#forty acres and a mule

[ioannemos]

upstairs neighbors having a race or possibly a rave... currently also operating heavy machinery

[doberbutts]

I’m wondering if you have thoughts on James Baldwin’s “open letter to the born again”? I’m struggling a bit with what his point is in that piece; it feels kinda dismissive on Jewish zionists agency in creation of Israel? But I may be missing parts or not getting things

The text in question.

And the segment I think anon is struggling with:

I know what I am talking about: my grandfather never got the promised “forty acres, and a mule,” the Indians who survived that holocaust are either on reservations or dying in the streets, and not a single treaty between the United States and the Indian was ever honored. That is quite a record.

Jews and Palestinians know of broken promises. From the time of the Balfour Declaration (during World War I) Palestine was under five British mandates, and England promised the land back and forth to the Arabs or the Jews, depending on which horse seemed to be in the lead. The Zionists—as distinguished from the people known as Jews—using, as someone put it, the “available political machinery,’’ i.e., colonialism, e.g., the British Empire—promised the British that, if the territory were given to them, the British Empire would be safe forever.

But absolutely no one cared about the Jews, and it is worth observing that non-Jewish Zionists are very frequently anti-Semitic. The white Americans responsible for sending black slaves to Liberia (where they are still slaving for the Firestone Rubber Plantation) did not do this to set them free. They despised them, and they wanted to get rid of them. Lincoln’s intention was not to “free” the slaves but to “destabilize” the Confederate Government by giving their slaves reason to “defect.” The Emancipation Proclamation freed, precisely, those slaves who were not under the authority of the President of what could not yet be insured as a Union.

It has always astounded me that no one appears to be able to make the connection between Franco’s Spain, for example, and the Spanish Inquisition; the role of the Christian church or—to be brutally precise, the Catholic Church—in the history of Europe, and the fate of the Jews; and the role of the Jews in Christendom and the discovery of America. For the discovery of America coincided with the Inquisition, and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Does no one see the connection between The Merchant of Venice and The Pawnbroker? In both of these works, as though no time had passed, the Jew is portrayed as doing the Christian’s usurious dirty work. The first white man I ever saw was the Jewish manager who arrived to collect the rent, and he collected the rent because he did not own the building. I never, in fact, saw any of the people who owned any of the buildings in which we scrubbed and suffered for so long, until I was a grown man and famous. None of them were Jews.

And I was not stupid: the grocer and the druggist were Jews, for example, and they were very very nice to me, and to us. The cops were white. The city was white. The threat was white, and God was white, Not for even a single split second in my life did the despicable, utterly cowardly accusation that “the Jews killed Christ’’ reverberate. I knew a murderer when I saw one, and the people who were trying to kilI me were not Jews.

But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of “divide and rule” and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.

Finally: there is absolutely—repeat: absolutely—no hope of establishing peace in what Europe so arrogantly calls the Middle East (how in the world would Europe know? having so dismally failed to find a passage to India) without dealing with the Palestinians. The collapse of the Shah of Iran not only revealed the depth of the pious Carter’s concern for “human rights,” it also revealed who supplied oil to Israel, and to whom Israel supplied arms. It happened to be, to spell it out, white South Africa.

Well. The Jew, in America, is a white man. He has to be, since I am a black man, and, as he supposes, his only protection against the fate which drove him to America. But he is still doing the Christian’s dirty work, and black men know it.

My friend, Mr. Andrew Young, out of tremendous love and courage, and with a silent, irreproachable, indescribable nobility, has attempted to ward off a holocaust, and I proclaim him a hero, betrayed by cowards.

For context: Andrew Young, considered the right hand of MLK Jr, had a longstanding and occasionally fraught relationship with the Jewish community. He stepped down from Congress shortly after being forced to choose between voicing support for Palestine and continuing to work towards black-jewish interests by his constituents and fellow politicians, as he felt very strongly about supporting both. This was a fairly unpopular move. While I don't believe he ever called himself Jewish by the strictest sense, he was actively involved in Jewish communities and the known "white" ancestry within him is a Polish Jew in his great grandparents.

