan, K. (2022). Adinkra Icons. Retrieved from Adinkra Icons: ‹https://www.adinkraicons.dev/›
McDonald, J. (2004). Adinkra Index. Retrieved from West African Wisdom: Adinkra Symbols & Meanings: ‹http://adinkra.org/›






















































































Khamisi
Khamisi

“The Three Evils of Society” by Martin Luther King Jr.

MLK_The-Three-Evils-of-Society.mp3Mr. Chairman, friends and brothers in this first gathering of the National Conference on New Politics. Ladies and gentlemen. . .can you hear me in the back? (No) I don’t know if the Klan is in here tonight or not with all the troubles we’re having with these microphones. Seldom if ever. . . .has. . . .we’re still working with it.
As I was about to say, seldom if ever has such a diverse and truly ecumenical gathering convened under the egis of politics in our nation, and I want to commend the leadership of the National Conference on New Politics for all of the great work that they have done in making this significant convention possible. Indeed by our very nature we affirm that something new is taking place on the American political horizon. We have come here from the dusty plantations of the Deep South and the depressing ghettos of the North. We have come from the great universities and the flourishing suburbs. We have come from Appalachian poverty and from conscious stricken wealth. But we have come. And we have come here because we share a common concern for the moral health of our nation. We have come because our eyes have seen through the superficial glory and glitter of our society and observed the coming of judgment. Like the prophet of old, we have read the handwriting on the wall. We have seen our nation weighed in the balance of history and found wanting. We have come because we see this as a dark hour in the affairs of men.
For most of us this is a new mood. We are traditionally the idealists. We are the marchers from Mississippi and Selma and Washington, who staked our lives on the American Dream during the first half of this decade. Many assembled here campaigned lasciviously for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 because we could not stand ideally by and watch our nation contaminated by the 18th century policies of Goldwaterism. We were the hardcore activists who were willing to believe that Southerners could be reconstructed in the constitutional image. We were the dreamers of a dream – that dark yesterdays of mans inhumanity to man would soon be transformed into bright tomorrows of justice. Now it is hard to escape, the disillusionment and betrayal. Our hopes have been blasted and our dreams have been shattered. The promise of a Great Society was shipwrecked off the coast of Asia, on the dreadful peninsula of Vietnam. The poor, black and white, are still perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. What happens to a dream deferred? It leads to bewildering frustration and corroding bitterness.
I came to see this in a personal experience here in Chicago last summer. In all the speaking I have done in the United States before varied audiences, including some hostile whites, the only time I have ever been booed was one night in our regular weekly mass meetings by some angry young men of our movement. Now I went home that night with an ugly feeling. Selfishly I thought of my suffering and sacrifices over the last twelve years. Why would they boo one so close to them? But as I lay awake thinking. I finally came to myself. And I could not for the life of me have less impatience and understanding for those young men. For twelve years, I am others like me, have held out radiant promises of progress. I had preached to them about my dream. I had lectured to them about, the not to distant day when they would have freedom, all here, now. I had urged them to have faith in America and in white society. Their hopes had soared. They were now booing me because they felt that we were unable to deliver on our promises. They were booing because we had urged them to have faith in people who had too often proved to be unfaithful. They were now hostile because they were watching the dream that they had so readily accepted, turn into a frustrating nightmare. This situation is all the more ominous, in view of the rising expectations of men the world over. The deep rumblings that we hear today, the rumblings of discontent, is the thunder of disinherited masses rising from dungeons of oppressions to the bright hills of freedom. All over the world like a fever, freedom is spreading in the widest liberation movement in history. The great masses of people are determined to end the exploitation of their races and lands. And in one majestic chorus they are singing in the worlds of our freedom song, “ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around”.
And so the collision course is set. The people cry for freedom and the congress attempts to legislate repression. Millions, yes billions, are appropriated for mass murder; but the most meager pittance for foreign aid for international development is crushed in the surge of reaction. Unemployment rages at a major depression level in the black ghettos, but the bi-partisan response is an anti-riot bill rather than a serious poverty program. The modest proposals for model cities, rent supplement and rat control, pitiful as they were to began with, get caught in the maze of congressional inaction. And I submit to you tonight, that a congress that proves to be more anti-negro than anti-rat needs to be dismissed. It seems that our legislative assemblies have adopted Nero as their patron saint and are bent on fiddling while our cities burn.
Even when the people persist and in the face of great obstacles, develop indigenous leadership and self-help approaches to their problems and finally tread the forest of bureaucracy to obtain existing government funds, the corrupt political order seeks to crush even this beginning of hope. The case of CDGM in Mississippi is the most publicized example but it is a story repeated many times across our nation.
Our own experience here in Chicago is especially painfully present. After an enthusiastic approval by H. E. W’s Department of Adult Education, SCLC began an adult literacy project to aid 1,000 young men and women who have been pushed out of overcrowded ghetto schools, in obtaining basic [literary] skills prerequisite to receiving jobs. We had an agreement with A&P stores for 750 jobs through SCLC’s job program, Operation Breadbasket and had recruited over 500 pupils the first week. At that point Congressmen Paccinski and the Daley machine intervened and demanded that Washington cut off our funds or channel them through the machine-controlled poverty program in Chicago. Now we have no problem with administrative supervision, but we do have a desire to be independent of machine control and the Democratic Party patronage network. For this desire for a politically independent approach to the needs of our brothers, our funds are being stopped as of September 15th and a very meaningful program discontinued. Yes the hour is dark, evil comes fourth in the guise of good. It is a time of double talk when men in high places have a high blood pressure of deceptive rhetoric and an anemia of concrete performance.
We cry out against welfare handouts to the poor but generously approve an oil depletion allowance to make the rich, richer. Six Mississippi plantations receive more than a million dollars a year, not to plant cotton but no provision is made to feed the tenant farmer who is put out of work by the government subsidy. The crowning achievement in hypocrisy must go to those staunch Republicans and Democrats of the Midwest and West who were given land by our government when they came here as immigrants from Europe. They were given education through the land grant colleges. They were provided with agricultural agents to keep them abreast of forming trends, they were granted low interest loans to aid in the mechanization of their farms and now that they have succeeded in becoming successful, they are paid not to farm and these are the same people that now say to black people, who’s ancestors were brought to this country in chains and who were emancipated in 1863 without being given land to cultivate or bread to eat; that they must pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. What they truly advocate is Socialism for the rich and Capitalism for the poor.
I wish that I could say that this is just a passing phase in the cycles of our nation’s life; certainly times of war, times of reaction throughout the society but I suspect that we are now experiencing the coming to the surface of a triple prong sickness that has been lurking within our body politic from its very beginning. That is the sickness of racism, excessive materialism and militarism. Not only is this our nation’s dilemma it is the plaque of western civilization. As early as 1906 W. E. B Dubois prophesized that the problem of the 20th century, would be the problem of the color line, now as we stand two-thirds into this crucial period of history we know full well that racism is still that hound of hell which dogs the tracks of our civilization. Ever since the birth of our nation, White America has had a Schizophrenic personality on the question of race, she has been torn between selves. A self in which she proudly profess the great principle of democracy and a self in which she madly practices the antithesis of democracy. This tragic duality has produced a strange indecisiveness and ambivalence toward the Negro, causing America to take a step backwards simultaneously with every step forward on the question of Racial Justice; to be at once attracted to the Negro and repelled by him, to love and to hate him. There has never been a solid, unified and determined thrust to make justice a reality for Afro-Americans. The step backwards has a new name today, it is called the white backlash, but the white backlash is nothing new. It is the surfacing of old prejudices, hostilities and ambivalences that have always been there. It was caused neither by the cry of black power nor by the unfortunate recent wave of riots in our cities. The white backlash of today is rooted in the same problem that has characterized America ever since the black man landed in chains on the shores of this nation.
This does not imply that all White Americans are racist, far from it. Many white people have, through a deep moral compulsion fought long and hard for racial justice nor does it mean that America has made no progress in her attempt to cure the body politic of the disease of racism or that the dogma of racism has been considerably modified in recent years. However for the good of America, it is necessary to refute the idea that the dominant ideology in our country, even today, is freedom and equality while racism is just an occasional departure from the norm on the part of a few bigoted extremists. Racism can well be, that corrosive evil that will bring down the curtain on western civilization. Arnold Toynesbee has said that some twenty-six civilization have risen upon the face of the Earth, almost all of them have descended into the junk heap of destruction. The decline and fall of these civilizations, according to Toynesbee, was not caused by external invasion but by internal decay. They failed to respond creatively to the challenges impingent upon them. If America does not respond creatively to the challenge to banish racism, some future historian will have to say, that a great civilization died because it lacked the soul and commitment to make justice a reality for all men.
