Dear Langston, It Explodes!

Economic Collapse as “Reverse Reparations”?
By: Regina Faye Brown

‘In God We Trust’…it’s on our American dollar bills. ‘One Nation, Under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for All’… that’s from our Pledge of Allegiance. Both presidential candidates ended their recent speeches at their respective parties’ conventions with “God Bless America.” America talks the talk but when it comes to believing in and fearing God, does she walk the walk?

Watching the financial stocks plummet on September 17th after a $70 billion “bail-out” of the world’s largest insurer, AIG, with taxpayer money, the commentators stated that Americans are worried about the safety of their funds placed in all banks big and small. The commentators insure the public that since the creation of the FDIC only three hundred or so individuals were not “made whole”.

What about the millions and millions of Americans of African descent whose forefathers and mothers were never “made whole”? Even though they were kidnapped, brutalized and terrorized during slavery and for a good chunk of time afterward, these Americans were not compensated for their labor or emotional distress and in turn they generally did not pass down wealth to their children to grow for future generations.

Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s most heralded founding fathers, was also a slave-owner and the father of slaves he never saw fit to emancipate. Being very intelligent he did understand the consequences of the actions of his class stating “I fear for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

Lehman Brothers has succumbed to bankruptcy while so far other investment banks have staved off this action. On www.lehman.com we see that Lehman Brothers was founded in 1850 in Montgomery, Alabama. They worked with local slaveholders as brokers of slave-picked cotton and in 1858 opened their office in New York. They made their fortune from the misery of others.
Lehman was not alone by any means. In 2002 lawyers Deadria Farmer-Paellman and Ed Fagan sued insurance giant Aetna, railroad company CSX and Fleet Boston bank for their history of profiting from slavery. But there are so many more companies who did just that as well and not just in America.

And let’s not forget the actual slaveholders whose children and children’s children benefitted financially for generations from wealth earned and passed down which originated from the wealth earned from the toil of other, uncompensated human beings. Maybe they even had inherited money invested in the markets and have inherited money in bank deposits that they hope are insured.

Unfortunately, many African-Americans don’t really know what reparations are, or that they were promised to freed slaves, or that we should be fighting for them. In Martin Luther King’s dream speech he didn’t just have a dream that his children could have the privilege of going to the same school as white children, he said America had given black Americans a check marked “Insufficient Funds”!! Most of the people who do know about reparations feel it’s a pipe dream to expect the government system established by the likes of Thomas Jefferson to correct itself and finally own up to its evil infliction of poverty on a people.

However, true believers in God recognize when He moves. They believe in His word the Bible where in James 5:1-4 it states: 1 Go now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. 2 Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. 3 Your gold and silver are cankered and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. 4 Behold, the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.

Amen.

'God moved on the water April the 19th day' is from a folk song African-Americans sang when the Titanic sank. African-Americans were barred from working or traveling on the infamous ship as it was reserved for the world's elite. As I watched Goldman Sachs' ( a company who sent me a letter stating they'd compromised my personal financial information, including my social security number and in a year of billion dollar bonuses for current employees compensated a former intern with a year of access to a credit-monitoring service!) shares fall today I knew exactly how the lyricists who penned that song felt.