To be honest, I don't really see much a problem with this as I think it fairly closely matches up not only with my understanding of the history of this problem but also my own country's part in it as well as my personal feelings on it decades later. It pretty blatantly says that Zionism is utilizing a machination of white supremist colonism due to the extensive history of antisemitism and having had the ancestral land dangled in front of them like bait on a hook from the British Empire, which owned Palestine at the time. It also goes on to say that many Zionists aren't even Jewish and are antisemitic in nature, but are Christians happy to get rid of as many Jews as possible and how that tracks due to the Christian church's millennia-deep history of antisemitism.

I don't think it lets anyone off the hook. I think it pretty much flat out says this is a problem caused first and foremost by white Christians who hate Jews and Arabs alike and have a vested interest in getting the two populations to fight because it'll be easier to kill off just the one group instead of both of them, if one ends up eradicating the other. It even talks about the friction between the black community and the Jewish community, what caused it, what drives it, how that friction in itself is a tool of white supremacy to hurt us both.

[elwenyere]

Black Americans have been demanding compensation and restitution for their suffering since the end of the Civil War. 40 Acres and a Mule remains the nation’s most famous attempt to provide some form of reparations for American slavery. Today, it is largely remembered as a broken promise and an abandoned step toward multiracial democracy. Less known is that the federal government actually did issue hundreds, perhaps thousands, of titles to specific plots of land between 4 and 40 acres. Freedmen and women built homes, established local governments, and farmed the land. But their utopia didn’t last long. After President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, his successor, Andrew Johnson, stripped property from formerly enslaved Black residents across the South and returned it to their past enslavers. Over the course of two and a half years, a team of Public Integrity reporters, editors, and researchers identified 1,250 Black men and women who had earned land as reparations after the Civil War. From there, the team conducted genealogical research to locate living descendants of many of those who had received and then lost the land. For the first time, these living Black Americans were made aware of the specific land that had been given to and then taken away from their ancestors. This project is an unprecedented and innovative use of Freedmen’s Bureau records—an impossible task for most of American history, until recent advances in genealogical research and the digitization of thousands of pages of Reconstruction-era documents made it feasible.

"Forty Acres and a Lie": incredible work in investigative journalism from Reveal

[odinsblog]

Special Field Orders, No. 15 (series 1865) were military orders issued during the American Civil War, on January 16, 1865, by General William Tecumseh Sherman, commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi of the United States Army. They provided for the confiscation of 400,000 acres (160,000 ha) of land along the Atlantic coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida and the dividing of it into parcels of not more than 40 acres (16 ha), on which were to be settled approximately 18,000 formerly enslaved families and other black people then living in the area.

The orders were issued following Sherman's March to the Sea. They were intended to address the immediate problem of dealing with the tens of thousands of black refugees who had joined Sherman's march in search of protection and sustenance, and “to assure the harmony of action in the area of operations.” Critics allege that his intention was for the order to be a temporary measure to address an immediate problem, and not to grant permanent ownership of the land to the freedmen, although most of the recipients assumed otherwise. General Sherman issued his orders four days after meeting with twenty local black ministers and lay leaders and with U.S. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton in Savannah, Georgia. Brig. Gen. Rufus Saxton, an abolitionist from Massachusetts who had previously organized the recruitment of black soldiers for the Union Army, was put in charge of implementing the orders. Freedmen were settled in Georgia, particularly along the Savannah River, in the Ogeechee district of Chatham County, and on islands off of the coast of Savannah.

In the end, the orders had little concrete effect because President Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation that returned the lands to southern owners who took a loyalty oath. Johnson granted amnesty to most former Confederates and allowed the rebel states to elect new governments. These governments, which often included ex-Confederate officials, soon enacted black codes, measures designed to control and repress the recently freed slave population. General Saxton and his staff at the Charleston SC Freedmen Bureau's office refused to carry out President Johnson's wishes and denied all applications to have lands returned. In the end, Johnson and his allies removed General Saxton and his staff, but not before Congress was able to provide legislation to assist some families in keeping their lands.

