30° and Sunny
Image
1-17-2025 2:00pm
OP-ED: Part I - "No Weapon Formed Against Us Shall Prosper" As We Prepare for MLK Day on Monday
S RENEE GREENE
Editor
Earlier in an article published here on Fountain City News, we discussed a few "factoids" or a packet of information with regard to the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The 13th Amendment, which was not abolished, also-to this day- still creates and condones ongoing slavery in the form of prison labor in the City of Columbus, in Muscogee County, in the State of Georgia and across the United States of America.
They say "No weapon formed against us will prosper..." but we see weapons forming and prospering on a daily basis. We're not imagining it; we're not making it up, nor are we paranoid. These are the FACTS OF LIFE. Why? And why aren't we finishing the statement with "...and every tongue that rises against us in judgment, we shall condemn because this is the inheritance of the servants of the Lord and our righteousness comes from Him"?
FOCUS
I recently attended an NAACP Freedom Fund Banquet at the Columbus Convention & Trade Center where Democratic champion Stacey Abrams was the Keynote Speaker. Her focus, for this speech, was "We Owe Each Other"--paraphrased for continuity into the words "A Debt of Gratitude Beginning with Our Ancestors and Elders".
Abrams was right on point with regard to her topic in the mainstream. But, for whatever reason, I had some serious doubts that anyone really heard what she said. It seemed there was the "Stacey Celebrity Effect" going on instead of Stacey Abrams's impactful words.
Like the most carefully planned sermon where the "Amens" and the clapping and the laughter comes, but as soon as The People walk out the door, they forget what the preacher said; nobody can remember the message less than an hour after service. If they took notes, they'll might read them later.
~~MLK DAY~~
Monday, January 20, 2025, is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the State of Georgia and across the United States of America and now is the time. To do what? To keep plugging in to why "we" think racial progress and advancement has been made in a city, in a state, in a nation, that will gladly tear down a school and build a prison in its place--in mostly Black American neighborhoods.
That's what I heard in my first City Council meeting after I returned to Columbus 25 years later.
It appeared some "Fast Track" pledge was going on to rush the arrested and accused through the juvenile justice system because they were being held, against the U.S. Constitution, too long for a guarantee of "speedy justice" to occur.
Many a day it has been shown that the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) will reach for punishment over reform, so refusing someone speedy justice-good, bad or ugly outcome-is an egregious miscarriage of that justice.
Our Madame Vice President (as of today, January 18, 2025) Kamala Harris has fought hard in her career as a citizen of the State of California and as Vice President to end this systemic injustice in the prison systems.
We won't remember what she has done, we will only remember what Trump's people said about her...that she locked up "thousands" of Black men in California, without quantifying how many thousands, who they were, or what-exactly-they did wrong.
Fact is, there was a grand total of 45...and the ones she prosecuted that were locked up deserved to be there. She nearly lost an election battle because of Janet Reno, who felt like Harris was letting too many Black men GO and had an advantageous preference for reform over punishment.
As Vice President, of course, she thought she could make a difference. However, the "Status Quo" - still dependent on slave labor through capitalism - did everything in their power to destroy her message by calling her everything but a child of God when that's all she was.
Just as was done with Atlanta's own Prosecutor Fani Willis, they (The They That Is) made her personal life a nationalist faux pas and the Republican cover story that attempted to make Donald J. Trump appear innocent at her expense usurped her God-given purpose.
A Black woman from Atlanta had her personal problems turned into an online political framework in order to not only strip her from her place as a Prosecutor, but to also weaken her will to protect the State of Georgia and the Nation from Donald J. Trump. By right, she is a millionaire, but by draining her of her own hard-earned private funds and public resources just to keep her silent, she is diluted and not as powerful. Her only job, after all, was to lock up more Black and poor, not to direct prosecutorial emphasis against a rich white guy who directed a Governor to give him federal votes that did not belong to him and were not the governor's to give. Same as they did to Stacey Abrams, except in her case, they did remove her votes to Brian Kemp and ditched the rest so he could declare himself Governor of Georgia. from the seat of Secretary of State, when it was more than obvious that Kemp was about to lose.
