Let us March On!
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Deoliver47
We are marching again. We have been marching for a long time. There have been many marches in the past and I’m sure we will march again in the future.
We march to celebrate. We march to demonstrate. We march with voices lifted in song to hearten the weary and encourage the discouraged. We march in strength and we march with dignity.
We march.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on 'til victory is won.
The Negro National Anthem – Lift Every Voice and Sing
"Lift Every Voice and Sing" (now also known as "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing") was publicly performed first as a poem as part of a celebration of Lincoln's Birthday on February 12, 1900 by 500 school children at the segregated Stanton School. Its principal, James Weldon Johnson, wrote the words to introduce its honored guest Booker T. Washington.
The poem was later set to music by Mr. Johnson's brother, John, in 1905. Singing this song quickly became a way for African Americans to demonstrate their patriotism and hope for the future. In calling for earth and heaven to "ring with the harmonies of Liberty," they could speak out subtly against racism and Jim Crow laws—and especially the huge number of lynchings accompanying the rise of the Ku Klux Klan at the turn of the century. In 1919, the NAACP adopted the song as "The Negro National Anthem." By the 1920s, copies of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" could be found in black churches across the country, often pasted into the hymnals.
We tend to reference that historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 when we discuss marching.
But there have been many marches. Some long before yours and my time; others that you may have participated in.
The NAACP, one of the major organizers of this weekend's march has been organizing marches for a long time.
One of the most notable was The Silent Protest March".
On July 28, 1917, in New York City, a silent parade was staged in protest of the East St. Louis, Illinois, massacre of July 2, 1917, as well as the recent lynchings in Waco, Texas, and Memphis, Tennessee. The march was organized by the NAACP, churchmen and other civic leaders to protest the violent events against African Americans around the country. The United States had just entered World War I and many were questioning the use of African-American soldiers to fight in a war that President Woodrow Wilson had described as necessary to the survival of democracy abroad, especially at a time when these same men and their families were denied their basic rights here in the United States. President Wilson continually dismissed the requests of African-American leadership to address the problem of lynching and was considered by many to be one of the most racist presidents ever to occupy the White House.
The lynching and murdering of blacks was on the rise. And in the wartime climate many African Americans were migrating to the North, both to escape racial oppression in the South and to secure the plentiful jobs in the munitions centers and factories in the Northern urban centers. The riots in East St. Louis began when whites, angry because African Americans were employed by a factory holding government contracts, went on a rampage. Over $400,000 worth of property was destroyed. At least 40 African Americans were killed. Men, women and children were beaten, stabbed, hanged and burned. Nearly 6,000 African Americans were driven from their homes.
Across the country, people were aghast at the violence. On July 28, 8,000 African Americans, primarily from Harlem, marched silently down Fifth Avenue. They were dressed in their finest clothes and marched to the sound of muffled drums. They carried picket signs while thousands of New Yorkers watched from the sidewalks. The children marched as well as the adults. Some of the banners read: "Mother, do lynchers go to heaven?" "Mr. President, why not make America safe for democracy?" "Thou shalt not kill." "Pray for the Lady Macbeths of East St. Louis." "Give us a Chance to Live."
W.E.B. Dubois (with walking stick) and James Weldon Johnson (to his left) marching with the parade’s marshals behind the row of drummers.
Not all marches were in protest. Some celebrated major events like Emancipation.
The Richmond Planet, a black newspaper described this Emancipation Day March in 1905:
The colored people of this city celebrated the fortieth year of their emancipation on last Monday with a large parade. Excursionists from other cities swelled the crowd and five bands of music mustered into service. The gathering was orderly. The day was an ideal one and the exercises were conducted at the Broad St. Base-ball Park. The grand-stand gave way and partly collapsed, but this inconvenience was only temporary. Rev. D. W. Davis, A.M., was orator of the day and his effort was an eloquent one.
Major J.B. Johnson, the military leader and tactician was Chief Marshall and he handled the line with skill and ability. The line of march was shortened considerably and the Church-Hill route was abandoned Mr. J.C. Randolph was president and Lawyer J. Thos. Hewin, secretary. The affair was a success and the best of good-feeling prevailed. Capt. Benjamin Scott, who was elected president during the early stages of the affair was in a carriage and many were disappointed at not seeing him on horse-back.
