" Dase still the same."

After the Emancipation Proclamation and during reconstruction after the Civil War, "the vagaries of economics in an ostensible free South motivated hundreds of thousands of slaves to learn to read and write." So pens Andrew Ward. Yes, this was a good thing. But many of "the colored folks didn’t know how to take care of themselves." So observed former slave Temple Wilson. Yes, a bad thing. Special Field Order No. 15, promised to each former slave in the South, forty-acre plots and a mule or horse. Even though 400,000 acres were allotted to about 40,000 slaves, the order was never fully extended beyond the southeast coast of the United States. Yes, this proved to be a mixed blessing. Freedmen attributed the North’s broken promises to the death of Lincoln. Former slave Mary McCray believed that "had the proper steps been taken and careful observations made of the condition of affairs in the South at the close of the war, the Negro race would be seventy years in advance of the position it occupies today. The bloody war results in envy, hatred, strife, malice and prejudice between the black and the white, which is sin of the worst nature." Yes, a bad thing. And so "over the decades that followed the Civil War, the freedoms former slaves had gained would be constricted to the point of suffocation, until their descendants found themselves trapped in a mutation of the Peculiar Institution; a white supremacist snare of poverty, fraud, debt, terror and disenfranchisement." Yes, another bad thing pointed out by Andrew Ward. Yet, on the contrary, Andrew Ward points out that the North’s victory for slaves "resulted in the recovery of their lost relatives, and by extension, their identities... humanity, ... long-lost mothers and fathers, children and grandchildren, turned up to receive their lost kin." Negroes reunited as families. Yes a very good thing. Religion and family formed a core for freedmen and freedwomen to begin their new lives.

Republicans tried for decades to implement and sustain reconstruction and racial reform, but a hundred years would pass until the civil rights movement, Rev. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson succeeded in bringing about changes. Yes, both good and bad things transpired in the intervening years. The Civil Rights Act finally passed. The Great Society program was initiated. Fast forward to 2008. I say, "nothins changed. Things dase still the same." Too many Negroes, renamed as Blacks, speak the patois of rap and hip hop. The descendants of slaves, the inheritors, still speak of vengeance, resignation, reparation or forgiveness - each mentality competing for prominence in our culture. Black families have virtually ceased to exist. The Welfare mentality has usurped the slave mentality. Perhaps 20% of Blacks are free and successful, but 80% remain in chains.