What was bypassed with the Donald J. Trump Crime was ditched on two Black women by Rudy Giuliani, who was supposed to be believed just because he was white and they were not.
Georgia residents Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss were hit by the Southern Strategy ploy that ruined the lives of so many Black people by planting evidence on them, that it was surprising to find them 'exonerated by evidence'. It rarely happens, especially with Black defendants or Black plaintiffs. Typically, the evidence isn't even proof enough if those to be defended or protected are not white.
We are the only ones who can preserve us. But will we?
Sadly, time has consistently shown that we LIKELY will not hear nor apply Abramses words "We Owe Each Other". There were many self-celebrating rewards and lots of local celebrity output to have had her speech make an actual impact for consideration, let alone any impact that would lead to Unity.
LAYING THE BACKGROUND
In an interview with Columbus Historian Johnnie Warner today, we discussed in some detail the particulars of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and why it is that we should also study the 14th and 15th Amendments along with it.
Brother Warner was consistent with his message that we The People Who Don't Know We Are A People are in need of retraining into constructive relationships that will bring us forward instead of backward into 1825.
What we still do not know in Columbus is how the 13th Amendment impacts us and how its forgotten underpinnings lean into our very existence in the 21st Century.
We cannot despoil progress and alleged racial advancement that was never made in the first place.
You see, slavery never really ended in the USA.
Particularly not with Georgia's dependence on free labor to keep the capitalist nature of its enterprises free-flowing at the expense of mostly Black people. We aren't the only ones, of course - legal and illegal immigrants are being used to - but we represent at least 60 to 90 percent of its majority population, depending on where we live.
If reading must equal comprehension, then we have failed on our mission to teach The People what it is that keeps them enslaved in perpetuity by this Amendment. It is the one Amendment that strips U.S. citizens of their citizenship and re-enslaves minds or bodies, or both, by law.
Most people do not know, for instance, that there have been at least THREE Civil Rights Movements in the United States since 1865.
THE MOSES GENERATION
I *The Civil Rights Movement of the 1860s-1870s that ended in 1875. The "Abraham Lincoln" story. EXCERPT: "Radical Republican senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts introduced the Civil Rights Act in 1870 as an amendment to a general amnesty bill for former Confederates. The bill guaranteed all citizens, regardless of color, access to accommodations, theatres, public schools, churches, and cemeteries. The bill further forbid the barring of any person from jury service on account of race, and provided that all lawsuits brought under the new law would be tried in federal, not state, courts."
By 1875, the Black Codes and the Jim Crow south had been firmly established as the "law and order" of the land by the words of Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, who said of the Dred Scott Decision of 1857 "A Black Man has no rights a white man is bound to respect."
The Dred Scott v. Sandford decision was a landmark 1857 Supreme Court ruling that denied citizenship to enslaved people of AFRICAN DESCENT. The decision also declared that Congress could not prohibit slavery in federal territories.
This is how you know who is due reparations and who is not.
ENSLAVED PEOPLE OF AFRICAN DESCENT.
ONE would think, on the converse then, that "the white man then makes no laws that the Black Man is bound to respect", but that would make the balanced scales on the predisposed Liberty statue of justice tilt toward righteousness. In other words, "that would be too much like RIGHT."
II *The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s-1960s, which did not expand upon the earlier one to mark its movements and pick up from there, likely because a century later, they did not know nor were they made aware of it. (Lack of Knowledge will cause the people to perish). The "Martin Luther King Jr." story: EXCERPT: "The civil rights movement was a struggle for social justice that took place mainly during the 1950s and 1960s for Black Americans to gain equal rights under the law in the United States. The Civil War officially abolished slavery, but it didn’t end discrimination against Black people—they continued to endure the devastating effects of racism, especially in the South. By the mid-20th century, Black Americans, along with many other Americans, mobilized and began an unprecedented fight for equality that spanned two decades."
and
THE JOSHUA GENERATION
III *Third, The Civil Rights Movement of the 1990s, which happened on President William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton's watch.