The second aspect of our afflicted society is extreme materialism, an Asian writer has portrayed our dilemma in candid terms, he says, “you call your thousand material devices labor saving machinery, yet you are forever busy. With the multiplying of your machinery you grow increasingly fatigued, anxious, nervous, dissatisfied. Whatever you have you want more and wherever you are you want to go somewhere else. Your devices are neither time saving nor soul saving machinery. They are so many sharp spurs which urge you on to invent more machinery and to do more business”. This tells us something about our civilization that cannot be caste aside as a prejudiced charge by an eastern thinker who is jealous of Western prosperity. We cannot escape the indictment. This does not mean that we must turn back the clock of scientific progress. No one can overlook the wonders that science has wrought for our lives. The automobile will not abdicate in favor of the horse and buggy or the train in favor of the stage coach or the tractor in favor of the hand plow or the scientific method in favor of ignorance and superstition. But our moral lag must be redeemed; when scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men. When we foolishly maximize the minimum and minimize the maximum we sign the warrant for our own day of doom.
It is this moral lag in our thing-oriented society that blinds us to the human reality around us and encourages us in the greed and exploitation which creates the sector of poverty in the midst of wealth. Again we have diluted ourselves into believing the myth that Capitalism grew and prospered out of the protestant ethic of hard word and sacrifice, the fact is that Capitalism was build on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor – both black and white, both here and abroad. If Negroes and poor whites do not participate in the free flow of wealth within our economy, they will forever be poor, giving their energies, their talents and their limited funds to the consumer market but reaping few benefits and services in return. The way to end poverty is to end the exploitation of the poor, ensure them a fair share of the government services and the nation’s resources. I proposed recently that a national agency be established to provide employment for everyone needing it. Nothing is more socially inexcusable than unemployment in this age. In the 30s when the nation was bankrupt it instituted such an agency, the WPA, in the present conditions of a nation glutted with resources, it is barbarous to condemn people desiring work to soul sapping inactivity and poverty. I am convinced that even this one, massive act of concern will do more than all the state police and armies of the nation to quell riots and still hatreds. The tragedy is, our materialistic culture does not possess the statesmanship necessary to do it. Victor Hugo could have been thinking of 20th Century America when he wrote, “there’s always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher classes”. The time has come for America to face the inevitable choice between materialism and humanism. We must devote at least as much to our children’s education and the health of the poor as we do to the care of our automobiles and the building of beautiful, impressive hotels.
We must also realize that the problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power. We must further recognize that the ghetto is a domestic colony. Black people must develop programs that will aid in the transfer of power and wealth into the hands of residence of the ghetto so that they may in reality control their own destinies. This is the meaning of New Politics. People of will in the larger community, must support the black man in this effort.
The final phase of our national sickness is the disease of militarism. Nothing more clearly demonstrates our nation’s abuse of military power than our tragic adventure in Vietnam. This war has played havoc with the destiny of the entire world. It has torn up the Geneva Agreement, it has seriously impaired the United Nations, it has exacerbated the hatred between continents and worst still between races. It has frustrated our development at home, telling our own underprivileged citizens that we place insatiable military demands above their critical needs. It has greatly contributed to the forces of reaction in America and strengthened the military industrial complex. And it has practically destroyed Vietnam and left thousands of American and Vietnamese youth maimed and mutilated and exposed the whole world to the risk of nuclear warfare. Above all, the War in Vietnam, has revealed what Senator Fulbright calls, “our nations arrogance of power”. We are arrogant in professing to be concerned about the freedom of foreign nations while not setting our own house in order. Many of our Senators and Congressmen vote joyously to appropriate billions of dollars for the War in Vietnam and many of these same Senators and Congressmen vote loudly against a Fair Housing Bill to make it possible for a Negro veteran of Vietnam to purchase a decent home. We arm Negro soldiers to kill on foreign battlefields but offer little protection for their relatives from beatings and killings in our own South. We are willing to make a Negro 100% of a citizen in Warfare but reduce him to 50% of a citizen on American soil.
No war in our nation’s history has ever been so violative of our conscious, our national interest and so destructive of our moral standing before the world. No enemy has ever been able to cause such damage to us as we inflict upon ourselves. The inexorable decay of our urban centers has flared into terrifying domestic conflict as the pursuit of foreign war absolves our wealth and energy. Squalor and poverty scar our cities as our military might destroy cities in a far off land to support oligarchy, to intervene in domestic conflict. The President who cherishes consensus for peace has intensified the war in answer to a cry to stop the war. It has brought tauntingly to one minutes flying time from China to a moment before the midnight of world conflagration. We are offered a tax for war instead of a plan for peace. Men of reason should no longer debate, the merits of war or means of financing war. They should end the war and restore sanity and humanity to American policy. And if the will of the people continue to be unheeded, all men of free will must create a situation in which the 1967, 68 are made a referendum on the War. The American people must have an opportunity to vote into oblivion those who cannot detach themselves from militarism, and those that lead us.
So we are here because we believe, we hope, we pray that something new might emerge in the political life of this nation which will produce a new man, new structures and new institutions and a new life for mankind. I am convinced that this new life will not emerge until our nation undergoes a radical revolution of values. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people the giant triplets of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s road side, but that will only be an initial act. One day the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be beaten and robbed as they make their journey through life. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar, it understands that an edifice which produces beggars, needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth, with righteous indignation it will look at thousands of working people displaced from their jobs, with reduced incomes as a result of automation while the profits of the employers remain in tact and say, this is not just. It will look across the ocean and see individual Capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia and Africa only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries and say, this is not just. It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, this is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, this way of settling differences is not just. This business of burning human being with napalm, of filling our nation’s home with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normal humane, of sending men home from dark and bloodied battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year, to spend more money on military defense then on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
So what we must all see is that these are revolutionary times All over the globe, men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot of the Earth are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the west must support these revolutions, it is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of Communism and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit and in a sense, Communism is a judgment of our failure to make democracy real and to follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world, declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism. With this powerful commitment, we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust [morals?] and thereby speed the day when every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be made low and the crooked places shall be made straight and the rough places plain.
May I say in conclusion that there is a need now, more than ever before, for men and women in our nation to be creatively maladjusted. Mr. Davis said, and I say to you that I choose to be among the maladjusted, as my good friend Bill Coughlin said there are those who have criticized me and many of you for taking a stand against the War in Vietnam and for seeking to say to the nation that the issues of Civil Rights cannot be separated from the issues of peace.
I want to say to you tonight that I intend to keep these issues mixed because they are mixed. Somewhere we must see that justice is indivisible, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere and I have fought to long and to hard against segregated public accommodations to end up at this point in my life, segregating my moral concerns.
So let us stand in this convention knowing that on some positions; cowardice asks the questions, is it safe; expediency asks the question, is it politic; vanity asks the question, is it popular, but conscious asks the question, is it right. And on some positions, it is necessary for the moral individual to take a stand that is neither safe, nor politic nor popular; but he must do it because it is right. And we say to our nation tonight, we say to our Government, we even say to our FBI, we will not be harassed, we will not make a butchery of our conscious, we will not be intimidated, and we will be heard.
Khamisi
Khamisi