April 3, 1905. Richmond, Virginia. "Emancipation Day."
We all know of the Selma to Montgomery Marches
The Selma to Montgomery marches were three marches in 1965 that marked the political and emotional peak of the American civil rights movement. They grew out of the voting rights movement in Selma, Alabama, launched by local African-Americans who formed the Dallas County Voters League (DCVL). In 1963, the DCVL and organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began voter-registration work. When white resistance to Black voter registration proved intractable, the DCVL requested the assistance of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who brought many prominent civil rights and civic leaders to support voting rights.
The first march took place on March 7, 1965 — "Bloody Sunday" — when 600 civil rights marchers were attacked by state and local police with billy clubs and tear gas. The second march took place on March 9. Only the third march, which began on March 21 and lasted five days, made it to Montgomery, 51 miles (82 km) away. The marchers averaged 10 miles (16 km) a day along U.S. Route 80, known in Alabama as the "Jefferson Davis Highway". Protected by 2,000 soldiers of the U.S. Army, 1,900 members of the Alabama National Guard under Federal command, and many FBI agents and Federal Marshals, they arrived in Montgomery on March 24, and at the Alabama Capitol building on March 25.
There were marches in Solidarity with those who marched in Selma - like the one depicted here, held in Harlem.
My mind is filled with the images of marches. The memory of many miles trod, and many miles still to go.
Native Americans, organized by AIM held The Longest Walk
The Longest Walk was an American Indian Movement led spiritual walk to support tribal sovereignty and bring attention to 11 pieces of anti-Indian legislation that would among things have abrogated Indian Treaties, quantified and limited water rights, etc. It started on February 11, 1978 with a Ceremony on Alcatraz where a Sacred Pipe was loaded with tobacco and that Pipe was carried the entire distance. This 3,200-mile (5,100 km) Walk's purpose was to educate people about the United States government's continuing threat to Tribal Sovereignty and served as a rallying point for many thousands of Indian People representing many Indian Nations throughout the United States and Canada. Most significantly, traditional spiritual leaders from many tribes came and ran Ceremonies, and even international spiritual people, primarily from Japan, also supported the Walk.
On July 15, 1978, "The Longest Walk" walked into Washington D.C. with several thousand Indian People and a number of non-Indian supporters. The traditional elders led the Walk into D.C. to the Washington Monument, where the Pipe carried across the country was smoked. Over the following week a number of rallys were held at various locations around Washington D.C. addressing various issues including the 11 pieces of legislation, American Indian political prisoners, forced relocation at Big Mountain, Navajo Nation etc. Some well known non-Indian supporters included American boxer Muhammad Ali, American Senator Ted Kennedy and actor Marlon Brando. The bill abrogating Indian Treaties was not passed. During the ensuing week of arrival, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act was passed. President Jimmy Carter refused to meet with representatives of The Longest Walk.
We've had Million Man Marches and Million Women Marches.
We've marched to end police brutality
We've marched to stop wars. We've marched to celebrate peace.
We March.
I will be marching this weekend...the familiar path to the Monument.
I will lift my voice in song with thousands upon thousands of my brothers and sisters.
Ain't Gonna Let Nobody turn me round...gonna keep on walkin, keep on talkin... marchin up to freedom Land
Hope to see you there.
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Black Kos community members have been very busy discussing and promoting the march this week.
Show some love to Sister shanikka for her masterpiece diary
10.2.10 - Pushing Back Against Our Training
and to our Brother aaraujo, for 10.2.10 Finally Getting Media Attention, among others in his series of important diaries on the upcoming event.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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There has been a large focus lately on education reform at the primary, middle school, and high school levels, but there is a new issue that is emerging that is in some ways even more scary. Washington Monthly: College Dropout Factories.
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Nestor is certain that the two years at Chicago State put him behind. In his first semester at UIC, he failed a math class, finding it difficult to match the faster pace and heavier workload. (He retook the class, however, and passed.) It’ll take him five years, rather than four, to get his degree. But he says he feels invigorated by the challenges. "It’s hard, but it feels like everybody’s trying to help you," he says. "You didn’t get that sense at Chicago State."
