My Tears in Print

 

I can let go of the 1787 U.S Constitutional statement that would not allow Congress to ban the slave trade until 1808. I can let go of the 1789 3/5^th clause in the constitution that allowed African-Americans to be counted to increase the political voice of whites in the south, but left blacks unable to vote. I can let go of the 1857 Dred Scott case that stated that Congress did not have the right to ban slavery in the states and that slaves weren’t citizens. I can let go of the Black codes that were passed by Southern states to restrict the rights of newly freed slaves. I can let go of the landmark 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision that deemed racial segregation constitutional—paving the way for the Jim Crow laws in the South. I can let go of an incident that took place in 1931, where nine black youth were indicted in Scottsboro, Ala., on charges of having raped two white women. I can let go of the 1932, 40-year Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, that used 399 African-American males as lab animals in a study of how long it takes syphilis to kill someone. I can left go of the incident where a young black boy by the name of Emmett Till was brutally murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi, in 1955. I can let go of the four little girls who died on Sept. 15, 1963 in that burning church in Birmingham, Ala. I can let go of the deaths of James E. Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner; three civil rights workers who were killed by the KKK in 1964, and every other person who participated in the Freedom Rides, the Black Panthers Movement and the civil rights movement. I can let go of the assassination of Malcolm X, which took place Feb. 21, 1965. I can let go of the blood shed on “Bloody Sunday,” (March 7, 1965) from all those who died so that we may be able to see the day when we are treated as equal. I can let of the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis, Tenn. And finally, I can let go of the killing of 49-year-old James Byrd Jr. who was savagely beaten and shackled by his ankles to the back of a pickup and dragged to death on June 7, 1998, in Jasper, Texas, just for being black.

 

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In his victory speech, President Obama said that we must join with him in the rebuilding of this nation and our communities, because this victory alone is not the change that we seek. This is the chance for us to make the change that we seek, he said. And because of that, we cannot go back to the way that things were. Now it is out job to summon that new spirit of service that he spoke so eloquently about, by educating ourselves and getting more involved in the political arena. Don’t just wait until the next general election, start being proactive in government policy now. We can either spend the next four to eight years riding on the coattails of someone who worked his hardest to gain more leverage in politics for our communities, or…we can do as he suggested and use this election as a stepping stone.

 

It’s time for a change in America, and our journey there has only just begun.