Largest African Ethnic Groups – 2019

Overall Largest African Ethnic Groups
Ethnic group, People, or Tribe
Population (#)
Language Family
Countries
Region
Berber
Arab-Berber

Afro-Asiatic, Semitic
Maghreb (Mauritania, Morocco, Western Sahara), Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya
North Afrika
Berber

Maghrebis

Hausa
40,000,000 – 45,000,000
Afro-Asiatic, Chadic
Nigeria, Niger, Benin, Ghana, Cameroon, Chad, Sudan
West Afrika
Yoruba
45,993,000 – 47,000,000
Niger–Congo, Volta–Niger
Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone
West Afrika
Igbo
32,684,301 – 35,000,000
Niger–Congo, Volta–Niger
Nigeria
West Afrika
Oromo
37,731,489 – 39,000,000
Afro-Asiatic, Cushitic
Ethiopia
Horn of Afrika
Mandé
Mandé
30,000,000 – 40,000,000
Niger-Congo, Mande
Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau
West Afrika
Mandinka
18,000,000 – 19,000,000
Hutu
23,000,000 – 25,000,000
Niger–Congo, Bantu
Rwanda, Burundi, and DR Congo
Central Afrika
Fulani
20,000,000 – 30,000,000
Niger-Congo, Senegambian
Nigeria, Guinea, Senegal, Mali, Cameroon, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Benin, Guinea-Bissau, Gambia, Ivory Coast, Chad, Central African Republic, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Togo
The Sahel and West Afrika
Akan
20,000,000
Niger–Congo, Kwa
Ghana, Ivory Coast
West Afrika
Somalis

Afro-Asiatic, Cushitic
Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya
Horn of Afrika
Amhara
19,867,817
Afro-Asiatic, Semitic
Ethiopia
Horn of Afrika
Mandinka
18,000,000 – 19,000,000
Niger-Congo, Mande
Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau
West Afrika
Kongo
17,254,808
Niger–Congo, Bantu
DR Congo, Angola, Congo Republic
Central Afrika
Shona

Niger–Congo, Bantu
Zimbabwe and Mozambique
East Afrika
Zulu
13,234,900 – 14,159,000
Niger–Congo, Bantu
South Africa
Southern Afrika
Chewa
12,000,000
Niger–Congo, Bantu
Malawi, Zambia
Central Afrika
Kanuri

Nilo-Saharan
Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon
Central Afrika
Mongo

Niger–Congo, Bantu
Congo, Democratic Republic
Central Afrika
Largest African Ethnic Groups by Country

Countries
Ethnic group/ People/ Tribe
Population (%)
Language Family
Algeria
Arab-Berber
99 %
Afro-Asiatic, Berber

Angola
Ovimbundu (a.k.a. Southern Mbundu)
37%
Bantu

Benin
Fon
38.4%
Niger–Congo, Gbe

Botswana
Tswana
79%
Bantu

Burkina Faso
Mossi
52%
Niger-Congo, Gur

Burundi
Hutu (a.k.a. Abahutu)
85%
Bantu

Cameroon
Cameroon Highlanders
31%


Cabo Verde
Creole Mulatto
71%


Central African Republic
Gbaya
20% – 26%
Niger-Congo, Gbaya–Manza–Ngbaka

Chad
Sara
25.9%
Nilo-Saharan

Comoros
Afro-Arab
86%
Bantu

Congo, Democratic Republic
Mongo
12%
Bantu

Congo, Republic
Kongo
40.5% – 48%
Bantu

Côte d’Ivoire
Akan
28.9% – 42.1%
Niger-Congo, Kwa

Djibouti
Somali
60%
Afro-Asiatic, Cushitic

Egypt
Egyptian
99.6%
Afro-Asiatic, Semitic

Equatorial Guinea
Fang
85.7%
Bantu

Eritrea
Tigrinya
55%
Afro-Asiatic, Semitic

Eswatini
Swazi
84.3%
Bantu

Ethiopia
Oromo
34.4%
Afro-Asiatic, Cushitic

Gabon
Fang
23.2%
Bantu

The Gambia
Mandinka/ Jahanka
34%
Niger-Congo, Mande

Ghana
Akan
47.5%
Niger-Congo, Kwa

Guinea
Fulani
33.9%
Niger-Congo, Senegambian

Guinea-Bissau
Fulani
28.5%
Niger-Congo, Senegambian

Kenya
Kikuyu
17.1%
Bantu

Lesotho
Sotho
99.7%
Southern Bantu

Liberia
Kpelle
17.1 % – 20.3%
Niger-Congo, Mande

Libya
Arab-Berber
97%
Afro-Asiatic, Berber

Madagascar
Merina
26%
Austronesian, Barito

Malawi
Chewa
34.3%
Bantu

Mali
Mandinka
52.5%
Niger-Congo, Mande

Mauritania
Haratin (a.k.a. Black Moors)
40%
Afro-Asiatic, Semitic & Berber

Mauritius
Indo-Mauritians
59.1%


Morocco
Arab-Berber
99%
Afro-Asiatic, Berber

Mozambique
Makhuwa
24.6%
Bantu

Namibia
Ovambo
49%
Bantu

Niger
Hausa
38.8%
Afro-Asiatic, Chadic

Nigeria
Hausa
30%
Afro-Asiatic, Chadic

Rwanda
Hutu
84%
Bantu

São Tomé & Príncipe
Mestiços
33%-68%


Senegal
Wolof
44.1%
Niger-Congo, Senegambian

Seychelles
Seychellois Creole (mainly of East African and Malagasy heritage)
78.3%


Sierra Leone
Temne
28.4% – 35%
Niger-Congo, Mel

Somalia
Somali
79% – 85%
Afro-Asiatic, Cushitic

South Africa
Zulu
23.7 %
Southern Bantu

South Sudan
Dinka
35.8%
Nilo-Saharan

Sudan
Sudanese Arab
70%
Afro-Asiatic, Semitic

Tanzania
Sukuma
17.7%
Bantu

Togo
Adja-Ewe
37%-42.4%
Niger-Congo, Gbe

Tunisia
Arab-berber
98%
Afro-Asiatic, Berber

Uganda
Baganda
16.5%
Great Lakes Bantu

Zambia
Bemba
21%
Bantu

Zimbabwe
Shona
82%
Bantu

Sources
C.I.A. "The World Fact Book." Demographics. n.d. 2019. ‹https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html›.
Dept. of Statistics, South Africa. Mid-year population estimates. Stats Release. Pretoria: Statisitcs South Africa, 2020. ‹http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0302/P03022020.pdf›.
WorldAtlas. Society. 2017. ‹https://www.worldatlas.com/society/›.
Khamisi
Khamisi

‘What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July?’: Descendants Read Frederick Douglass’ Speech

The U.S. celebrates this Independence Day amid nationwide protests and calls for systemic reforms. In this short film, five young descendants of Frederick Douglass read and respond to excerpts of his famous speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” which asks all of us to consider America’s long history of denying equal rights to Black Americans.
Khamisi
Khamisi

