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Last week a fellow chapter member of the Tuskegee Airmen Association, Inc. Sent me an article from the New York Times (NYT Opinion by Caroline Randall Williams, You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/opinion/confederate-monument-racism.HTML). After reading the well written article, all sorts of additions went through my mind and I decided to share a few thoughts with you.
Most White people claim to know history and especially the struggles of the Black person. They say they can feel our pain and sorrow. I don’t think they realize how deep it goes because most White people can trace their ancestry, most Black people cannot. They do not really understand why we can only trace our DNA to a country or area. They do not understand how painstakingly our history and culture was removed as if it never existed. We were told we were nothing, never would be anything and never had anything until they came along to save us. History does not bear that out although they tried to erase and/or distort history.
Against our will we were bought to this country in chains with untold many dying along the way. We were forbidden our language, it was forbidden to teach us to read and write, it was forbidden to gather in groups except to slave in the hot sun and, not least, to speak unless spoken to and it was always with a bowed head. If any law, written or unwritten, spoken or unspoken, we were whipped, beaten, shot, butchered, or hung. The women were constantly raped, and the offspring were either kept for the fields or sold. We were taught the Bible and christen ways although the White people did not uphold those values. After learning the christen way, we could only go to our church unless a White person was there to observe. The offspring, although some were indistinguishable from their White owners, were told that one drop of Negros blood made a person Black no matter the color of their skin. Humm…there are not many White people that do not have a drop of Black blood in their veins. I know some that went to school with me and later passed for White.
This country was built on the backs of Black people. There would not be a United States of America without the labor or ingenuity of Black people. Why did I use the word ingenuity? Let us think back to the days of the Pharoses and beyond. These people were not as Elisabeth Talyor, who portrayed Cleopatra, they were Black people, living in Egypt on the continent of Africa. The oldest operating library in the world is in Alexandria, Egypt. Plato, Socrates and many others studied and received advanced education there. The world still does not understand how the pyramids were built nor why they are still standing, just to name a few things.
As I said in recent blogs and a few before those, we Black people have endured a lot and is still enduring. We have endured inferior education and had to learn more than the White person to obtain a job. While obtaining a job, we received lower pay for the same or more work than the White person and a promotion is out of consideration. I could go on and on but, in a nutshell, the Black person gets shafted in everything that goes on simply because they are Black. We have endured a lot and, still, all that is said is for us to stop complaining because they are working on it and to suck it up. It is the same thing that have been said for years and years and, maybe, more years to come. However, we will endure.