Beloved, nearly a year has passed since that horrifying day when the Atlanta Police brutally murdered 92 year old Kathryn Johnston in her own home. At the time, our community was still reeling in anguish more than one year after the great Diaspora within the Diaspora that was Katrina. However, we awakened that morning after November 21, 2006 only to be faced with yet another equally inconceivable atrocity; this time at 933 Neal Street. They actually killed an innocent grandmother in cold blood! It was a reminder to us all of the strange mounting scourge of unprovoked racist violence that appears to have all of a sudden become curiously on the rise throughout the country. So too, let us not be unmindful that throughout its history the state of Georgia itself has had a rather Red Record.
Once again, in yet another century we are witness to a rather bizarre and fiendish bloodlust seemingly directed without shame towards our community. Why is this happening to us? We my ask ourselves. What is it that seems to stir this macabre racist core of the white American collective into such a frenzied deadly offensive against our community, and why does this so often seem to occur during times of war? How is one to read all of this upon that clock that helps us to tell our time of day as a people? What does this inform us in yet another generation about the actual state of our earnest historical efforts towards true liberation, justice, and human rights in this land of captivity? And, perhaps most important of all, what does this tell us about the true state of leadership in our community? What has brought us to this point? By any measure, in normal human circumstances it should require little more than one cursory glance for the outsider to reason for a cause towards this unprovoked bizarre and curious behavior, which obviously remains so perversely extant even in our own day, that it would actually come to ultimately claim the innocent life of a elderly grandmother. It must occur somewhere within the guise of an enormous flip of the historical script. It would probably look something like this: “Whereas, we now inquire of the massive criminal enterprise of ‘primitive accumulation’, that cast Afrikans in the role of captors and enslavers of hundreds of millions of Europeans; stealing them from their homes in order to build what was to become the American Empire!” How else to reconcile a merge pittance of a sane understanding towards the zeitgeist of the racist mind? Unfortunately, so often in this land common sense remains suspended in queer animation overwhelmed by the lingering perception of Black racial inferiority. It is the evil twin that remains hidden in the basement. However, this is the true face of the Maafa, and these are the lingering tornadoes of holocaust; the unremitting pogroms of the colonial settler-state.
Truth be told, as in the past so it is today, and it is fear that remains the great motivator, because not much has truly changed. After the Nat Turner Rebellion, we witnessed yet another manic white riot, and marauding groups of white men and boys killed hundreds of innocent Black men, women, and children. Turner had already been captured and he was hung on November 11, 1931. Yet they hunted down and killed this one brotha, and they cut off his head and put it up on a pike in the middle of the road. Then, they hung a sign around his neck that read: “Black Head Sign Post” After slavery, white men came to cowardly project the savage Jack-the-Ripper-like attention that they had once wantonly displayed towards Black women’s bodies, on to the Black male. For nearly a century the specter of fiendish Black men on the prowl seeking to rape pure white women became the classic rationale for the unchecked lynching of tens of thousands of Black men, women, and children. Throughout American history every episode featuring a war aboard has showcased a frightening rise in racist violence at home.
Couple this with the reality that for far too many decades we have been ill-advised and miss-directed by an emasculated cabal of Black leadership that has held a bogus hegemony over the direction of our struggle. Unlike the hapless handful of people in that popular automobile ad, ‘Maybe It’s Not A Mini Van!’, it really need not take Native American wisdom to suggest to any of us that maybe many of our ‘leading Blacks’ are really not ‘Black leaders’ at all. Witness both the Fulton County (Georgia) District Attorney Paul Howard, and Thurbert Baker, the premiere Black Attorney General in this state, and their actions just recently offering us a startling view of Black politicians who it would appear are Black in Blackface alone. Last spring, the DA brokered his own rather curious balance of justice in plea advocacy for two rather dissimilar victims of wrongful death. One was Kathryn Johnson, a responsible tax paying citizen for nearly a century. Her peaceful home was abruptly brought under criminal assault by the Atlanta police. Her body had already been savagely riddled with bullets; yet the gunfire and the travesty would not end there. As the fragile wrists of her dying body lay dispassionately bound in handcuffs, while she lay there in what must have been unimaginable agony and pain, completely innocent of any crime; still she was sentenced to die in her own home. A peaceful 92 year old American grandmother living alone in The Bluff, and brutally snatched from us in a savagely wrought pool of her own blood. Is there anyway that we could ever conceive of the possibility that they simply did not hear her moans, as she lay there lynched? Perhaps there was just too much commotion going on, even as more of Atlanta’s finest were obviously busy planting drugs in her basement and carefully rehearsing the maintenance of a series of malicious lies; in order to cover up the heinous crimes that they had just committed? Clearly, these white offices in a Black neighborhood, who had just killed an innocent senior citizen, were totally indifferent to the public trust.