“What Shall Be Done with the Slaves if Emancipated?” by Frederick Douglass

Douglass’ Monthly, January, 1862 
It is curious to observe, at this juncture, when the existence of slavery is threatened by an aroused nation, when national necessity is combining with an enlightened sense of justice to put away the huge abomination forever, that the enemies of human liberty are resorting to all the old and ten thousand times refuted objections to emancipation with which they confronted the abolition movement twenty-five years ago. Like the one stated above, these proslavery objections have their power mainly in the slavery engendered prejudice, which every where pervades the country. Like all other great transgressions of the law of eternal rectitude, slavery thus produces an element in the popular and depraved moral sentiment favorable to its own existence. These objections are often urged with a show of sincere solicitude for the welfare of the slaves themselves. It is said, what will you do with them? they can’t take care of themselves; they would all come to the North; they would not work; they would become a burden upon the State, and a blot upon society; they’d cut their masters’ throats; they would cheapen labor, and crowd out the poor white laborer from employment; their former masters would not employ them, and they would necessarily become vagrants, paupers and criminals, overrunning all our alms houses, jails and prisons. The laboring classes among the whites would come in bitter conflict with them in all the avenues of labor, and regarding them as occupying places and filling positions which should be occupied and filled by white men; a fierce war of races would be the inevitable consequence, and the black race would, of course, (being the weaker,) be exterminated. In view of this frightful, though happily somewhat contradictory picture, the question is asked, and pressed with a great show of earnestness at this momentous crisis of our nation’s history, What shall be done with the four million slaves if they are emancipated?
This question has been answered, and can be answered in many ways. Primarily, it is a question less for man than for God—less for human intellect than for the laws of nature to solve. It assumes that nature has erred; that the law of liberty is a mistake; that freedom, though a natural want of the human soul, can only be enjoyed at the expense of human welfare, and that men are better off in slavery than they would or could be in freedom; that slavery is the natural order of human relations, and that liberty is an experiment. What shall be done with them?
Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone. They suffer by every interference, and succeed best by being let alone. The Negro should have been let alone in Africa—let alone when the pirates and robbers offered him for sale in our Christian slave markets— (more cruel and inhuman than the Mohammedan slave markets)—let alone by courts, judges, politicians, legislators and slave drivers—let alone altogether, and assured that they were thus to be let alone forever, and that they must now make their own way in the world, just the same as any and every other variety of the human family. As colored men, we only ask to be allowed to do with ourselves, subject only to the same great laws for the welfare of human society which apply to other men, Jews, Gentiles, Barbarian, Sythian. Let us stand upon our own legs, work with our own hands, and eat bread in the sweat of our own brows. When you, our white fellow countrymen, have attempted to do anything for us, it has generally been to deprive us of some right, power or privilege which you yourself would die before you would submit to have taken from you. When the planters of the West Indies used to attempt to puzzle the pure minded Wilberforce with the question, How shall we get rid of slavery? his simple answer was, “quit stealing.” In like manner, we answer those who are perpetually puzzling their brains with questions as to what shall be done with the Negro, “let him alone and mind your own business.” If you see him plowing in the open field, leveling the forest, at work with a spade, a rake, a hoe, a pickaxe, or a bill—let him alone; he has a right to work. If you see him on his way to school, with spelling book, geography and arithmetic in his hands—let him alone. Don’t shut the door in his face, nor bolt your gates against him; he has a right to learn—let him alone. Don’t pass laws to degrade him. If he has a ballot in his hand, and is on his way to the ballot box to deposit his vote for the man whom he thinks will most justly and wisely administer the Government which has the power of life and death over him, as well as others—let him alone; his right of choice as much deserves respect and protection as your own. If you see him on his way to the church, exercising religious liberty in accordance with this or that religious persuasion—let him alone.—Don’t meddle with him, nor trouble yourselves with any questions as to what shall be done with him.
The great majority of human duties are of this negative character. If men were born in need of crutches, instead of having legs, the fact would be otherwise. We should then be in need of help, and would require outside aid; but according to the wiser and better arrangement of nature, our duty is done better by not hindering than by helping our fellowmen; or, in other words, the best way to help them is just to let them help themselves.
We would not for one moment check the outgrowth of any benevolent concern for the future welfare of the colored race in America or elsewhere; but in the name of reason and religion, we earnestly plead for justice before all else. Benevolence with justice is harmonious and beautiful; but benevolence without justice is a mockery. Let the American people, who have thus far only kept the colored race staggering between partial philanthropy and cruel force, be induced to try what virtue there is in justice. First pure, then peaceable—first just, then generous.—The sum of the black man’s misfortunes and calamities are just here: He is everywhere treated as an exception to all the general rules which should operate in the relations of other men. He is literally scourged beyond the beneficent range of truth and justice.—With all the purifying and liberalizing power of the Christian religion, teaching, as it does, meekness, gentleness, brotherly kindness, those who profess it have not yet even approached the position of treating the black man as an equal man and a brother. The few who have thus far risen to this requirement, both of reason and religion, are stigmatized as fanatics and enthusiasts.
What shall be done with the Negro if emancipated? Deal justly with him. He is a human being, capable of judging between good and evil, right and wrong, liberty and slavery, and is as much a subject of law as any other man; therefore, deal justly with him. He is, like other men, sensible of the motives of reward and punishment. Give him wages for his work, and let hunger pinch him if he don’t work. He knows the difference between fullness and famine, plenty and scarcity. “But will he work?” Why should he not? He is used to it. His hands are already hardened by toil, and he has no dreams of ever getting a living by any other means than by hard work. But would you turn them all loose? Certainly! We are no better than our Creator. He has turned them loose, and why should not we?
But would you let them all stay here?—Why not? What better is here than there? Will they occupy more room as freemen than as slaves? Is the presence of a black freeman less agreeable than that of a black slave? Is an object of our injustice and cruelty a more ungrateful sight than one of your justice and benevolence? You have borne the one more than two hundred years—can’t you bear the other long enough to try the experiment? “But would it be safe?” No good reason can be given why it would not be. There is much more reason for apprehension from slavery than from freedom. Slavery provokes and justifies incendiarism, murder, robbery, assassination, and all manner of violence.— But why not let them go off by themselves? That is a matter we would leave exclusively to themselves. Besides, when you, the American people, shall once do justice to the enslaved colored people, you will not want to get rid of them. Take away the motive which slavery supplies for getting rid of the free black people of the South, and there is not a single State, from Maryland to Texas, which would desire to be rid of its black people. Even with the obvious disadvantage to slavery, which such contact is, there is scarcely a slave State which could be carried for the unqualified expulsion of the free colored people. Efforts at such expulsion have been made in Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina, and all have failed, just because the black man as a freeman is a useful member of society. To drive him away, and thus deprive the South of his labor, would be as absurd and monstrous as for a man to cut off his right arm, the better to enable himself to work.
There is one cheering aspect of this revival of the old and threadbare objections to emancipation—it implies at least the presence of danger to the slave system. When slavery was assailed twenty-five years ago, the whole land took the alarm, and every species of argument and subterfuge was resorted to by the defenders of slavery. The mental activity was amazing; all sorts of excuses, political, economical, social, theological and ethnological, were coined into barricades against the advancing march of anti-slavery sentiment. The same activity now shows itself, but has added nothing new to the argument for slavery or against emancipation.—When the accursed slave system shall once be abolished, and the Negro, long cast out from the human family, and governed like a beast of burden, shall be gathered under the divine government of justice, liberty and humanity, men will be ashamed to remember that they were ever deluded by the flimsy nonsense which they have allowed themselves to urge against the freedom of the long enslaved millions of our land. That day is not far off.
“O hasten it in mercy, gracious Heaven!“
Source
University of Rochester, Frederick Douglass Project
Khamisi
Khamisi