Although mules are not mentioned in the orders, they were a main source for the expression “forty acres and a mule.” A historical marker commemorating the order was erected by the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah, near the corner of Harris and Bull streets, in Madison Square. (source)

👉🏿 40 Acres & A Lie (podcast)

[tanadrin]

Is there a term that covers the idea of a political economy where instead of the lowest rung of baronial hierarchy, power is devolved onto, like, independent smallhold farmers and (in modern times) small business owners/landed and property-owning patriarchs, who run their personal domains as a kind of despotism? This encompasses both the (idealized) phase of westward expansion in American history and, like, Commonwealth Iceland. It is often, but not always, associated with agrarian societies--the modern equivalent of this idea associates it more with like car dealerships than forty acres and a mule. But it's not egalitarian: it comfortably coexists with forms of social hierarchy, including extreme ones like slavery.

You know the thing? Is there a word for that?

[tododeku-or-bust]

This is probably a silly question, but it's just something I think about. So when the indigenous communities here inevitably get their land back post the destruction of the United States as an entity, can we add securing reparations for my people as part of the changeover? I'm not saying Native folks are paying for it or that we should still get forty acres and a mule! I'm just saying that it'd be nice, bc the white settler colonialism here also included upwards of (modern day) trillions of dollars in economy building via two and a half centuries of free labor via enslavement and other crimes against humanity. Against Black people.

[girlactionfigure]

7 reasons why the Palestinian crisis & the Black struggle for freedom are absolutely nothing alike

The “parallels” between the Palestinian plight and that of African-Americans have been made for decades, and this has always been spurious. Sadly, the exercise continues and seems to be growing as anti-Israel sentiment including global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) inexplicably gain credibility.

1. UNRWA

Beginning operations on May 1, 1950, the United Nations Relief Works Agency for the Palestinian people is the only UN relief agency that exists exclusively for one group — the Palestinians. At the time of its founding, there were some 720,000 Palestinian refugees. Many of these people became refugees after refusing the offer to become Israeli citizens and choosing to await the great victory over the Jews promised to them by the leaders of the Arab states.

Black Americans from slavery to Jim Crow to the civil rights era never had anything that vaguely resembled UNRWA or any type of international relief agency. We were also unsuccessful at being declared refugees — which surely would have led to reparations for 400 years of forced servitude.

2. INTERNATIONAL AID

The Palestinian Authority (formerly the Palestinian Liberation Organization – PLO) receives about $1 billion annually. This money comes primarily from American and European taxpayers. The money is supposed to go to relieve the suffering of the Palestinian people which, as Dr. King said in 1968, “are part of that third world of hunger, of disease, of illiteracy.” Unfortunately, much of that aid goes to political and racial propaganda and programming, as Palestinian children are fed a constant diet of anti-Semitism and hatred for Israel. From curriculum to suicide bomber camps, Palestinian children are taught to hate Israel and the West — on our dime.

Black Americans received no international aid during centuries of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. Neither did we receive domestic aid.  The very term “forty acres and a mule” (what the US  government promised former Black slaves, but didn’t deliver) became code for, “what we never got.” Money to help fund our quest for freedom came almost exclusively from private donors including Black businesses and families, White abolitionists, churches, synagogues, and other Jewish organizations and individuals.

3. ARAB STATES (Arab League)

In the Middle Eastern region alone there are multiple Arab homelands including Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and oil-rich Saudi Arabia. They were the dominant force in the Middle East when Israel was reestablished in 1947-48, and used their combined military might to attempt to crush the nascent Jewish State. They failed. Now, not only will these states not take in the Palestinians who have been given official refugee status for three generations, these nations also have a horrible record of human rights abuses against their Arab-Palestinian brothers. They will not allow them to live as citizens, enroll in school, buy property, or even repair their dilapidated dwellings. Palestinian refugees are being killed in Syria while you read this.

Black Americans had no Black nations to which we could turn for help or shelter. While we were enslaved in America, our continent had been colonized by the Europeans. Further, all of North Africa is currently being occupied by Arabs, who stole it from our people. But that’s another list.

4. TERRORISM & TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS

Other than Nat Turner and a few rebellious slaves whom history has forgotten, Black victims of oppression never possessed the means to offer armed resistance to our oppressors during slavery. After slavery (and due to the legal right to purchase guns), Black Americans were able to arm themselves but had no access to rockets, rocket launchers, IEDs, or other explosives.

If Black Americans had been able to fight with weapons, you can be certain that blowing up our sons and daughters would not have been a strategic option. Ever. Under any circumstances.

