What Black History Looks Like

Here is what black history looks like. It looks like the black people who were forcibly removed from Africa to the USA for slavery but were determined to be free. It looks like whites and Jews who risked life and limb to protest slavery and Jim Crow, including hiding people in their homes and barns along the Underground Railroad. Some were killed. It looks like Native Americans who welcomed escaped slaves. It looks like people and organizations that helped support the Black Panther Party's free clinics and breakfast program and people who financially helped and physically marched beside Rev.Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Freedom Riders. Black history looks like people of all races uniting against oppression and defending freedom with their very lives. That is what it took, and that is still the only way. "An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" (MLK). Happy Black History Month, everybody!"

You've Got to Be Taught

YOU'VE GOT TO BE TAUGHT

To hate and fear,

You've got to be taught

From year to year,

It's got to be drummed

In your dear little ear

You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid

Of people whose eyes are oddly made,

And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,

You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,

Before you are six or seven or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate,

You've got to be carefully taught!

Rodgers and Hammerstein's "You've Got To Be Carefully Taught",

from the musical "South Pacific"

 

The t-shirt says, "It's not a black or white thing; it's a wrong thing." Let us not deny that racism exists. There are two empty graves: Jesus Christ's and Jim Crow's. However, We the People should be too busy uniting for social and economic justice to hate. Racial prejudice is an unnatural emotion that is learned. It benefits the oppressors, not the People. Reject it. UNITY is strength for the 99%. People who are united in purpose and speak the same language like computers make possible can have whatever they work toward, even real democracy (Gen. 11:6).

He stooped down, and wrote on the ground.

~John 8:8