“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” by Frederick Douglass

On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass was invited to address the citizens of his hometown, Rochester, New York. Whatever the expectations of his audience on that 76th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Douglass used the occasion not to celebrate the nation’s triumphs but to remind all of its continuing enslavement of millions of people. Douglass’s speech appears below.
Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens: He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have. I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly, nor with greater distrust of my ability, than I do this day. A feeling has crept over me, quite unfavorable to the exercise of my limited powers of speech. The task before me is one which requires much previous thought and study for its proper performance. I know that apologies of this sort are generally considered flat and unmeaning. I trust, however, that mine will not be so considered. Should I seem at ease, my appearance would much misrepresent me. The little experience I have had in addressing public meetings, in country schoolhouses, avails me nothing on the present occasion.
The papers and placards say, that I am to deliver a 4th [of] July oration. This certainly sounds large, and out of the common way, for it is true that I have often had the privilege to speak in this beautiful Hall, and to address many who now honor me with their presence. But neither their familiar faces, nor the perfect gage I think I have of Corinthian Hall, seems to free me from embarrassment.
The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable—and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former, are by no means slight. That I am here today is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. You will not, therefore, be surprised, if in what I have to say, I evince no elaborate preparation, nor grace my speech with any high sounding exordium. With little experience and with less learning, I have been able to throw my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together; and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence, I will proceed to lay them before you.
This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. I am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands. According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny? Were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As with rivers so with nations.
Fellow-citizens, I shall not presume to dwell at length on the associations that cluster about this day. The simple story of it is that, 76 years ago, the people of this country were British subjects. The style and title of your “sovereign people” (in which you now glory) was not then born. You were under the British Crown . Your fathers esteemed the English Government as the home government; and England as the fatherland. This home government, you know, although a considerable distance from your home, did, in the exercise of its parental prerogatives, impose upon its colonial children, such restraints, burdens and limitations, as, in its mature judgment, it deemed wise, right and proper.
But, your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need say, fellow citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers. Such a declaration of agreement on my part would not be worth much to anybody. It would, certainly, prove nothing, as to what part I might have taken, had I lived during the great controversy of 1776. To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy. Everybody can say it; the dastard, not less than the noble brave, can flippantly discant on the tyranny of England towards the American Colonies. It is fashionable to do so; but there was a time when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers. But, to proceed.
Feeling themselves harshly and unjustly treated by the home government, your fathers, like men of honesty, and men of spirit, earnestly sought redress. They petitioned and remonstrated; they did so in a decorous, respectful, and loyal manner. Their conduct was wholly unexceptionable. This, however, did not answer the purpose. They saw themselves treated with sovereign indifference, coldness and scorn. Yet they persevered. They were not the men to look back.
As the sheet anchor takes a firmer hold, when the ship is tossed by the storm, so did the cause of your fathers grow stronger, as it breasted the chilling blasts of kingly displeasure. The greatest and best of British statesmen admitted its justice, and the loftiest eloquence of the British Senate came to its support. But, with that blindness which seems to be the unvarying characteristic of tyrants, since Pharaoh and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea, the British Government persisted in the exactions complained of.
The madness of this course, we believe, is admitted now, even by England; but we fear the lesson is wholly lost on our present ruler.
Oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers were wise men, and if they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment. They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression. Just here, the idea of a total separation of the colonies from the crown was born! It was a startling idea, much more so, than we, at this distance of time, regard it. The timid and the prudent (as has been intimated) of that day, were, of course, shocked and alarmed by it. Such people lived then, had lived before, and will, probably, ever have a place on this planet; and their course, in respect to any great change, (no matter how great the good to be attained, or the wrong to be redressed by it), may be calculated with as much precision as can be the course of the stars. They hate all changes, but silver, gold and copper change! Of this sort of change they are always strongly in favor.
These people were called Tories in the days of your fathers; and the appellation, probably, conveyed the same idea that is meant by a more modern, though a somewhat less euphonious term, which we often find in our papers, applied to some of our old politicians.
Their opposition to the then dangerous thought was earnest and powerful; but, amid all their terror and affrighted vociferations against it, the alarming and revolutionary idea moved on, and the country with it.
On the second of July, 1776, the old Continental Congress, to the dismay of the lovers of ease, and the worshipers of property, clothed that dreadful idea with all the authority of national sanction. They did so in the form of a resolution; and as we seldom hit upon resolutions, drawn up in our day whose transparency is at all equal to this, it may refresh your minds and help my story if I read it.
[We] solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of right, ought to be free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown; and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be [totally] dissolved.
Citizens, your fathers made good that resolution. They succeeded; and to-day you reap the fruits of their success. The freedom gained is yours; and you, therefore, may properly celebrate this anniversary. The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nation’s history —the very ring—bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny.
Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance. I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.
From the round top of your ship of state, dark and threatening clouds may be seen. Heavy billows, like mountains in the distance, disclose to the leeward huge forms of flinty rocks! That bolt drawn, that chain broken, and all is lost. Cling to this day—cling to it, and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight.
The coming into being of a nation, in any circumstances, is an interesting event. But, besides general considerations, there were peculiar circumstances which make the advent of this republic an event of special attractiveness.
The whole scene, as I look back to it, was simple, dignified and sublime.
The population of the country, at the time, stood at the insignificant number of three millions. The country was poor in the munitions of war. The population was weak and scattered, and the country a wilderness unsubdued. There were then no means of concert and combination, such as exist now. Neither steam nor lightning had then been reduced to order and discipline. From the Potomac to the Delaware was a journey of many days. Under these, and innumerable other disadvantages, your fathers declared for liberty and independence and triumphed.
Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too—great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.
They loved their country better than their own private interests; and, though this is not the highest form of human excellence, all will concede that it is a rare virtue, and that when it is exhibited, it ought to command respect. He who will, intelligently, lay down his life for his country, is a man whom it is not in human nature to despise. Your fathers staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, on the cause of their country. In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests.
They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was “settled” that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were “final;” not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times.
How circumspect, exact and proportionate were all their movements! How unlike the politicians of an hour! Their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment, and stretched away in strength into the distant future. They seized upon eternal principles, and set a glorious example in their defense. Mark them!
Fully appreciating the hardship to be encountered, firmly believing in the right of their cause, honorably inviting the scrutiny of an on-looking world, reverently appealing to heaven to attest their sincerity, soundly comprehending the solemn responsibility they were about to assume, wisely measuring the terrible odds against them, your fathers, the fathers of this republic, did, most deliberately, under the inspiration of a glorious patriotism, and with a sublime faith in the great principles of justice and freedom, lay deep the corner-stone of the national superstructure, which has risen and still rises in grandeur around you.
Of this fundamental work, this day is the anniversary. Our eyes are met with demonstrations of joyous enthusiasm. Banners and pennants wave exultingly on the breeze. The din of business, too, is hushed. Even Mammon seems to have quitted his grasp on this day. The ear-piercing fife and the stirring drum unite their accents with the ascending peal of a thousand church bells. Prayers are made, hymns are sung, and sermons are preached in honor of this day; while the quick martial tramp of a great and multitudinous nation, echoed back by all the hills, valleys and mountains of a vast continent, bespeak the occasion one of thrilling and universal interests nation’s jubilee.
Friends and citizens, I need not enter further into the causes which led to this anniversary. Many of you understand them better than I do. You could instruct me in regard to them. That is a branch of knowledge in which you feel, perhaps, a much deeper interest than your speaker. The causes which led to the separation of the colonies from the British crown have never lacked for a tongue. They have all been taught in your common schools, narrated at your firesides, unfolded from your pulpits, and thundered from your legislative halls, and are as familiar to you as household words. They form the staple of your national poetry and eloquence.
I remember also that as a people Americans are remarkably familiar with all facts which make in their own favor. This is esteemed by some as a national trait—perhaps a national weakness. It is a fact, that whatever makes for the wealth or for the reputation of Americans, and can be had cheap will be found by Americans. I shall not be charged with slandering Americans if I say I think the American side of any question may be safely left in American hands.
I leave, therefore, the great deeds of your fathers to other gentlemen whose claim to have been regularly descended will be less likely to be disputed than mine!
My business, if I have any here to-day, is with the present. The accepted time with God and his cause is the ever-living now.
Trust no future, however pleasant, Let the dead past bury its dead; Act, act in the living present, Heart within, and God overhead.
We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time. Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy a child’s share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence. Sydney Smith tells us that men seldom eulogize the wisdom and virtues of their fathers, but to excuse some folly or wickedness of their own. This truth is not a doubtful one. There are illustrations of it near and remote, ancient and modern. It was fashionable, hundreds of years ago, for the children of Jacob to boast, we have “Abraham to our father,” when they had long lost Abraham’s faith and spirit. That people contented themselves under the shadow of Abraham’s great name, while they repudiated the deeds which made his name great. Need I remind you that a similar thing is being done all over this country to-day? Need I tell you that the Jews are not the only people who built the tombs of the prophets, and garnished the sepulchres of the righteous? Washington could not die till he had broken the chains of his slaves. Yet his monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men, shout —”We have Washington to our father.”—Alas! that it should be so; yet so it is.
The evil that men do, lives after them, The good is oft’ interred with their bones.
Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? 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 tom 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. I 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 life 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 to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, lowering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day 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 I 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, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue 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 4th 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, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be fight and just. But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man, (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgement that the slave is a moral, intellectual and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws, in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, their will I argue with you that the slave is a man!
For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and cyphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; 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 hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!
Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively, and positively, negatively, and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.
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 bum 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 employments for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.
What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is past.
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
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 cruelly 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 denunciations 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 these 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. Take the American slave-trade, which, we are told by the papers, is especially prosperous just now. Ex-Senator Benton tells us that the price of men was never higher than now. He mentions the fact to show that slavery is in no danger. This trade is one of the peculiarities of American institutions. It is carried on in all the large towns and cities in one-half of this confederacy; and millions are pocketed every year, by dealers in this horrid traffic. In several states, this trade is a chief source of wealth. It is called (in contradistinction to the foreign slave-trade) “the internal slave trade.” It is, probably, called so, too, in order to divert from it the horror with which the foreign slave-trade is contemplated. That trade has long since been denounced by this government, as piracy. It has been denounced with burning words, from the high places of the nation, as an execrable traffic. To arrest it, to put an end to it, this nation keeps a squadron, at immense cost, on the coast of Africa. Everywhere, in this country, it is safe to speak of this foreign slave-trade, as a most inhuman traffic, opposed alike to the laws of God and of man. The duty to extirpate and destroy it, is admitted even by our doctors of divinity. In order to put an end to it, some of these last have consented that their colored brethren (nominally free) should leave this country, and establish themselves on the western coast of Africa! It is, however, a notable fact that, while so much execration is poured out by Americans upon those engaged in the foreign slave-trade, the men engaged in the slave-trade between the states pass without condemnation, and their business is deemed honorable.
Behold the practical operation of this internal slave-trade, the American slave-trade, sustained by American politics and America religion. Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our Southern States. They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation, with droves of human stock. You will see one of these human flesh-jobbers, armed with pistol, whip and bowie-knife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans. These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. They are food for the cotton-field, and the deadly sugar-mill. Mark the sad procession, as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them. Hear his savage yells and his blood-chilling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives! There, see the old man, with locks thinned and gray. Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes! weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn! The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength; suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream, that seems to have torn its way to the center of your soul! The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. Follow the drove to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me citizens, where, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States.