5. PALESTINIAN ROCK THROWERS & INSTIGATORS

Pictures of Palestinians throwing rocks at, or dropping boulders on unsuspecting Jewish motorists are quite strange to informed Black Americans (my grandmother would have called those rock throwers ‘hoodlums’). During the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s our ‘weapon’ was non-violent resistance. This was by choice and by necessity, as we were vastly outnumbered and outgunned by the White majority. We could not imagine what would have happened to our young men had they stood at ambush on the roads of Montgomery, Alabama, or Jackson, Mississippi, and thrown rocks at White passers-by. We were lynched for simply breathing while Black.

6. UNHRC

The United Nations Human Rights Council has condemned Israel more than any other nation — combined. In fact, since 1975, over 40% of the UNHRC’s indictments have been against Israel. This imbalance is a result of the Arab states’ undue influence over the UNHRC, as they have worked in tandem with the enemies of the US to discredit and delegitimize the Jewish State. The UNHRC is a large part of the reason that even the casual follower of world events may view Israel in a negative light.

Not only did Black Americans ever have something like a League of Nations to condemn our enemies, the UNHRC further insults us by largely ignoring the suffering of African people in places like Sudan, Eritrea or Congo; or Egypt/Sinai where African slavery and organ harvesting is taking place. This disparity prompted former UN Secretary-General, Kofi Anan to comment, “Since the beginning of their work, [the UNHRC] has focused almost entirely on Israel and there are other crisis situations, like Sudan, where they have not been able to say a word.”

7. ARAB REPRESENTATION IN ISRAELI GOVERNMENT

Not only are there Arab members of the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) and the Supreme Court, some of the individuals are actively working to destroy the Jewish State. They are very vocal anti-Zionists, and their speech (as well as their legislative action) are all protected by Israeli law.

Black Americans did not become a part of the legislative system until after slavery during Reconstruction. We were exclusively Republican by default, as the Democrats were the party of slavery, Jim Crow, and the KKK. We never called for the destruction of America. We have a long, proud tradition of working within the American legal system to address violations of civil and human rights — for everyone. This process reached its zenith during the 1960s as Black leaders and lay people (led by Dr. King and other stalwarts) marched on Washington, D.C. demanding jobs, justice, and equal treatment under the Constitution. 400 years of hard work resulted in Black people helping to make America the greatest democracy on earth.

There are many more than seven reasons why the Black saga and the Palestinian plight should not be compared, but I believe sufficient point has been made.

Lastly, I do not spurn the Palestinian fight for self-determination.  Every fight for justice is a righteous struggle. I would just say that, what made the Black historic struggle effective was our remembering who our enemy was — and who it was not. In the interest of defending Palestinian human rights, one may want to start with the main perpetrators: The Palestinian Authority and Hamas. But again, that is the subject of another discussion.

[faorism]

the walk in the woods job out here doing the mostest with their translation of the bohemian grove (a real, very evil boys club of the worlds most powerful men that does in fact feature weird rituals and pissing everywhere). by moving it from california to ambiguous south near new orleans, it makes explicit some of the underlying tomfuckery of the grove by making possible the fictional counterpart's being hosted on a plantation.

.

as gestured to in the episode, the grove began 130 years ago by ~men of industry~ (ill get back to this). the bohemian grove specifically was founded in 1878. places its founding within reconstruction, an era post the us civil war's end in 1865. the war had created fundamental changes to the american landscape, from the emancipation of enslaved Black people to a nationwide trauma due to mass death. reconstruction is often described as a period of reconciliation between the northern states and the south, to draw together the nation's people, rebuild its infrastructure, and reestablish the union.

thing is, there was a reconciliation. but ultimately, it was to bridge together the power and resources of whites by way of the continued disfrancisement of Black people. it was a time of both reckoning and potential, given the shock attempted succession had on the political landscape but more impkrtantly given what the nation looks like post-slavery as long as you are not incarcerated. Black people held a fuck ton of govt seats at first, there was Black industry, there was Black migration, but also simultaneously wildly exploitative sharecropping schemes that were not slavery but also yeah kinda were and a ton of other genocidal shit. the forty acres and a mule promise never came through. Black folk were freed, but they were not equal and there would be no support to undo hundreds of years of violence, human trafficking, and genocide, nor would there be enough protections in place to secure Black prosperity for the future. it is absolutely no surprise that the first iteration of the KKK ran from 1868 to the early 1870s: their intention was to reestablish white supremacy through violence, voter suppression, and terrorism. while they were squashed as a formal organization, they signaled antiblack attitudes held by many white people for years to come.

