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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 "" target="_blank">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; can't remember it less than an hour after service.
~~MLK DAY~~
Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the State of Georgia and across the United States of America and now is the time to keep plugging in to why "we" think racial progress and advancement has been made in a city, 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 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 Janey 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 draining her of her own hard-earned private funds and public resources just to keep her silent. Same as what happened with Stacey Abrams.
What was bypassed and overlooked with the Donald J. Trump Strategy became a "crime" on two Black women ... make that four Black women, as we certainly can't leave out Georgians Ruby Freeman or Shay Moss and the Southern Strategy ploy by Rudy Giuliani that literally destroyed their entire lives because they were Black and wide open vulnerable.
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" because there were too many self-celebrating rewards and celebrity out-shiners to be had to make her speech a point for future consideration and work that would lean toward unpacified 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 bring us forward instead of backward into 1825. What still do not know in Columbus about how the 13th Amendment impacts us is still the forgotten underpinnings of 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.
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 of United States citizenship and re-enslaves minds or bodies, or both.
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 Justice Roger B. Taney, who said of the Dred Scott Decision of 1857 said in essence: "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.
One would think, on the converse, 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 Liberty statue of justice tilt toward righteousness, as in "the weapons did not form and prosper."
But they did.
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 *Thirdly ... 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 US 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.
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.
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.
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 unanswered.
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, slavekeepers, the ones they called "poor white trash" who lost their plantation jobs to the setting free of slaves under the Emancipation Proclamation--a process that did not happen overnight. Most people in the south did not hear of it until at least two years, or more, after it happened.
It is when Black people touched welfare that 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 and even as the numbers show that the welfare roles in the USA are still made of mostly white people.
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.
"They need temporary help, those are plain lazy..." two portraits of the same families in dire straights and the only real difference 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 nymph Lee "Boogie Man" Atwater in the 20th century.
It has now carried over to the 21st century on the shoulders of one Donald J. Trump--showing that it still works; and sadly, Black people will help defend it because they, too, are convinced that most Black people are lazy. Yet, there's only one problem with telling people to "go get a job" when you're not hiring.
You don't have a job to give them--and 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. 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?
The Strategy bled in from Barry Goldwater, a southern Democrat of the Jim Crow kind, to Richard Nixon in the 1970s. Nixon was a Republican who helped pioneer the Southern Strategy, i.e., use of White Hatred of Black People to win nationalist popularity elections.
It was a political strategy that work 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.
Goldwater actually left the southern Democrat Party for cozying up too closely with the "Nigras".
He 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 was then known as the "Bubba of the United States"-a lowly peanut farmer-and they wouldn't even acknowledge that Carter carried a legacy that Trump will never have into infamy and beyond.
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 have not looked back.
It was quite a change from the Republicans being the leaders of freedom fights for Black America to the worst terrorists Black America had known in modern history. Goldwater and Atwater got Nixon's attention with it and it has been rolling along ever since.
It is ignorance to this fact that keeps Black America running with scissors.
Reagan is now known as the one 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" that "yeehaw F-the law" took to mean "Black to the 1800s" and followed through on that.
He 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" that would "Go Back to God".
But that's not what happened. Is it?
How the Gains of White Supremacy Turned Into Black Self-Hatred
Now we are leading into the PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX [PIC] and how it is that Black People unwittingly put themselves back on slave plantations through it.
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. What are we calling it now?
The School to Prison Pipeline.
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--until once-filled church pews emptied into the streets.
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 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. It has not ended.
Then 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, showed up in night clubs which had replaced the Black churches with a whole coffer filled with homeless Black women and abandoned Black babies who ended up on welfare--not as a temporary help, but as a matter of life dependency and codependencies that have still not ended.
And there still are little to no jobs available now, unless they are locked up and turned into self-replicating slaves. In Columbus, and nationwide, the same jobs plantation prisoners do for free in the pay-to-play prison profit systems 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 law soon came down to massive guns, crack cocaine, et al, and slumlords in the inner cities.
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 for it in spite of the fact that they did not put it there, and they became the Poster Children of the sins of the U.S. forefathers--and even worse, they blamed God for it.
RESPECT YOURSELF.
ONCE UPON A MODERN-DAY SLAVE: Nowhere to Run Nowhere to Hide
"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?
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 someone who will 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 just like forgiveness does not exonerate a person from paying dearly for their crimes. Even the Apostle Paul, forgiven nonetheless, did not keep him from being beheaded for his beliefs, just like he had beheaded and castrated others.
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."
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.