I was born amid such sights and scenes. To me the American slave-trade is a terrible reality. When a child, my soul was often pierced with a sense of its horrors. I lived on Philpot Street, Fell’s Point, Baltimore, and have watched from the wharves, the slave ships in the Basin, anchored from the shore, with their cargoes of human flesh, waiting for favorable winds to waft them down the Chesapeake. There was, at that time, a grand slave mart kept at the head of Pratt Street, by Austin Woldfolk. His agents were sent into every town and county in Maryland, announcing their arrival, through the papers, and on flaming hand-bills headed “Cash for Negroes.” These men were generally well dressed men, and very captivating in their manners. Ever ready to drink, to treat, and to gamble. The fate of many a slave has depended upon the turn of a single card; and many a child has been snatched from the arms of its mother by bargains arranged in a state of brutal drunkenness.
The flesh-mongers gather up their victims by dozens, and drive them, chained, to the general depot at Baltimore. When a sufficient number have been collected here, a ship is chartered, for the purpose of conveying the forlorn crew to Mobile, or to New Orleans. From the slave prison to the ship, they are usually driven in the darkness of night; for since the antislavery agitation, a certain caution is observed.
In the deep, still darkness of midnight I have been often aroused by the dead heavy footsteps, and the piteous cries of the chained gangs that passed our door. The anguish of my boyish heart was intense; and I was often consoled, when speaking to my mistress in the morning, to hear her say that the custom was very wicked; that she hated to hear the rattle of the chains, and the heart-rending cries. I was glad to find one who sympathized with me in my horror. Fellow-citizens, this murderous traffic is, to-day, in active operation in this boasted republic. In the solitude of my spirit, I see clouds of dust raised on the highways of the South; I see the bleeding footsteps; I hear the doleful wail of fettered humanity, on the way to the slave markets, where the victims are to be sold like horses, sheep and swine, knocked off to the highest bidder. There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men. My soul sickens at the sight.
Is this the land your Fathers loved, The freedom which they toiled to win? Is this the earth whereon they moved? Are these the graves they slumber in?
But a still more inhuman, disgraceful, and scandalous state of things remains to be presented. By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. By that act, Mason & Dixon’s line has been obliterated; New York has become as Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women, and children as slaves remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States. The power is co-extensive with the Star-Spangled Banner and American Christianity. Where these go, may also go the merciless slave-hunter. Where these are, man is not sacred. He is a bird for the sportsman’s gun. By that most foul and fiendish of all human decrees, the liberty and person of every man are put in peril. Your broad republican domain is hunting ground for men. Not for thieves and robbers, enemies of society, merely, but for men guilty of no crime. Your lawmakers have commanded all good citizens to engage in this hellish sport. Your President, your Secretary of State, your lords, nobles and ecclesiastics enforce, as a duty you owe to your free and glorious country, and to your God, that you do this accursed thing. Not fewer than forty Americans have, within the past two years, been hunted down and, without a moment’s warning, hurried away in chains, and consigned to slavery and excruciating torture. Some of these have had wives and children, dependent on them for bread; but of this, no account was made. The right of the hunter to his prey stands superior to the right of marriage, and to all rights in this republic, the rights of God included! For black men there are neither law, justice, humanity, not religion. The Fugitive Slave Law makes makes mercy to them a crime; and bribes the judge who tries them. An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he consigns to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so. The oath of any two villains is sufficient, under this hell-black enactment, to send the most pious and exemplary black man into the remorseless jaws of slavery! His own testimony is nothing. He can bring no witnesses for himself. The minister of American justice is bound by the law to hear but one side; and that side, is the side of the oppressor. Let this damning fact be perpetually told. Let it be thundered around the world, that, in tyrant-killing, king-hating, people-loving, democratic, Christian America, the seats of justice are filled with judges, who hold their offices under an open and palpable bribe, and are bound, in deciding in the case of a man’s liberty, to hear only his accusers!
In glaring violation of justice, in shameless disregard of the forms of administering law, in cunning arrangement to entrap the defenseless, and in diabolical intent, this Fugitive Slave Law stands alone in the annals of tyrannical legislation. I doubt if there be another nation on the globe, having the brass and the baseness to put such a law on the statute-book. If any man in this assembly thinks differently from me in this matter, and feels able to disprove my statements, I will gladly confront him at any suitable time and place he may select.
I take this law to be one of the grossest infringements of Christian Liberty, and, if the churches and ministers of our country were not stupidly blind, or most wickedly indifferent, they, too, would so regard it.
At the very moment that they are thanking God for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, and for the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences, they are utterly silent in respect to a law which robs religion of its chief significance, and makes it utterly worthless to a world lying in wickedness. Did this law concern the “mint, anise and cummin” —abridge the fight to sing psalms, to partake of the sacrament, or to engage in any of the ceremonies of religion, it would be smitten by the thunder of a thousand pulpits. A general shout would go up from the church, demanding repeal, repeal, instant repeal! And it would go hard with that politician who presumed to solicit the votes of the people without inscribing this motto on his banner. Further, if this demand were not complied with, another Scotland would be added to the history of religious liberty, and the stern old Covenanters would be thrown into the shade. A John Knox would be seen at every church door, and heard from every pulpit, and Fillmore would have no more quarter than was shown by Knox, to the beautiful, but treacherous queen Mary of Scotland. The fact that the church of our country, (with fractional exceptions), does not esteem “the Fugitive Slave Law” as a declaration of war against religious liberty, implies that that church regards religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man. It esteems sacrifice above mercy; psalm-singing above right doing; solemn meetings above practical righteousness. A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to mankind. The Bible addresses all such persons as “scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, who pay tithe of mint, anise, and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith.” But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of die slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines. who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.
For my part, I would say, Welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything—in preference to the gospel, as preached by those divines. They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke, put together, have done! These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action, nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty, and leave the throng of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that “pure and undefiled religion” which is from above, and which is “first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy.” But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation—a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. In the language of Isaiah, the American church might be well addressed, “Bring no more vain ablations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea! when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow.”
The American church is guilty, when viewed in connection with what it is doing to uphold slavery; but it is superlatively guilty when viewed in connection with its ability to abolish slavery.
The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission. Albert Barnes but uttered what the common sense of every man at all observant of the actual state of the case will receive as truth, when he declared that “There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it.”
Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday school, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery and slave-holding; and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds; and that they do not do this involves them in the most awful responsibility of which the mind can conceive.
In prosecuting the anti-slavery enterprise, we have been asked to spare the church, to spare the ministry; but how, we ask, could such a thing be done? We are met on the threshold of our efforts for the redemption of the slave, by the church and ministry of the country, in battle arrayed against us; and we are compelled to fight or flee. From what quarter, I beg to know, has proceeded a fire so deadly upon our ranks, during the last two years, as from the Northern pulpit? As the champions of oppressors, the chosen men of American theology have appeared—men, honored for their so-called piety, and their real learning. The Lords of Buffalo, the Springs of New York, the Lathrops of Auburn, the Coxes and Spencers of Brooklyn, the Gannets and Sharps of Boston, the Deweys of Washington, and other great religious lights of the land, have, in utter denial of the authority of Him, by whom the professed to he called to the ministry, deliberately taught us, against the example or the Hebrews and against the remonstrance of the Apostles, they teach “that we ought to obey man’s law before the law of God.”
My spirit wearies of such blasphemy; and how such men can be supported, as the “standing types and representatives of Jesus Christ,” is a mystery which I leave others to penetrate. In speaking of the American church, however, let it be distinctly understood that I mean the great mass of the religious organizations of our land. There are exceptions, and I thank God that there are. Noble men may be found, scattered all over these Northern States, of whom Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn, Samuel J. May of Syracuse, and my esteemed friend [Rev. R. R. Raymond] on the platform, are shining examples; and let me say further, that upon these men lies the duty to inspire our ranks with high religious faith and zeal, and to cheer us on in the great mission of the slave’s redemption from his chains.
One is struck with the difference between the attitude of the American church towards the anti-slavery movement, and that occupied by the churches in England towards a similar movement in that country. There, the church, true to its mission of ameliorating, elevating, and improving the condition of mankind, came forward promptly, bound up the wounds of the West Indian slave, and restored him to his liberty. There, the question of emancipation was a high[ly] religious question. It was demanded, in the name of humanity, and according to the law of the living God. The Sharps, the Clarksons, the Wilberforces, the Buxtons, and Burchells and the Knibbs, were alike famous for their piety, and for their philanthropy. The anti-slavery movement there was not an anti-church movement, for the reason that the church took its full share in prosecuting that movement: and the anti-slavery movement in this country will cease to be an anti-church movement, when the church of this country shall assume a favorable instead or a hostile position towards that movement.
Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties) is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria, and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and bodyguards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot and kill. You glory in your refinement and your universal education yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation—a system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen and orators, till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against her oppressors; but, in regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce the strictest silence, and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make those wrongs the subject of public discourse! You are all on fire at the mention of liberty for France or for Ireland; but are as cold as an iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America. You discourse eloquently on the dignity of labor; yet, you sustain a system which, in its very essence, casts a stigma upon labor. You can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a threepenny tax on tea; and yet wring the last hard-earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country. You profess to believe “that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth,” and hath commanded all men, everywhere to love one another; yet you notoriously hate, (and glory in your hatred), all men whose skins are not colored like your own. You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you “hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, “is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose,” a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.
Fellow-citizens! I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a by word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes. Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever!
But it is answered in reply to all this, that precisely what I have now denounced is, in fact, guaranteed and sanctioned by the Constitution of the United States; that the right to hold and to hunt slaves is a part of that Constitution framed by the illustrious Fathers of this Republic. Then, I dare to affirm, notwithstanding all I have said before, your fathers stooped, basely stooped
To palter with us in a double sense: And keep the word of promise to the ear, But break it to the heart.
And instead of being the honest men I have before declared them to be, they were the veriest imposters that ever practiced on mankind. This is the inevitable conclusion, and from it there is no escape. But I differ from those who charge this baseness on the framers of the Constitution of the United States. It is a slander upon their memory, at least, so I believe. There is not time now to argue the constitutional question at length – nor have I the ability to discuss it as it ought to be discussed. The subject has been handled with masterly power by Lysander Spooner, Esq., by William Goodell, by Samuel E. Sewall, Esq., and last, though not least, by Gerritt Smith, Esq. These gentlemen have, as I think, fully and clearly vindicated the Constitution from any design to support slavery for an hour.
Fellow-citizens! there is no matter in respect to which, the people of the North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon, as that of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution. In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it. What would be thought of an instrument, drawn up, legally drawn up, for the purpose of entitling the city of Rochester to a track of land, in which no mention of land was made? Now, there are certain rules of interpretation, for the proper understanding of all legal instruments. These rules are well established. They are plain, common-sense rules, such as you and I, and all of us, can understand and apply, without having passed years in the study of law. I scout the idea that the question of the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of slavery is not a question for the people. I hold that every American citizen has a fight to form an opinion of the constitution, and to propagate that opinion, and to use all honorable means to make his opinion the prevailing one. Without this fight, the liberty of an American citizen would be as insecure as that of a Frenchman. Ex-Vice-President Dallas tells us that the constitution is an object to which no American mind can be too attentive, and no American heart too devoted. He further says, the constitution, in its words, is plain and intelligible, and is meant for the home-bred, unsophisticated understandings of our fellow-citizens. Senator Berrien tell us that the Constitution is the fundamental law, that which controls all others. The charter of our liberties, which every citizen has a personal interest in understanding thoroughly. The testimony of Senator Breese, Lewis Cass, and many others that might be named, who are everywhere esteemed as sound lawyers, so regard the constitution. I take it, therefore, that it is not presumption in a private citizen to form an opinion of that instrument.
Now, take the constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.
I have detained my audience entirely too long already. At some future period I will gladly avail myself of an opportunity to give this subject a full and fair discussion. Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country.”
Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are, distinctly heard on the other.
The far-off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the Almighty, “Let there be Light,” has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen, in contrast with nature. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hand unto God.” In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it.
Sources
BlackPast, B. (2007, January 24) (1852) Frederick Douglass, “What, To The Slave, Is The Fourth Of July”. Retrieved from <https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/speeches-african-american-history/1852-frederick-douglass-what-slave-fourth-july/>