as you might see in the Reconstruction wiki page (under the timing section), some place the end of Reconstruction to align with some govt seat change schenanigans called the compromise of 1977. there's a lot of nitpicky shit about it, but what i care about is that federal troops were withdrawn out of the south. i dont like this time point because i dont feel like it tells the full story. it leans onto the reconciliation between whites, because the withdrawl can be described as Back To Normal Operations! in terms of state control. but as the compromise wiki describes, Black politicians were upset about this because they felt the federal troops were protecting Black progress and safety. and they were right! vote suppression and intimidation went rampant, and the slow churn toward the establishment of Jim Crow Laws would be allowed to sneak in.

by extending the frame of Reconstruction to, as the wiki again suggests, something like 1890s when antiblack voter suppression was passed. a longer era focuses not on reconciliation on a top-down (read: white) level, but instead highlights the rise and eventual destruction of Black rights and capital. centering that as the true legacy of Reconstruction is vital to avoid white supremacist historicizing that distracts from the true concerted efforts to disenfranchise Black folk.

.

anyway what does this have to do with leverage and the grove, you might be asking.

as said, the irl grove was founded 1878, a year after the compromise act but firmly within the arc of a long Reconstruction era.

this is where the "men of industry" line said (i believe) in general frick's speech comes in, and how the move to a plantation heightens the optics in a hugely significant way.

bruh, they are a group of powerful men in white robes meeting on a plantation in the south. they allowed in some Black men now (diversity win! your cabal is now racially mixed!), but you know that when this shit started up, it was white dudes on white dudes on white dudes. the actual bohemian grove has rituals involving red robes, but the shock and discomfort of the fictional version was intentional, i feel, in order to associate it with the KKK. this to me is confirmed when frick said his family owned that plantation for generations. that, like all other sites that abducted and tortured enslaved people, was a concentration camp. the men of industry frick is talking about are at least partly human traffickers (aka, "slaveowners"). the leverage grove is one that is intricately tied to a moment of transition, Black dispossession, and violence. white men pissing every which way getting drunk on the lands that held hundreds of years of trauma.

.

it's important for me to say that around the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were a fuckton of social clubs and lodges opening up across the country, including some hosted by people of color. maybe the irl grove did not have the same overtly racial tensions feeding into it as when placed in the heart of Reconstruction (even though, please please understand that it's not just a south thing; it was a white folk thing, regardless of political affiliation or location).

but! the legacy of bohemian grove? yeah, this is a fucking club that has had an impact. there was a meeting of the manhattan project at one of the grove meetings that led to the development of the atomic bomb. if all that ever came out from the grove was that, then that alone would be enough to make the whole shit rotten. but given the power behind the men of the grove (listed here), any reestablishment of a boys club (literal or figurative) is a backdoor dealings system to withhold influence, opportunities, and privilege from marginalized people by managing access to cultural capital and social resources.

it's what was done in Reconstruction, and its done through these secret (or "secret") society rituals, and it's done again and again and again, but those dealings are ones us normies will ever get a chance to see.

i just wish there was a leverage team for us irl ready to fuck shit up and defend some wildlife. (the irl bohemian grove protesters wete trying to protect redwood trees, owls, and some other bird instead of a frog, but still.)

but yeah. fuck fricks dudes and fuck the irl grove and i hope your ugly ass owl statue topples over one day during one of your cringe plays and yall all die drowning in your own piss!

[i might come back to this, clean it up, and throw it onto ao3 as a meta post because i do feel this is important for people to know and i legit spent two and a quarter hours on this.... anyway, i will link it here in this postscript should i do that. also i am not a historian so i absolutely got some shit wrong but whatever. dont cite me in a paper, basically]

[fantasyfantasygames]

40 Parsecs

40 Parsecs and a M.U.L.E, Steamroller, 2021

(No relation to 40 Degree Fever, another game on my review list. Also no relation to the antique computer strategy game M.U.L.E.)

The name is, as you hopefully guessed, a reference to "Forty acres and a mule". For those who don't know Starcraft, a M.U.L.E. is a mining machine that you can call down from orbit.