As it happens, Nestor’s impressions are supported by hard numbers. Chicago State has the worst graduation rate of any public four-year university in Illinois and one of the worst in the nation, with just 13 percent of students finishing in six years. For stronger students like Nestor, the statistics are only somewhat better than that. According to a study from the Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR), which looked at twenty different colleges in the Chicago area, kids who graduate from a Chicago public high school with a grade point average of 3.5 have a 37 percent chance of graduating from Chicago State. Those with the same grades who attend UIC have a much better chance of graduating—56 percent. And for those with a 3.5 GPA who attend Northwestern, just north in Evanston, the completion rate is 89 percent. Even schools all around the country with student profiles as challenging as that of Chicago State—that is, schools with mostly African American and Latino students from low-income backgrounds—have overall graduation rates that are many times higher.
Nestor’s experience of educational incompetence at the college level isn’t just a Chicago phenomenon. Nationwide, low-income minority students are disproportionately steered toward colleges not where they’re most likely to succeed, but where they’re most likely to fail.
School reformers, including President Obama, often talk about high school "dropout factories." These are the roughly 2,000 public high schools, about 15 percent of the total, with the nation’s highest dropout rates. The average student at these schools has about a fifty-fifty chance of graduating, according to the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. But the term "dropout factory" is also applicable to colleges. The Washington Monthly and Education Sector, an independent think tank, looked at the 15 percent of colleges and universities with the worst graduation records—about 200 schools in all—and found that the graduation rate at these schools is 26 percent. (See the table at left for a listing of the fifty colleges and universities with the worst graduation rates.) America’s "college dropout factories," in other words, are twice as bad at graduating their students as the worst high schools are at graduating theirs.
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Harvard professor William Julius Wilson on how the HBO series is the perfect teaching tool for inequality in inner-city America. Washington Post: Why we're teaching 'The Wire' at Harvard.
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In our course on urban inequality at Harvard this semester, we want our students to understand the roots of the social conditions in America's inner cities. To that end, we get some help from Bodie, Stringer Bell, Bubbles and others from HBO's "The Wire."
Take this scene in a Baltimore housing project from the show's first season: Two teenage drug dealers marvel at the ingenuity of their boneless Chicken McNuggets and imagine the inventor who must have become incredibly rich off his creation. An older dealer, D'Angelo, mocks their naivete, explaining that the man who invented the McNugget is just a guy in the McDonald's basement who dreamed up a money-making idea for the real players.
To D'Angelo, the formal labor market is fundamentally unfair. People are not rewarded according to their true worth, and powerful institutions regularly exploit those with less power. Social inequality is the inevitable result -- the McNugget inventor doesn't get his due. "It ain't about right. It's about money," D'Angelo tells the young dealers.
"The Wire," which depicted inner-city Baltimore over five seasons on HBO, shows ordinary people making sense of their world. Its complex characters on both sides of the law defy simplistic moral distinctions. Critics loved it. Its fans hung on every episode. We think it is more than just excellent television. Impressed by its treatment of complex issues, we developed a course at Harvard drawing on the show's portrayal of fundamental sociological principles connected to urban inequality. Our seminar was designed for 30 students; four times that many showed up for the first class last week.
Of course, our undergraduate students will read rigorous academic studies of the urban job market, education and the drug war. But the HBO series does what these texts can't. More than simply telling a gripping story, "The Wire" shows how the deep inequality in inner-city America results from the web of lost jobs, bad schools, drugs, imprisonment, and how the situation feeds on itself.
Those kinds of connections are very difficult to illustrate in academic works. Though scholars know that deindustrialization, crime and prison, and the education system are deeply intertwined, they must often give focused attention to just one subject in relative isolation, at the expense of others. With the freedom of artistic expression, "The Wire" can be more creative. It can weave together the range of forces that shape the lives of the urban poor.
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Washington Post: Racist messages pose quandary for mainstream sites.