Khamisi
Khamisi

Race Classification in Brazil

Whiteness in Brazil is often defined at the intersection between race and class. In Brazil, one’s racial classification is not only dependent on skin color but is also influenced by the perception of self and the perception from others. Compared to the United States, race in Brazil is not often defined based on the biological make-up of a person. As described by Omni and Winant, racial formation is “the process by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meanings”. This suggests that race is defined by social forces and the individual. In Brazil it has been said that race exists on a spectrum and can change based on a number of factors such as social class and educational attainment.
Class and education have an influence on the perceived whiteness of an individual. The Brazilian class system is heavily influenced from the history of slavery and colonization. This puts people who identify as white at the top of class system and those who identify as black at the bottom of the class system. Upward mobility is possible in Brazil, but very rare. An aspect that influences the upward mobility of individuals is education. According to Telles, greater education leads to greater whitening. This suggests that one who achieves higher education can be perceived as whiter. Nonetheless, North American anthropologist John F. Collins has suggested that ideologies of whitening have declined markedly, at least in the northeastern state of Bahia. According to Collins, one novel aspect of this shift is not simply a supposedly novel, recent, emphasis on blackness over whitening among many Bahians, but the invocation and generalization by the end of the 20th Century of specific forms of explicitly genealogical imagination that support racial or ethnic identity.
A study was done by Chinyere K Osuji on racial boundary policing of Black-White couples in Brazil. Her study shows how race and class are intertwined in order to produce inequality among Brazilians in interracial marriages. Though the idea that interracial marriages in Brazil are used for racial whitening has disappeared since the early 1900’s, many interracial couples still feel as though their partnerships are being stigmatized by outsiders. Ethno-racial boundaries continue to divide people of different racial phenotypes as a way of creating distinctions and keeping order in multi-racial societies such as Brazil. Black women are often hypersexualized, and black men are looked down upon for having married a white woman. Whiter Brazilians engage in oppressive othering by speaking or looking at others in ways that make them feel inferior.
References
Collins, John F. (2015). Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-5320-1.
Hier, Sean P.; Greenberg, Joshua L. (2002-01-01). "Constructing a discursive crisis: risk, problematization and illegal Chinese in Canada". Ethnic and Racial Studies. 25 (3): 490–513. doi: 10.1080/01419870020036701. ISSN 0141-9870.
Osuji, Chinyere K. (2013). "RACIAL 'BOUNDARY-POLICING': Perceptions of Black-White Interracial Couples in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro1". Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race. 10 (1): 179–203. doi: 10.1017/S1742058X13000118. ISSN 1742-058X.
Mitchell-Walthour, Gladys L.; Hordge-Freeman, Elizabeth (2016). Race and the Politics of Knowledge Production. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. pp. 179–187. doi: 10.1057/9781137553942_14. ISBN 978-1-349-71664-7.
Schwalbe, Michael (December 2000). "Generic Processes in the Reproduction of Inequality: An Interactionist Analysis". Social Forces. 79 (2): 419–452. doi: 10.1093/sf/79.2.419. JSTOR 2675505.


