Black Lives Must Matter

Langston Hughes was writing about this back at the beginning of the century, folks. And it certainly goes back farther than that, to the beginning, the founding of our nation.

I, Too

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody’ll dare

Say to me,

“Eat in the kitchen,”

Then.

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

--Langston Hughes

Poem originally published 1926

Black Lives Matter didn't grow out of a Black issue or a problem Black people have or only Black people have, no. Far from it. It is a problem white people in America have. It's a problem we all have and share as Americans. If you don't see that, you don't know our own nation. You likely don't know our own nation's, your own nation's history.

On This Day, -- July 5, 1852

"In 1852, the Maryland-born abolitionist Frederick Douglass was invited to address the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Association’s 4th of July celebration in Rochester, N.Y. President Millard Fillmore, national political leaders and abolitionists from across the country were among those in the audience.

The speech, which was become known as “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” was in fact delivered on July 5. In many ways, it seems every bit as relevant today as it did 168 years ago."

A Marylander's Words That Still Resonate 

168 Years Later

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

If you can, at least once, read the entire piece. 

On This Day, June 12, 1963

On this day, June 12, 1963, civil rights activist Medgar Evers was shot and killed in the driveway of  his home in Mississippi by a white supremacist.

How long, Amerca?

How long?