MAINTAINING the STATUS QUO

Recently, I have begun to make known some of my personal spiritual conclusions. I have reached some of these “revelations” after spending many hours in research and meditation. By expressing my understanding, it has always been my hope to stimulate real interest in the pursuit of the connection between the CREATOR and his/her creation. It has never been my purpose to “convert” others, or to cause anyone discomfort concerning their religious/spiritual beliefs. Growth has always been at the forefront of my written expressions because in the spiritual realm, as in the physical realm, you evolve or die. With all this in mind, I offer you the reader some historical perspective below for your consideration, in your journey to spiritual enlightenment.

Historical Beginnings of the Black Church

America’s war for independence gave slaves the desire for their own religious expression. However, the slave master feared the slaves would come to understand the contradiction of how they (slaves) were being treated and the Christian doctrine of "love" for your fellow man portrayed in the Bible. Personally, I could never understand how someone could lynch and murder a human being and in the next breath talk about GOD'S grace.  So whites applied very strict limits on black religious services. Initially a few “house negros” as apposed to the “field negros” were allowed to attend services with whites, but were segregated to an all black section within the church.

Interestingly enough ”church” still remains one of the most segregated institutions in America!

Slave owners soon came to realize that religion could be utilized as a mechanism to control slaves. They began to allow field slaves to attend white church services as long as an “overseer” accompanied them. Later because they didn’t want black field hands in their services they began to build blacks their own modest churches on the plantation, with the ever-present overseer attending ensuring that the "proper message" was being preached.

During the latter part of the 18^th century whites allowed blacks to begin building their own churches and conduct their own religious services. A national policy was developed requiring whites to select and license ALL BLACK PREACHERS. Slave owners only allowed the most compliant, controllable blacks that were selected and licensed to become ministers. These ministers were taught to encourage slaves to be meek, obedient and to accept whites as their masters. The slaves were taught to remain loyal to their slave masters, to accept their station in life and to disregard any thoughts of improvement in this life, to look instead for your "reward" in the next.

Although I cannot offer it as fact, after exhaustive research, I couldn’t find one major Black Divinity School in America, not one !!!

Since blacks couldn’t develop any independent businesses or any professional organizations, the ministry became a “profession” as well as a business. Black ministers numbers began to multiply in number. They instantly began to be looked upon as leaders among the other blacks. Popularity, respect, and security came with the position. There was no “educational requirement” only the obligation to maintain the existing Status Quo between slaves and their masters.

The black church was once a sanctuary from the daily grind of racial discrimination and inequality for the Black Afrikan American community, now....

The modern black church has developed into a profit centered, big business. This institution, which should be standing up for its poor and disenfranchised members often represents the worst exploiter of the poor and disenfranchised that has ever existed in the Black Afrikan American community. Its unconsciousable embrace of individualism and materialism is cloked in a feel good message of salvation and prosperity. Unfortunately the message of salvation and prosperity that the black church promotes seems to only apply to a select few (ie, pastor). While the financial situation of the members remain stagnant.

I don’t want to insinuate that this is the case in every black church, but it is the reality in far to many black churches. There are a numbers of issues and problems that face the Black Afrikan American community, ie, drugs, self-induced extinction through violence, disintergration of the family structure, disproportunate incarceration of our black youth, and economic stagnation just to name a few. On most of these issues the church remains strangely silent, offering no viable solution to the multitude of problems.
Churches could use the money you give them to institute programs to educate and uplift our people, but instead their passivity works in concert with the mechanism of our oppression, to maintain the Status Quo.

We, as a people must learn to develop and institute our solutions. Organized religion, polititians, so-called black leadership have all contributed nothing in our pursuit of freedom and socio-economic empowerment. We must come together, as a Afrikan people and stand tall in  the face of adversity, admit our weaknesses and amplify our strenghts. We must decide if the Staus Quo is good enough. Are we content to always accept what is given or will we come together on one accord and build a community we can all be proud of ?

Together we can accomplish all things,

if we just BELIEVE WE CAN !!!