Oddly enough, the other victim was a nameless dog (named ‘Lady’) tortured and killed by two apparently deeply troubled orphan sibling teens; one of which by the way has always maintained that he was not even there. Still, DA Howard aggressively sought the maximum of eighty five years for the two Black children for the senseless death of a dog, and he settled for 10 to 12 years for two of his officers who had brutally slain an innocent tax paying grandmother in cold blood right inside of her own home; and then even had the nerve to brazenly lie about it.
Still, the scourge would not rest for us and we were forced to fight diligently for yet another of our children; beloved Jenarlo Wilson. Once an infectious 17 year old student athlete and potential scholar sentenced to ten years of arrested development in a death-worn hell hole in Georgia; convicted as a child molester for the victimless crime of having consensual teenage sex with a 15 year old acquaintance. Meanwhile, Attorney General Thurbert Baker, appeared to have taken one cursory glance at Jenarlo and simply reasoned in his mind, that the warm familiar spit of racist Southern intransigence was indeed much less repugnant than that of his own people. The Black Attorney General acted out and played his perfidious prerogative against a promising young Black teenaged boy in an ardently racist state notorious for a bloodlust uniquely its own. Like I said, Georgia has a rather Red Record and truth be told Thurbert Baker did not have to do anything at all. He could have simply gone fishing instead. But he did do something. He acted out, and he alone delayed for this young brotha the freedom that most of the world truly believed that he always deserved.
Let us remember that it was not just Marcus Garvey, but Malcolm X, Dr. King, Dr. Bobby Wright, the Black Panther Party, and a host of others who warned us about the rise of ‘The Negroes Greatest Enemy’ Today, Grandma Johnston is dead. The Moulder Brother remain behind bars, and we have a swarming multitude of leading Blacks who live in Blackface. In other words, they wear their black faces, but for all intents and purposes they have the mind of white people. Watching the PETA circus clamoring for Michael Vick’s conviction, it is becoming increasingly clear that a dog is more likely to receive justice in the red clay state.
See you in the Sun!
Once again, in yet another century we are witness to a rather bizarre and fiendish bloodlust seemingly directed without shame towards our community. Why is this happening to us? We my ask ourselves. What is it that seems to stir this macabre racist core of the white American collective into such a frenzied deadly offensive against our community, and why does this so often seem to occur during times of war? How is one to read all of this upon that clock that helps us to tell our time of day as a people? What does this inform us in yet another generation about the actual state of our earnest historical efforts towards true liberation, justice, and human rights in this land of captivity? And, perhaps most important of all, what does this tell us about the true state of leadership in our community? What has brought us to this point? By any measure, in normal human circumstances it should require little more than one cursory glance for the outsider to reason for a cause towards this unprovoked bizarre and curious behavior, which obviously remains so perversely extant even in our own day, that it would actually come to ultimately claim the innocent life of a elderly grandmother. It must occur somewhere within the guise of an enormous flip of the historical script. It would probably look something like this: “Whereas, we now inquire of the massive criminal enterprise of ‘primitive accumulation’, that cast Afrikans in the role of captors and enslavers of hundreds of millions of Europeans; stealing them from their homes in order to build what was to become the American Empire!” How else to reconcile a merge pittance of a sane understanding towards the zeitgeist of the racist mind? Unfortunately, so often in this land common sense remains suspended in queer animation overwhelmed by the lingering perception of Black racial inferiority. It is the evil twin that remains hidden in the basement. However, this is the true face of the Maafa, and these are the lingering tornadoes of holocaust; the unremitting pogroms of the colonial settler-state.