Khamisi
Khamisi

Kwanzaa: Origins & Meanings of Nguzo Saba symbols

The seven principles of Kwanzaa, or Nguzo Saba, together comprise the Kawaida or “common” philosophy, a synthesis of nationalist, pan-African, and socialist values.
Dagi Knot
Unity
A Pan-African symbol of unity found in several African cultures.
Ahenwa
 
The Akan throne, symbol of national identity, cultural groundedness and rightful governance, used in Kwanzaa to represent the principle of Kujichagulia (Self-Determination).
Akoma Ntoaso
Understanding, Agreement
The Adinkra symbol of shared effort and obligation. Akoma Ntoaso is used in Kwanzaa to represent the principle Ujima (Cooperative Work & Responsibility).
Two Interlocking Half Circles
Love or Unity
The Nsibidi symbol of togetherness and family is used to represent the Kwanzaa principal Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics).
Nefer
Good, Pleasant, Beautiful
The ancient Egyptian symbol for beauty and good is used to represent the Kwanzaa principal Nia (Purpose).
The Seven Vibrations of Divine Creation
Creativity
The Dogon symbol of creativity, used to represent the Kwanzaa principle Kuumba (Creativity).
Ankh
Key of Life, Life
The ancient Egyptian double symbol of the ankh, used to represent the Kwanzaa principal Imani (Faith).
References
Karenga, M. (2020). Nguzo Saba. Retrieved from Official Kwanzaa Website: ‹https://www.officialkwanzaawebsite.org/›.
Khamisi
Khamisi

About HIV/AIDS

HIV
The Human Immunodeficiency Viruses (HIV) are two species of Lentivirus (a subgroup of retrovirus) that infect humans. Over time, they cause Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS),[1][2] a condition in which progressive failure of the immune system allows life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers to thrive.[3] Without treatment, average survival time after infection with HIV is estimated to be 9 to 11 years, depending on the HIV subtype.[4] In most cases, HIV is a sexually transmitted infection and occurs by contact with or transfer of blood, pre-ejaculate, semen, and vaginal fluids. Research has shown (for both same-sex and opposite-sex couples) that HIV is untransmittable through condomless sexual intercourse if the HIV-positive partner has a consistently undetectable viral load.[5][6] Non-sexual transmission can occur from an infected mother to her infant during pregnancy, during childbirth by exposure to her blood or vaginal fluid, and through breast milk. [7][8][9][10] Within these bodily fluids, HIV is present as both free virus particles and virus within infected immune cells.
HIV infects vital cells in the human immune system, such as helper T cells (specifically CD4+ T cells), macrophages, and dendritic cells. [11] HIV infection leads to low levels of CD4+ T cells through a number of mechanisms, including pyroptosis of abortively infected T cells,[12] apoptosis of uninfected bystander cells,[13] direct viral killing of infected cells, and killing of infected CD4+ T cells by CD8+ cytotoxic lymphocytes that recognize infected cells.[14] When CD4+ T cell numbers decline below a critical level, cell-mediated immunity is lost, and the body becomes progressively more susceptible to opportunistic infections, leading to the development of AIDS.
HIV-1
HIV-1 is the most common and pathogenic strain of the virus. Scientists divide HIV-1 into a major group (Group M) and two or more minor groups, namely Group N, O and possibly a group P. Each group is believed to represent an independent transmission of SIV into humans (but subtypes within a group are not).[16] A total of 39 ORFs are found in all six possible reading frames (RFs) of HIV-1 complete genome sequence,[17] but only a few of them are functional.
Group M
With ‘M’ for “major”, this is by far the most common type of HIV, with more than 90% of HIV/AIDS cases deriving from infection with HIV-1 group M. This major HIV virus which was the source of pre-1960 pandemic viruses originated in the 1920s in Léopoldville, the Belgian Congo, today known as Kinshasa, which is now the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).[18] The M group is subdivided further into clades, called subtypes, that are also given a letter. There are also “circulating recombinant forms” or CRFs derived from recombination (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bookshelf/br.fcgi?book=mmed&part=A2330) between viruses of different subtypes which are each given a number. CRF12_BF, for example, is a recombination between subtypes B and F.
Subtype A is common in eastern Africa.[19]
Subtype B is the dominant form in Europe, the Americas, Japan, and Australia.[20] In addition, subtype B is the most common form in the Middle East and North Africa.[21] It may have been exported from Africa when Haitian professionals visited Kinshasa in the 1960s and brought it to Haiti in 1964.[18]
Subtype C is the dominant form in Southern Africa, Eastern Africa, India, Nepal, and parts of China.[20]
Subtype D is generally only seen in Eastern and central Africa.[20]
Subtype E is found in Southeast Asia which is the dominant form for heterosexuals as transmission rate is much higher than most other subtypes.
Subtype F has been found in central Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe.[22]
Subtype G (and the CRF02_AG) have been found in Africa and central Europe.[22]
Subtype H is limited to central Africa.[22]
Subtype I was originally used to describe a strain that is now accounted for as CRF04_cpx, with the cpx for a “complex” recombination of several subtypes.
Subtype J is primarily found in North, Central and West Africa, and the Caribbean[23]
Subtype K is limited to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Cameroon.[22]
Subtype L is limited to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). [24]
Group N
HIV-1 subtype prevalence in 2002 The ‘N’ stands for “non-M, non-O”. This group was discovered by a Franco-Cameroonia team in 1998, when they identified and isolated the HIV-1 variant strain, YBF380, from a Cameroonian woman who died of AIDS in 1995. When tested, the YBF380 variant reacted with an envelope antigen from SIVcpz rather than with those of Group M or Group O, indicating it was indeed a novel strain of HIV-1.[28] As of 2015, less than 20 Group N infections have been recorded.[29]
Group O
The O (“Outlier”) group has infected about 100,000 individuals located in West-Central Africa and is not usually seen outside of that area.[15] It is reportedly most common in Cameroon, where a 1997 survey found that about 2% of HIV-positive samples were from Group O.[30] The group caused some concern because it could not be detected by early versions of the HIV-1 test kits. More advanced HIV tests have now been developed to detect both Group O and Group N.[31]
Group P
In 2009, a newly analyzed HIV sequence was reported to have greater similarity to a simian immunodeficiency virus recently discovered in wild gorillas (SIVgor) than to SIVs from chimpanzees (SIVcpz). The virus had been isolated from a Cameroonian woman residing in France who was diagnosed with HIV-1 infection in 2004. The scientists reporting this sequence placed it in a proposed Group P “pending the identification of further human cases”.[32][33][34]
HIV-2
HIV-2 has not been widely recognized outside of Africa. The first identification of HIV-2 occurred in Senegal by microbiologist Souleymane Mboup and his collaborators[35]. The first case in the United States was in 1987.[36] Many test kits for HIV-1 will also detect HIV-2.[37]
As of 2010, there are 8 known HIV-2 groups (A to H). Of these, only groups A and B are pandemic. Group A is found mainly in West Africa, but has also spread globally to Angola, Mozambique, Brazil, India, Europe, and the US. Despite the presence of HIV-2 globally, Group B is mainly confined to West Africa.[38][39] Despite its relative confinement, HIV-2 should be considered in all patients exhibiting symptoms of HIV that not only come from West Africa, but also anyone who has had any body fluid transfer with a person from West Africa (i.e. needle sharing, sexual contact, etc.).[40]
HIV-2 is closely related to simian immunodeficiency virus endemic in sooty mangabeys (Cercocebus atys atys) (SIVsmm), a monkey species inhabiting the forests of Littoral West Africa. Phylogenetic analyses show that the virus most closely related to the two strains of HIV-2 which spread considerably in humans (HIV-2 groups A and B) is the SIVsmm found in the sooty manga beys of the Tai forest, in western Ivory Coast. [38]
There are six additional known HIV-2 groups, each having been found in just one person. They all seem to derive from independent transmissions from sooty manga beys to humans. Groups C and D have been found in two people from Liberia, groups E and F have been discovered in two people from Sierra Leone, and groups G and H have been detected in two people from the Ivory Coast. Each of these HIV-2 strains, for which humans are probably dead-end hosts, is most closely related to SIVsmm strains from sooty manga beys living in the same country where the human infection was found.[38][39]
Khamisi
Khamisi

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