Ase’

The Emmett Till Case

The circumstances surrounding the death of Emmett Till provide chilling insight into the racism that dominated the South in the 1950s. Till was a fourteen-year-old Chicago native visiting relatives in Mississippi. While out with his cousins and friends on the night of August 24, 1955, he allegedly "accosted" a white woman in the grocery store owned by her husband, Roy Bryant. Accounts vary as to what Till actually said or did. According to the woman Till grabbed her and made lewd remarks. Some witnesses claimed that he only whistled at her.

Roy Bryant considered his wife's honor tainted by the incident. Several nights after the episode, Bryant, his half brother J. W. Milam, and possibly other accomplices kidnapped Till from his relatives' home in the middle of the night. A key witness was 18-year-old sharecropper Willie Reed, who said that on the morning after Till was abducted, he saw Emmett on a truck with six people: Bryant, Milam, two other white men, and two black men who worked for Milam.  The two men beat him severely, beyond recognition and, apparently enraged that he had a picture of a white woman in his wallet, shot Till in the head and threw him in a nearby river. Several days later the body was found, and Bryant and Milam were charged with murder. Till's mother, showing great courage, insisted on an open casket at his funeral, "to show the world what they did to my son".

Mississippi politicians and newspapers publicly condemned the murderers and promised swift justice.  The highly publicized trial of the two men was charged with racial tension. African-American politicians and reporters from the North were treated as outsiders and were segregated in the courtroom. The prosecution was poorly prepared, and the substance of the defense was the astounding claim that Till was not actually dead. The badly decomposed body was identified only by Till's ring on his finger. The sheriff of Tallahatchee County, who investigated the case, speculated on the witness stand that an unnamed group of so-called "rabble-rousers" had planted the evidence. The all-male, all-white jury was apparently convinced: they acquitted Bryant and Milam after deliberating slightly longer than one hour.

Lynchings were often public spectacles: Crowds of whites gathered and cheered on unspeakable acts of torture and savagery. Many parents brought their kids. Some participants would send postcards of the events back home to friends and relatives. Others would vie for souvenirs like a finger or another body part. Few of the perpetrators of these acts were ever identified or brought to trial. Many of the unfortunate victims of these heinous, racially motivated, acts of cowardice, remain anonymous to this day.

The truth of what happened that night became public knowledge several months after the trial. William Bradford Huie, an Alabama journalist in Mississippi to report on the aftermath of the case, offered Bryant and Milam money to tell their story. Since the two could no longer be prosecuted for a crime of which they had already been acquitted, they gladly told for a fee of how they had beaten and killed young Till. Huie reported what the killers told him in the 24 January 1956 issue of Look magazine. Now publicly exposed as murderers, Bryant and Milam were ostracized by the community, and both moved elsewhere within a year. Emmett Till in death became a martyr for the civil rights movement, a symbol of race based persecution of African-Americans.

Both Milam and Bryant are now deceased. However, it is believed that others who participated in the crime are still alive today. In May 2004, the Justice Department, calling the 1955 prosecution a "grotesque miscarriage of justice," reopened the murder investigation. In June 2005, the FBI exhumed Till's body and had an autopsy performed. The case is still considered...OPEN!

Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it!

As the economic climate continues to spiral downward people will look for someone to blame. They will look for someone to vent there frustrations against. When they review socio-economic policies, when the media portrays us as being the largest beneficiaries of their hard earned dollars via welfare, and socialized medical care, we will become the focus of their contempt. We must anticipate our circumstances turning tenuous at best. Who will protect us?, the law?, the police? Police are being fired at alarming rate in urban areas across this country. We must forget our trivial differences and accept the mentality of The Village and initiate action to protect ourselves. We must empower ourselves. Our very survival may depend on it

HATSHEPSUT

In relating OUR STORY we must realize that OUR STORY did not begin when we were brought to the shores of America. Our story contains not only great deeds of black men but of great black women as well. This is the story of one of those great black women....

Hatshepsut, meaning Foremost of Noble Ladies, of ancient Egypt is considered on of the greatest female rulers of all time. She was the first woman in recorded history to confront and literally destroy the theory of male superiority.