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Although you rarely hear racial insults on Main Street these days, there's a place where unashamed bigotry is all too easy to find: tossed off in the comments sections of some of the Internet's most popular websites, today's virtual Main Street.
Internet anonymity has removed one of the strongest barriers to the type of language that can ruin reputations and end careers. Racist messages are a small percentage of the wild and woolly web, but they stick out since they are rare in person - and they raise a host of questions.
Do these comments reflect a reversal of racial progress? Is that progress an illusion while racism thrives underground? What kind of harm are these statements doing? Could there be any value in such venting? And what, if anything, should a free society do about it?
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Double Standard. The Root: Bike 'Thief' Experiment Highlights Racism
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Primetime co-anchor John Quiñones, hosted a segment of "What Would You Do?" On this particular segment, he held an experiment with two bicycle thieves, one white and the other black. The men were dressed the same and had tools to break the locks off of the bikes which were located in an exposed area. Each man attempted to steal the bike in broad daylight. The white "thief" was allowed to go about his business pretty much unbothered, even breaking out an electric saw to draw more attention, because people failed to stop him. Over 100 people passed by and only one couple attempted to contact authorities. Someone even wished him good luck.
The black bicycle "thief," not so much. He was surrounded immediately, yelled at and people were whipping out cell phones and snapping pictures of the "thief." The ironic and pathetic part about the story is that in between the experiments, two black women came upon the white "thief," and decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. They also explained what would happen if it was a black guy stealing the bike and guess what, they were right. Nobody gave the brother the benefit of the doubt.
We're glad that John Quiñones is shedding light on what we already know -- there is a double standard when it comes to crime. Black people are often guilty until proven innocent which is why when people are actually committing crimes, like killing their children or throwing acid on themselves to gain sympathy and money, they usually blame a black person. Guess what? It works, everytime
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Bank Fires Collection Agency After Operators Caught Using Racist, Obscene Phone Calls to Collect Debts. ABC: Debt Collectors, the N-Word and Bank of America.
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Two days after being confronted by ABC News, Bank of America has fired a debt collection agency after several of its operators were caught using racist and obscene phone calls to collect debts from bank customers.
Offensive, unrelenting collection calls on behalf of a major corporation."What's up, you f---ing n---r?" said one of the collection agents in a message to 32-year old Allen Jones of Dallas, who owed $81 on his Bank of America credit card.
"This is your f---ing wake up call, man," the debt collector said in a message left at Jones' home at 6:30 a.m.
In a message left a few minutes later, the debt collection agent told Jones, "You little, lazy ass bitch, get your mother f---ing ass up and go pick some mother f---ing cotton fields, bitch."
Jones said the calls continued even after he told the debt collection company he had paid his credit card bill.
"The representative acted like, oh, we can call you as many times as we want," Jones said in an interview to be broadcast Friday on ABC World News with Diane Sawyer and Nightline.
The calls came from the Harlingen, Texas office of Advanced Call Center Technologies. ACT is a Philadelphia-based company that provides collection services for a number of major corporations.
Jones saved the taped messages and hired lawyers to sue ACT. A jury in Texas found the both the debt collectors and the corporation responsible and awarded Jones more than $l.5 million.
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We can never forget Haiti! New York Times: Weighing the Lives of Babies in Haiti
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We were 18 doctors, nurses and other health professionals from Children’s Hospital Boston, on a nine-day mission to the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince to work with a Haitian pediatric team.
It was the first week of May, almost four months after the earthquake, and the situation remained dire. Rubble was everywhere, many buildings were unusable, and all of the pediatric care was being given in tents. Supplies were sparse and unreliable.
The obstetricians at the General were on strike, and women in labor were being told to go elsewhere. But word had gotten out that there were American doctors at the hospital, and many patients simply refused to leave.
So it was on that rainy Sunday evening that there were six women in active labor in the emergency room. And soon one of them, in her late teens, gave birth to a tiny boy, just 2 pounds 3 ounces. A neonatologist on our team estimated that he was two months premature. (The mother claimed she hadn’t even known she was pregnant.)
