HISTORICALLY, HOW DO WE HONOR OUR ANCESTORS?
A. HISTORY
History is an account of the beginning of time to the present. It is an account of what has happened. It is what is happening now. In other words, current events constitute history in the making.
Historically, how do we honor our ancestors? There are many ways to do so.
- Education. One way is to get educated. We dishonor our ancestors when we wilfully remain uneducated. During the time of slavery in this country, it was a crime for the enslaved people to learn to read and write. Many of our enslaved ancestors did learn to read and write in spite of often severe, horrendous punishment. (Click on “You Have A Duty To Become Educated: You Do Not Have A Right To Be Ignorant.”)
- Voting. Another way is to vote. Many of our ancestors died to get the right to vote. Every one of us owes it to our ancestors to register and to vote at every election. (According to information on the Internet, Break Every Chain was written in 1994 by Al Christian. The version currently being played on gospel music radio stations is sung by Tasha Cobbs.) In the words of that song, the descendants of our Founding Laborers® and other people of good will should have “an army” of persons “rising up” and registering to vote and actually voting in the upcoming elections “to break every chain” that is oppressing us. We owe it to our ancestors do so! (Click on “Call to Action.”)
B. Reparations
The basis for Reparations for African Americans is that in the United States of America generally the law provides, unless a person by will specifies otherwise, a person’s descendants inherit his or her wealth. (Usually persons do devise and bequeath their wealth to their descendants. They most certainly do not wilfully give their wealth to their kidnappers and rapists or to the latter’s descendants!) African Americans should have inherited the wealth created by the stolen forced slave labor of their ancestors. They did not.
There was a proposal that each freedman be given forty acres and a mule. This did not happen. Each had done more than enough work to earn the forty acres and a mule. Instead they were left to fend for themselves. They did not receive any compensation for their contribution to the United States of America for the backbreaking labor under the cruel, barbaric conditions under which they labored in the cotton fields, the tobacco fields, the rice fields, and in building the White House and the United States Capitol, and elsewhere. This is one of the most important bases for the payment of Reparations to the descendants of our Founding Laborers® for their labor which played a very great role in building the United States of America!
That stolen-forced-labor wealth is benefitting the descendants of the enslavers, not the descendants of the enslaved workers. Much of the wealth of the United States economy is attributable to the stolen forced labor of our African American ancestors. That is one basis for the claim that reparations should be paid to African Americans who are descendants of the Founding Laborers® of this country.
One of our great Founding Laborers®, Frederick Douglass, said on April 14, 1876 (eleven years after legal slavery ended by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution):
Much complaint has been made that the freedmen have shown so little ability to take care of themselves since their emancipation. Men have marvelled that they have made so little progress. I question the justice of this complaint. It is neither reasonable, nor in any sense just.
To me the wonder is, not that the freedmen have made so little progress, but, rather,that they have made so much– not that they have been standing still, but that they have been able to stand at all.
C. Slavery
Our African ancestors were captured from their homes in Africa, brought to America on the brutally cruel Middle Passage, and held in bondage and forced to become our Founding Laborers® under the cruelest, most barbaric system of slavery in the history of humanity. The early European Americans raped Africa and brought its people to the so-called “New World” to provide the massive labor force necessary to develop this country. The enslaved Africans were the victims of theft, rape, murder, brutality, and unspeakably inhumane treatment. Many, many, many documented horrendous incidents have been related by persons who were in slavery in the United States of America.
Recently, there has been a very disturbing disrespect of our ancestors by inappropriately comparing various things to slavery. We must aggressively stop this disrespect.
Please do not disrespect our African American ancestors. When a person makes inappropriate references to slavery, you should ask him or her –how many of your children have been sold into slavery?” “How many of your mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters have been raped at will without any repercussions?” “How many times have you been beaten with a whip?” “How often are you forced to do back-breaking labor from sun-up to sun-down?” Have you seen the movie, Twelve Years A Slave”?