Hatshepsut was the elder daughter of Thutmose I and Queen Ahmose, the first king and queen of the Thutmoside clan of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Thutmose I and Ahmose are known to have had only one other child, a daughter, Akhbetneferu, who died in infancy. Thutmose I also married Mutnofret, possibly a daughter of Ahmose I, and produced several half-brothers to Hatshepsut: Wadjmose, Amenose, Thutmose II, and possibly Ramose, through that secondary union. Both Wadjmose and Amenose were prepared to succeed their father, but neither lived beyond adolescence.

Royal lineage was traced through the women in ancient Egypt. Hatshepsut could trace her female ancestry to her jet-black Ethiopian grandmother, Nefertari Aahmes. Marriage to a queen of the royal lineage was necessary, even if the king came from outside of the lineage as happened occasionally. Secondary unions to other women in the royal family assured that there would be heirs from the lineage of women who could became the royal wives. This is the reason for intermarriages. The royal women also played a pivotal role in the religion of ancient Egypt. The queen officiated at the rites in the temples, as priestess, in a culture where religion was inexorably interwoven with the roles of the rulers.

Upon the death of her father in 1493 BCE, Hatshepsut married her half-brother, Thutmose II, and assumed the title of Great Royal Wife. Thutmose II ruled Egypt for 13 years, during which time it has traditionally been believed that Queen Hatshepsut exerted a strong influence over her husband. It is generally believed that Thutmose II was overweight, sickly, and a weakling, allowing Hatshepsut to run the affairs of the monarchy unopposed during their 13 years of marriage. When Thutmose II died, he left behind only one son, a young Thutmose III to succeed him. The latter was born as the son of a lesser wife of Thutmose II rather than of the Great Royal Wife, Hatshepsut, as Neferure, Hathshepsut's daughter was. Due to the relative youth of Thutmose III, he was not eligible to assume the expected tasks of a Pharaoh. Instead, Hatshepsut became the regent of Egypt at this time, assumed the responsibilities of state, and was recognized by the leadership in the temple.

Upon the death of Thutmose II Hatshepsut startled all Egypt by declaring she was now a man. She seized the throne, started to dress as a man, and donned a fake beard. Hatshepsut crushed all opposition by announcing that she was not the daughter of Thutmose I, but was the virgin birth son of Amen and her mother Ahmose. She declared that Amen appeared to her mother in a "flood of light and perfume" and through Immaculate Conception produced a male child (herself). From then on her statues and sculptured portraits depicted her with a beard and male features. Hatshepsut became firmly entrenched as King/Pharaoh for the next 21 years as her popularity increased along with Egypts prosperity. She opened trade to neighboring lands, and her reign was generally peaceful.

She later commissioned her Black architect boyfriend, Senenmut to build the colossal Temple of Amen-Ra at Karnak, which became a strong hold for her detractors. She then commissioned Senenmut to build another magnificent temple called Deir el Bahari out of sheer rock cliffs that looked down on the temple of Amen-Ra. Del el Bahari is considered one of the world's most remarkable architectural achievements. As a final blow to her opposition Hatshepsut ordered the creation of two of the largest obelisk the world had ever seen. She purposely made the obelisk larger than the the Temple of Amen-Ra so that the roof would have to be removed to accommodate them. She made the obelisk more conspicuous by encasing the tops in a mixture of silver and gold. This made the obelisk so brilliant in the sunlight that whenever anyone saw the city, the most brilliant sight was her obelisk, not the Temple of Amen-Ra.

Hatshepsut died under mysterious circumstances. It is believed that Thutmose III upon coming of age to become Pharaoh, decided to seize political power from Hatshepsut and had her killed. Thutmose declared Hatshepsut a "non-person" and had her image erased from many Egyptian artifacts. It is believed that Neferure, Hatshepsut daughter later became the royal wife of Thutmose III.

Hatshepsut's rule was one of the most prosperous times in ancient Egypt. Memories of Hatshepsut persisted for many centuries after her tenure as Pharaoh. Hatshepsut was a great Black woman during Africa's "Golden Age".