Premature babies can get into a lot of trouble, and the smaller they are, the higher their risk of complications. They usually have difficulty maintaining a normal body temperature, losing heat to their surroundings faster than they can generate it. This is why they are kept in incubators until they are able to stay warm on their own. They are at high risk for infections, along with feeding and breathing problems.
MAKESHIFT MEDICINE A team from Children’s Hospital in Boston made an "incubator" for the baby they cared for in Port-au-Prince.
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Over the last two decades, native-born black players on the diamond became rare, but this year has brought a promising crop of rookies and emerging stars. The Root: The Return of African-American Baseball Players.
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Baseball has come a long way since Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947. Robinson's courageous desegregation of the game now serves as an inspiration to all Americans. And those ballplayers who followed in Robinson's large footsteps -- all-time greats like Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson and Bob Gibson -- provided evidence of the greatness that African Americans could accomplish if given a fair shot. Baseball now celebrates the anniversary of Robinson's breakthrough every season on April 15, when every player wears Jackie's number 42.
The occasion has usually also been a time for head scratching, however. African-American participation in baseball has been on the decline for years, recently reaching a figure of just over 8 percent. And although it has increased marginally since then, this year just 9.5 percent of players on opening-day rosters were of African-American descent.
Major League Baseball has not sat on its hands. It has boosted the visibility of a program called Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities, or RBI, that has provided baseball equipment and instruction to youngsters who might not otherwise play the game. Major leaguers like New York Yankee ace pitcher C.C. Sabathia credit RBI with his interest in the game. Major League Baseball also has several entries in the influential videogame market in hopes of duplicating for the diamond the success the Madden series brought to football.
And most important, there is a new wave of African-American stars. Tampa Bay Rays pitcher David Price, 25, started in the All-Star Game this summer, and he is leading his team in a close battle with the New York Yankees in the American League East. One of the hitters on the opposing team at this summer's classic was Houston Astros outfielder Michael Bourn, 27. The Astros are at the start of a long-overdue rebuilding campaign, but they have made the fleet centerfielder one of their cornerstones.
Bourn was joined in the National League's All-Star outfield by Atlanta Brave Jason Heyward, 20, who homered in his first major league at-bat, then endured the usual struggles of a 20-year-old in the big leagues. However, since the All-Star Game, Heyward has lived up to his advance billing; he is hitting .333 and is a leading candidate for National League Rookie of the Year. Meanwhile, in the American League, Detroit Tiger outfielder Austin Jackson, 23, is a contender for Rookie of the Year.
David Price of the Tampa Bay Rays in September 2010. (Elsa/Getty Images)
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor
Being the son of a professional Historian, having a degree in History myself; I am both, amazed and appalled, by the blatant historical revisions and ignorance that is on display by the TeaBirchers© and their fellow travelers. From outright editing and distribution of Jefferson's Letter to the Danbury Baptists as a whole document, so as to support their dubious claims of the Founders being against the existence of a Wall between Church and State; to Fox News editing Obama's public exchanges so his presidency is diminished and marginalized.
Surely, if one has to lie to support an argument, the argument must not be very sound. What if we "edit" the lie out these discourses? What do we get? How about an honest assessment of where we came from:
What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn't stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts.
-- James Baldwin
"A Talk to Teachers," Oct. 16, 1963
It is true that a Dream arose out of the disaffection experienced by those hungry, and poor, and convicted. It is true that tragedies and dangerous compromises occurred to make that Dream of America a possibility. Just let us not lie about where it was we came from and how it is we came to be who we are; let us look honestly to where our present is and where our future could be; let us not lie to make the Dream true. It is said, Knowledge is Power; and that is a sad truism when taking account of the axiom's terrible permutations. Ignorance though, masking itself as Knowledge, is not real Power; but real Ruination.
The only real course to stem this ruination then, is to embrace Knowledge and not Ignorance; to arm our minds and soul and activism against those corporate armies of propaganda, against those mobs of malice and hate; who in either, ignorance or guile, or both, would go to any means necessary than...
Let America Be America Again
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.
O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!
-- Langston Hughes
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The Front Porch is now open. Hope you are busy cooking up some food to bring this weekend. Grab some folding chairs too.