I love alternate imaginations of the future, especially when they're on the optimistic side. 40 Parsecs is an afrofuture reimagining of Starcraft and it's amazing.

Instead of the Terran Dominion's fascist monarchy, the Umoja wa Galaksi (Galactic Unity or something like it in Kiswahili) is locally-run, multi-faceted, and multicultural. Every planet has its own unique ships. Some of them are fused with Protoss psychic crystals or Zerg biotech, because, like humanity, the Protoss and Zerg are not presented as monocultures! There are overminds who embrace peace. "Dark Templar" isn't frightening or an insult. There's an assumption that everyone has a little Protoss or Zerg (or both) going on and is tapped into a shared psychic network.

The PCs are citizens of a community (there's a community-building flowchart that the whole group uses) who have pledged to defend it. You see, there are still Terrans who are fascist, Zerg who don't like anyone, and Protoss who do want to telepathically control you, and they're trying to sneak into your territory. You find them, root them out, and defend your people.

Character types let you mimic the medium-scale characters from SC1 and SC2, though without their trademark gear until shit goes down. Terrans can be Enlisted (Marine, Firebat, Reaper, etc.), Agents (Ghosts), Construction (SCVs), Pilots, and Commanders. Protoss can be Priests, Scientists, Zealots, or AIs. Zerg can be Queens, Warriors, Overseers, or Corruptors. All of those are broad categories rather than the exact unit type.

The rules for 40 Parsecs are concise and effective, with a medium amount of "swing" to the rolls. Most of it is 3d6 + bonus vs. target number. A lot is handled through opposed rolls. Combat involves a neat die-swapping trick that lets you "steal" good dice from your opponent's failed roll to add to your attack roll to get your damage. Matters of scale are handled by adding large bonuses - a battlecruiser has +40 scale, for instance, whereas Marine armor gets +10, so doing even a small amount of damage takes an amazing shot.

Ability scores include the usual sci-fi set (Str, Agi, Sta, Int, Psy, Per) plus three cultural ability scores (unique to each culture) that map to each other in the game's most complex interactions. I'm not 100% sure how well those work in practice, but they sound cool and I like the approach to culture-as-a-defining-part-of-character. You can also borrow skills through the psychic network.

The art for the ships and units is pretty good, though the character art would have benefited from a professional artist rather than the writer's cousin. Bonus points for not using any of the video game art, though!

As you might guess from the name this one's on itch - or it was until ActiBlizzsion sent them a cease-and-desist and the page disappeared. You can occasionally find a copy on file-sharing services. Be warned that for some reason it's a touch over 3.4 GB. I suspect that the image compression went badly, badly wrong.

[gtunesmiff]

2023 NOVEMBER POEM-A-DAY CHAPBOOK CHALLENGE: DAY 28 ~ CARPE THE DIEM

CARPE THE DIEM © 2023 G. Smith (BMI) ================== “Carpe the diem,” as Granddad would say, “Use both your hands and go grab the day. “Sometimes it’s hard work, sometimes it’s just play, “But get up each morning, and go grab the day.”

He farmed forty acres behind a mule and a plow, Raising corn and some chickens, a hog and a cow, And my daddy and brothers, I’m not quite sure how, He farmed forty acres behind a mule and a plow.

Up before sunrise, his workdays were long. No matter what happened, what went right or went wrong, He always hummed, or whistled a song, And came in at dark thirty; his work days were long.

“Carpe the diem,” as Granddad would say, “Use both your hands and go grab the day. “Sometimes it’s hard work, sometimes it’s just play, “But get up each morning, and go grab the day.”

His work shirts were worn, his work boots were scuffed, He made sure they had plenty, and when times got tough, He always made sure that they had enough. Let his work shirts be worn, and his workboots be scuffed.

The old home place started as a tool shed, But there was food on the table, each had a warm bed. They had shoes on their feet and a roof overhead. And that old home place now is much more than a shed.

One summer a flood, two summers of droughts, Through the highs and the lows, he never had doubts, He reached out to neighbors who needed help in the night, And knew that the Good Lord would do what He knew was right.

“Carpe the diem,” as Granddad would say, “Use both your hands and go grab the day. “Sometimes it’s hard work, sometimes it’s just play, “But get up each morning, and go grab the day. “Yeah, Boy, get up every morning, "And go, grab the day.”

