President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.
His successor did not have the vision, nor the moral authority, nor the will to oversee a proper recovery from Civil war and slavery.
After that war, both sides were fought-out, worn-out, and without a clue about what ought to be done to reconstruct the smoldering train-wreck of a nation that was still named the United States of America.
As decades dragged by, the main real-politic effect of the Union victory degenerated into a woefully inadequate provision for the peace, safety and opportunity of those newly-emancipated, displaced black citizens.
But what the hell could anybody do in the wake of such a god-awful war as that one was?
I wasn’t there of course, but this southern boy baby boomer can tell you from hear-tell traces of rebel memory, that recovery in Dixie was no walk in the park.
Especially, as it turns out, for black folk.
We were surely dazed, war-weary, and PTS-ed to the point of shell-shocked idiocy after that very first, mid-19th-century technologized exercise in hostility futility.
A constructive-minded group of Americans worked, post-Civil War, through Congress, toward legislating laws to provide reconstruction and resettlement for the defeated Dixiecrats. But their first efforts toward any compensation whatsoever for formerly enslaved people were—as the decades rolled by— shot down, time after time, by a white-privileged Southerine courthouse gang of inglorious bastards.
Congress had managed to somehow pass the Southern Homestead Act in 1866. It barely squeaked by Andrew Johnson’s first and second veto. 46.4 million acres in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas were supposed to be made available for the newly-emancipated black folk to drive their homesteading stakes in the ground and call it home, with the 4-footed help of a federal mule.
But the shadow of johnny-reb’s frankenstein reconstructed monster cast a long, late afternoon shadow on the best-laid plans of mice and men.
By ’n by, our post-Civil War Reconstruction Plan degenerated into a long, drawn-out mess; it never did include any adequate compensation for black Americans. In the wake of a dreadfully destructive apocalypse, the postwar well-being of those souls on the bottom of the totem pole was not the first thing on white-privileged principal players’ minds.
Nowadays in the postmodern, post-assassinations, post-LittleRock, post-Montgomery, post-Memphis, post Jackson State, post-20th-century, twittered-up, facebooked-down South, we find ourselves suddenly deja-vu shell-shocked as the videoed murder of George Floyd has ripped wide open an old wound that should have been stitched up for healing 165 years ago.
So now we discover the cold, hard, read-em-andweep truth:
A Reparations Plan for black folk that is 165 years late would be better than no plan at all.
We need to fix this thing once and for all.
Our federal .gov needs to be supplied to do now what we should have been done long ago:
Dispense federal assets—land, money, loans, whatever is needed—to black folk so they can get a hand-up toward equality, justice and the American way, the American dream!
We need to repair, at last, what should have been fixed long ago.
If this were a Monopoly game, it’s as if the classic player— Mr. White Privilege, with his top hat and cane— just rolled snake-eyes and landed on “Go To Jail”.
Do not pass Go. Do not collect 200 of anything, until you repay this long-overdue—as Dr. King called it—“promissory note” on which the nation has defaulted.
Congress, fix this now or forever hold your peace.
To put it another way: Pay up on this Promissory Note. Or forever, our domestic peace and tranquility will be held-up!
