OBAMA: Black Men Must Vote Despite American Demonization
On a warm April day in 1899 W.E.B Dubois — the great scholar and Civil Rights advocate — waned in lugubrious despair as he glared through the widow of a grocery store in Atlanta to see the detached knuckles of Sam Hose on display in a jar. Hose had been lynched.
In 1998, James Byrd’s body parts were found splayed across the roads near Jasper, Texas after a trio of white men dragged his body three miles while in molten states of racial hatred. Byrd’s right arm and head were severed from his body.
In 2015, Freddie Gray, a Black Baltimorean in his mid 20s, was pushed into a police wagon one bright Sunday morning by the city’s police on charges related to vagrancy. He would not survive transport to the local jail. Gray was yet another casualty of the modern Black Lives Matter Movement.
The sociological and cultural point here is incandescently clear:
Black men have had many reasons not to go to the polls this November in what many are calling the most important election in our life time. The bodies of black men have been historically relegated to the status of human fodder — of no particular value within the annals of American history. In slavery, Black men were deemed as mere breeders. During Jim Crow they were stigmatized as ignorant, lazy, aggressively brutal and brazen…