2-fer Tuesday Prompt:

SEIZE the day

SURVIVE the day

[jonatinojueves]

What you want you? A house or a car? Forty acres and a mule, a piano, a guitar? Anythin', see, my name is Uncle Sam, I'm your dog. Motherfucker, you can live at the mall

[qqueenofhades]

Heyyyy random history question if you don't mind :) What happened to the forty acres and a mule thing as reparations for slavery? Why did that seemingly not happen?

Well, you can read the history of reparations in the United States Wikipedia page, or you can take a guess as to the reason why all formal and/or federal-level reparation efforts involving money and/or other tangible property have, in fact, failed. Would the answer to that question be "institutional racism?" Yes. Yes it would.

[protoslacker]

A poem by Pauli Murray

DARK TESTAMENT: VERSE 8

Hope is a crushed stalk

Between clenched fingers

Hope is a bird’s wing

Broken by a stone.

Hope is a word in a tuneless ditty —

A word whispered with the wind,

A dream of forty acres and a mule,

A cabin of one’s own and a moment to rest,

A name and place for one’s children

And children’s children at last . . .

Hope is a song in a weary throat.

Give me a song of hope

And a world where I can sing it.

Give me a song of faith

And a people to believe in it.

Give me a song of kindliness

And a country where I can live it.

Give me a song of hope and love

And a brown girl’s heart to hear it.

Dark Testament and Other Poems by Pauli Murray

[hydeordie]

Harrison Kinnane Smith Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company Final Dividend Check (1883), 2024 Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company final dividend check, rent-to-own contract, stewardship agreement.

Harrison Kinnane Smith’s collaborative work and site-specific interventions critique public institutions and financial systems. His practice departs from the intersection of critical geography and political economy. Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company Final Dividend Check (1883) (2024) constitutes the latest addition to Smith’s growing body of work exploring racial ideology in the history of American real estate law and finance. The artwork draws on the exploitative arrangements of two failed Reconstruction-era reparation programs in order to support a non-profit organization providing affordable housing at the site of these historical failures. Freedman’s Savings offers collectors the opportunity to purchase one of the last checks issued by the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, a bank chartered by the Lincoln Administration to serve freedpeople who were legally excluded by “White” banks. Depositors in the Freedman’s Bank who hoped to save towards land ownership instead found their savings nearly halved when corruption and mismanagement led the bank to close after less than a decade. The check — a final payment of $1.50 issued to a Savannah accountholder — is available to prospective buyers only through a lease-to-own agreement that replicates the land contracts issued under the 1865 “Forty Acres and a Mule” order. Just as emancipated Black Americans lost their land when the “Forty Acres” order was canceled, title to the check is promptly withdrawn and prospective buyers are left only with the contract carefully crafted to exclude them from full ownership. All proceeds generated by serial leasing of this work directly support the Savannah Community Land Trust.

[the-impact-of-music]

This is America by Childish Gambino (Donald Glover)

Released May 6, 2018

This song holds many different types of social commentary through both the lyricism and visual symbolism.

In the music video, there is many different references to black culture, stereotypes, and real world issues.

The video begins with Glover executing a tied up man while imitating the stance of the Jim Crow caricature (pictured below). Some believe that the red cloth being held by the child that receives the gun from Glover represents republicans priorities on guns, but this has not been confirmed.

Throughout the whole video there is a clear focal point surrounding Glover, though at around 1:11 in the video a group of school kids join in Glover’s dance. While they are dancing, chaos and violence ensue behind them, this represents how current American media chooses to highlight only the positive things that happen to African Americans and drowns out the violence and other real issues that affect them.

During the second verse, track feature Young Thug says “America, I just checked my following list and-“ “you mothafuckas owe me” This is believed to be a reference to the American agreement of payment and land dispute to African American people originally known as “Forty Acres and a Mule”

***IF ANYTHING INCLUDED IN THIS ANALYSIS IS WRONG OR HURTFUL PLEASE MAKE IT KNOWN AND I WILL TAKE IT DOWN***

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[crazyboy3million]

Not all women want flowers. Some just want a house, a car, forty acres and a mule, a piano, a guitar, to live at the mall,