Truth be told, as in the past so it is today, and it is fear that remains the great motivator, because not much has truly changed. After the Nat Turner Rebellion, we witnessed yet another manic white riot, and marauding groups of white men and boys killed hundreds of innocent Black men, women, and children. Turner had already been captured and he was hung on November 11, 1931. Yet they hunted down and killed this one brotha, and they cut off his head and put it up on a pike in the middle of the road. Then, they hung a sign around his neck that read: “Black Head Sign Post” After slavery, white men came to cowardly project the savage Jack-the-Ripper-like attention that they had once wantonly displayed towards Black women’s bodies, on to the Black male. For nearly a century the specter of fiendish Black men on the prowl seeking to rape pure white women became the classic rationale for the unchecked lynching of tens of thousands of Black men, women, and children. Throughout American history every episode featuring a war aboard has showcased a frightening rise in racist violence at home.
Couple this with the reality that for far too many decades we have been ill-advised and miss-directed by an emasculated cabal of Black leadership that has held a bogus hegemony over the direction of our struggle. Unlike the hapless handful of people in that popular automobile ad, ‘Maybe It’s Not A Mini Van!’, it really need not take Native American wisdom to suggest to any of us that maybe many of our ‘leading Blacks’ are really not ‘Black leaders’ at all. Witness both the Fulton County (Georgia) District Attorney Paul Howard, and Thurbert Baker, the premiere Black Attorney General in this state, and their actions just recently offering us a startling view of Black politicians who it would appear are Black in Blackface alone. Last spring, the DA brokered his own rather curious balance of justice in plea advocacy for two rather dissimilar victims of wrongful death. One was Kathryn Johnson, a responsible tax paying citizen for nearly a century. Her peaceful home was abruptly brought under criminal assault by the Atlanta police. Her body had already been savagely riddled with bullets; yet the gunfire and the travesty would not end there. As the fragile wrists of her dying body lay dispassionately bound in handcuffs, while she lay there in what must have been unimaginable agony and pain, completely innocent of any crime; still she was sentenced to die in her own home. A peaceful 92 year old American grandmother living alone in The Bluff, and brutally snatched from us in a savagely wrought pool of her own blood. Is there anyway that we could ever conceive of the possibility that they simply did not hear her moans, as she lay there lynched? Perhaps there was just too much commotion going on, even as more of Atlanta’s finest were obviously busy planting drugs in her basement and carefully rehearsing the maintenance of a series of malicious lies; in order to cover up the heinous crimes that they had just committed? Clearly, these white offices in a Black neighborhood, who had just killed an innocent senior citizen, were totally indifferent to the public trust.
Oddly enough, the other victim was a nameless dog (named ‘Lady’) tortured and killed by two apparently deeply troubled orphan sibling teens; one of which by the way has always maintained that he was not even there. Still, DA Howard aggressively sought the maximum of eighty five years for the two Black children for the senseless death of a dog, and he settled for 10 to 12 years for two of his officers who had brutally slain an innocent tax paying grandmother in cold blood right inside of her own home; and then even had the nerve to brazenly lie about it.
Still, the scourge would not rest for us and we were forced to fight diligently for yet another of our children; beloved Jenarlo Wilson. Once an infectious 17 year old student athlete and potential scholar sentenced to ten years of arrested development in a death-worn hell hole in Georgia; convicted as a child molester for the victimless crime of having consensual teenage sex with a 15 year old acquaintance. Meanwhile, Attorney General Thurbert Baker, appeared to have taken one cursory glance at Jenarlo and simply reasoned in his mind, that the warm familiar spit of racist Southern intransigence was indeed much less repugnant than that of his own people. The Black Attorney General acted out and played his perfidious prerogative against a promising young Black teenaged boy in an ardently racist state notorious for a bloodlust uniquely its own. Like I said, Georgia has a rather Red Record and truth be told Thurbert Baker did not have to do anything at all. He could have simply gone fishing instead. But he did do something. He acted out, and he alone delayed for this young brotha the freedom that most of the world truly believed that he always deserved.
Let us remember that it was not just Marcus Garvey, but Malcolm X, Dr. King, Dr. Bobby Wright, the Black Panther Party, and a host of others who warned us about the rise of ‘The Negroes Greatest Enemy’ Today, Grandma Johnston is dead. The Moulder Brother remain behind bars, and we have a swarming multitude of leading Blacks who live in Blackface. In other words, they wear their black faces, but for all intents and purposes they have the mind of white people. Watching the PETA circus clamoring for Michael Vick’s conviction, it is becoming increasingly clear that a dog is more likely to receive justice in the red clay state.
See you in the Sun!
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