Those are the most notable Civil Rights Movements in U.S. history. That we even had to have another CRM at the bottom of the 20th century speaks volumes about how much "advancement" we really have attained. If there is any advancement to be had, Black people appear to have walked away with nothing but dead end rootless pre-taxed "jobs" with little to no benefits, (maybe) a home that can be taxed and foreclosed upon, cars that can be repossessed...and with that, they were satisfied. Even their alleged voting rights are 'coat hanger in the nationalist closet' amendable. But that's PROGRESS for you. Not much different than it was 160 years ago, but at least the dates and timing, and people still living now are different, right?
That the Clinton Administration did not bring justice and civility to its own Civil Rights Movement (.pdf file) in the 1990s, but instead increased mass incarceration on Clinton's watch with a large majority of members of the CONGRESSIONAL BLACK CAUCUS behind it, did not help that progress.
Nobody was asking for real criminals to be released. They were asking for righteous justice to be served for those who rarely have the law on their side due to skin color difference. Some organizations have spent their own money exonerating a great deal of mostly Black people who were incarcerated on a humbug.
The idea was not to change the law -- but to make it make sense to those who would put themselves in such jeopardy, that they could be made slaves again over one mistake, or even over a lie.
As to racial profiling, part of the Clintonian Civil Rights study "A Bridge to One America", did nothing to help diminish it. Racial Profiling does not necessarily mean they are being discouraged from doing it either.
People ask "What happened to us?", but the real question is more a matter of why we let it happen. That's the one that has yet to be answered.
What happened becomes more obvious by the moment. Why it was allowed to happen remains an unanswered mystery.
Rooter to Tooter
Ronald Reagan and the reprise of the nationalist extremes of the mythical "Welfare Queen" through people who had no issues with welfare until Black people touched it is a matter of anti-Black discrimination.
Welfare was around long before any Black person was allowed to have it.
It was federal "reparations, so to speak, for white overseers, slave-keepers, the ones they called "poor white trash" who lost their plantation jobs because slaves were set free under the Emancipation Proclamation-and even that was a process that did not happen overnight. Most Black people in the south did not hear of it until at least two years or more after it was signed.
It is when Black people touched welfare that it became am ungodly "sin and a crime" to be Black and poor. There was just no excuse! They must be very lazy and refuse to work!! was the outcry of the times.
That has not changed, even among the poorest of our own, though the numbers show that the dependents of the overseers are still the largest welfare recipients in the land.
The same people who profited off FREE BLACK LABOR ended up being the same people who profited off BLACK TAXES once they had an income to tax.
The 'problem' with welfare didn't surface until Black people of meager means insisted upon being equal to and treated like the white people of meager means, and that meant yet another court battle. Even W.E.B. DuBois once said "The Problem" isn't the Black man, in his book "The Souls of Black Folk". It's the fact that there would not have been any such thing as an "N-word" if the Africans had never been touched by Europeans.
"These need temporary help, those other ones are plain lazy..." two portraits of the same families in dire straights and the only real difference between them was skin color.
THIS Welfare Queen forerunner of the Nixon and Reagan era political propaganda was, and is known as the "Southern Strategy" --brought to the fore by the nymphatic (now deceased) Lee "Boogie Man" Atwater in the 20th century.
This propaganda myth has carried over to the 21st century on the shoulders of one Donald J. Trump--showing that it still works. Sadly, Black people will help defend the myth because they, too, are convinced that most Black people are lazy, or they are being paid to lie. Yet, there's only one problem with telling people to "get a job" when you're not hiring.
You don't have a job to give them.
Besides, racism has said that nearly nothing they do to provide for themselves is going to work. {Bombing Black business owners by banning creators on the social media app TikTok is digitally the same as bombing Black Wall Street.]
China gave Black people opportunities for ownership that they never had in the USA, and that was the "national security risk" that put it up to be banned over here. Keith Lee "blew up" as a food critic on TikTok. He was one of many.
