The Status Of American Blacks 100 Years Before "Selma"

Alan: Most Americans have living relatives who were alive when these good Christians cooked this man.

Several years ago, I attended a talk by UNC-Chapel Hill Public Health Professor John Hatch who mentioned that all four grandparents were born into slavery. In one of his ancestral families the children were auctioned off in a single day. Knowing that the new owners would remove them to distant plantations - with no hope of family reunion - a bereaved daughter committed suicide within hours of her sale.

To think that this heritage - still burningly alive in human memory - can be transcended in a few generations is more Pharisaic than the good church-goers whom Yeshua railed against.

"Selma"

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/selma/

"Bad Black People." Why Bill O'Reilly Is Wrong Even When He's Right

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/08/bad-black-people-why-bill-oreilly-is.html

"Yeshua Excoriates Fellow Pharisees"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/08/yeshua-excoriates-fellow-pharisees-woe.html

The Status Of American Blacks 100 Years Before "Selma

Horace Greeley, Editor of the New York Tribune and an abolitionist, described a slave auction: “The negroes were examined with as little consideration as if they had been brutes indeed; the buyers pulling their mouths open to see their teeth, pinching their limbs to find how muscular they were, walking them up and down to detect any signs of lameness, making them stoop and bend in different ways that they might be certain there was no concealed rupture or wound..”

The Negro slaves on the auction block, 500 of them, stood nervously waiting as the buyers lit cigars and studied their log books, scanning the list of ‘chattel’ available to them, preparing to start the bidding. The facial expression of each slave stepping on the auction block was the same — anguish about an unknown future, despair at the thought of never again seeing their loved ones.

The abject heartlessness of forever dividing families was captured by Mark Twain, when he sat on his front porch in 1874 and listened to his servant, Mary Ann Cord, whom the writer had come to know as “Aunt Rachel.”

Dey begin to sell my chil’en an’ take dem away, an’ I begin to cry; an’ de man say, ‘Shet up yo’ dam blubberin’,’ an’ hit me on de mouf wid his han’. An’ when de las’ one was gone but my little Henry, I grab’ him clost up to my breas’ so, an’ I ris up an’ says, ‘You shan’t take him away,’ I says; ‘I’ll kill de man dat tetch him!’ … But dey got him – dey got him, de men did...