[Lee has gone viral for his reviews, often resulting in a surge of support and patronage, coined “The Keith Lee Effect” by social media users. The Detroit native is known for giving preference to reviewing mom-and-pop restaurants along with Black-owned businesses. - Sep 3, 2024]
"Now," a Facebook social media ranter typed "Those TikTok bums will have to get back to work and get real jobs. "Real jobs? They were burgeoning business owners.
Notably, Donald J. Trump brought up that conversation about "Black jobs" and forgot that ONLY the Democratic Party had ever brought us to the point where the job that even he/(Trump) wanted so badly was a Black Job before he got it.
What did he think a "Black job" is? Still plowing cotton and tobacco and picking fruits and vegetables. Doubt you can find more than a handful of Black people who would even accept that for a job---and we're definitely not going back to 1825 to appease them.
The Southern Strategy bled in from Barry Goldwater, a southern Democrat of the Jim Crow kind, to Richard Nixon in the 1970s. Nixon was a nationalist Republican who helped pioneer the Southern Strategy, i.e., the use of White Hatred of Black People, to win plantation popularity elections.
It was a political strategy that worked so well that George HW Bush and Ronald W. Reagan came along after President James Earl "Jimmy" Carter lost his second term bid and the Republicans used it over and again. It also worked with Trump.
Goldwater actually left the southern Democrat Party for cozying up too closely with the "Nigras" and that's why Black people majorly ditched the Republican Party.
Dr. King was a registered Republican because he didn't have a choice back then. It was expected all Black people would join them because of the Lincoln Impact, but it's pretty obvious that he/King didn't VOTE Republican, however.
Goldwater was more than welcomed by the Republicans for reasons that we are still studying on to this day. Notably, Carter also used the Southern Strategy as a political "in", but flipped the script on them once he was in office. They hated that even more, that Carter did not stick with it.
He became the "Bubba of the United States"-a lowly peasant peanut farmer who cared too much about Black folk-and they wouldn't even acknowledge that Carter carried a legacy into infamy and beyond that Trump will never have.
RE: "THE CARTER LEGACY"
Black people, ad majorum, drained out from the Republican party with the roll-out of Lee Atwater as a political strategist, and they have not looked back.
It was quite a change from the Republicans being the leaders of freedom fighters for Black American justice to its worst terrorists in modern history. Goldwater and Atwater got Nixon's attention with that Strategy and it has been rolling along ever since.
It is ignorance to this fact that keeps Black America running with scissors. Use Black Americans to your advantage and their peril and the whole world watches. Not just the USA, but the WORLD.
Yet there is a bigger reason for it than most are aware of.
Reagan is now known in history as the President who restarted anti-Black lynchings in the USA after we had gone for 20 years without one. Look up the Lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama. Donald wasn't an accused criminal, he was a random Black man minding his own business at the time that he was assassinated.
Reagan claimed to abhor the lynching, but he started it with his "Back to Basics" cacophony that "yeehaw F-the law" took to mean "Back to the 1800s" and followed through on it.
He/Reagan quoted scripture "If my people who are called by my name..." and Black people were led astray by the hearing of the words of their own ancestors that they mistook for an "America plea" that would turn us all "Back to God".
But that's not what happened. Is it?
How We Learned That Forgetting the Past Led Us Back to It
Now we are leading into the PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX [PIC].
How is it that Black People unwittingly put themselves back on slave plantations via PIC?
I remember back in the 1980s, I warned Black people in Columbus that if they didn't stop falling for the shenanigans of self-proclaimed "Christian" Ronald Wilson Reagan with his sacrilegious beliefs about cross-burning Christianity, that they were going to find themselves back on plantations.
They laughed and said it was not possible for that to happen, and yet it was happening right under their noses. Still happening now. What are we calling it now though?
The School to Prison Pipeline.? Is it?
Black people in Columbus, and honestly across the nation, especially in the south, did not pay much attention to the Southern Strategy Reagan era Christianista evangelical teachings that seemed smooth as butter on the outside but ended in shame, hurt, embarrassment and collective self-destruction. Didn't notice it until once-filled church pews emptied into the streets and became violent and godless instead of god-fearing.
THE HEARTS OF BLACK FOLK
By the time they wondered "what happened" -- it was too little much much too late. Like someone kicking you in the shin and you don't say "Ouch" until 20 minutes later. In this case, it was twenty YEARS later.
Sudden anger and foolish selfish "who cares?" pride welled up in the swollen chests of young Black men who were taught that their elders and ancestors were weak and should be disrespected and that "Jesus church stuff" was for the birds and white people. The women quickly followed, just trying to hang on to some man-any man who wanted them. It has not ended.
Then came the proliferation of the nastiest grungiest street dance Ground Zero rap music we had ever heard in our lives, along with extreme alcoholism and drug and sex addictions. These vats showed up in night clubs across the USA which had replaced the Black churches with a whole coffer filled with homeless Black women and abandoned Black babies, many of whom ended up on welfare. Welfare not as a temporary help, but as a matter of life dependency and codependencies.
The weapons formed and they prospered.
There still are little to no jobs available now, especially in Columbus, unless a Black man is locked away and turned into a self-replicating (recidivist) slave. True, there are Black men who have jobs and don't have to go to prison to get them, but that is not the topic of this conversation. The ones who go through this slave prison system are the focus.
In Columbus, and nationwide, the same work that plantation prisoners do for free in the 'pay-to-play' for-profit prison systems are the same jobs that are not available to them FOR HIRE once they are out. If they ever get out.
From that point forward, the post-slavery era instilled Black Codes and Jim Crow laws soon came down to massive guns, crack cocaine, et al, and slumlords in the inner cities. They didn't have any place else to go--caged in.
It spread like wildfire far and wide among young people who could not afford to buy guns or pipe drugs into the streets like that, but they were just hungry enough to bite the fish bait put out there for them.
They were caught with it and locked up in spite of the fact that they did not put it there, didn;'t ask for it, and yet, they became the Poster Children of the sins of the U.S. forefathers--and even worse, they turned on and blamed God for it.
NOT LIKE GOD HAS A REASON TO CARE WHO BLAMES HIM FOR WHAT, but "RESPECT YOURSELF".
"Love the Lord with all thine heart and mind, soul and strength" QUICKLY became "Party Hardy!" and the Black communities nationwide never recovered.
But how and why did it get there? Who did it and what for?
MODERN DAY SLAVERS
Johnnie Warner asks:
"Quick~! What is the most expensive DEBIT on the corporate bank sheet?
_THE COST OF LABOR_
Of course, paying people to work while you get rich off them is the most expensive part of any company's economic budget and the only way to cut those costs is to do what? Pay as little as possible or FIND PEOPLE TO WORK FOR FREE.
The 13th Amendment is the key to keeping that free labor on tap without running afoul of The Constitution.
{{Cause the trouble, stir up the pot with infiltration, arrest the freedom riders, lie on them and plant the evidence, strip them of their codified rights and freedoms by the trappings of their own buzzsaw lusts, and put them right back on the prison plantations "where they belong."}}
Once arrested, always arrested--a record for life, even misdemeanors turn into felonies under the laws of racial profiling.
Remember: Racial profiling doesn't mean that they are discouraged from doing it. It's like forgiveness. Forgiveness does not exonerate a person from paying dearly for their crimes. Even the Apostle Paul, forgiven nonetheless, but it did not keep him from paying the ultimate price in the same manner in which he had decapitated and castrated others.
NOTE: Arrested for holding or selling marijuana in a nation that has made it the law and given deregulated others the right to sell it through dispensaries and for-profit stores?
Then the shrugging of the shoulders by other Black people who will only say "They shouldn't have done whatever they did wrong."
This is how it continues. We didn't come to rescue bona fide criminals, we came to tell them they may not want to volunteer to be slaves again.
Who What When Where How and Why Did This Happen to Black America?" "CLOCK OR GLOCK"Don't ever wonder how we got here: The answer is ever before you. In your face.
