Latest Posts by pantherking77 - Page 2

In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write a famous author and ask for advice. Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond - and his response is magnificent:

“Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit:

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it:

Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash receptacales. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!" Kurt Vonnegut

/// Wild Revolution · Deja Hu / Posted by Michael Harper / Photo - Kurt Vonnegut - Steve Pyke

Thomas Howland: This whole Dredd Scott thing is freaking me out, can I have a passport to move to Liberia please

State Department: No, only US citizens can have passports

Thomas Howland: …I was born here, I’m literally an elected official

State Department: But…black people aren’t real citizens

Thomas Howland: *looks at the portrait painter like he’s on The Office*

#hugs

Map of the route of the Trails of Tears — depicting the route taken to relocate Native Americans from the Southeastern United States between 1836 and 1839.

I have people from organizations ask me all the time, “ how do we get Black people in our movement?” Sometimes I say, “Well we ain’t in stores no more so you have to pay us.”

From Tennessee Lookout:

MASON, Tenn. – The Tennessee Comptroller issued an unusual appeal last week to residents of this small, majority Black town, which occupies fewer than two square miles in rural west Tennessee.

“In my opinion, it’s time for Mason to relinquish its charter,” Comptroller Jason Mumpower wrote in a letter mailed to each one of Mason’s 1,337 property owners.

Mumpower urged local residents to “encourage your local officials to do what’s necessary to allow Mason to thrive. There is no time to waste.”

State comptrollers, responsible for financial oversight of local government, typically communicate directly with elected local leaders and not their constituents. “We have not issued a letter to citizens like this before,” Comptroller spokesman John Dunn said, noting it is “unprecedented for us to publicly call for a town charter to be relinquished.”

But the Comptroller’s unprecedented public callout comes at an unprecedented time not only for Mason, but for the state. Mason, located in the southeastern corner of Tipton County, now finds itself with some of the most coveted real estate in Tennessee.

It’s one of the nearest towns to the massive new site to be built for Blue Oval City, a key component in Ford Motor Co’s multibillion-dollar pivot to electric vehicle manufacturing.

Mumpower’s letter has infuriated Mason’s part-time elected officials, who insist they have no intention of ceding their town’s 153-year-old charter – which would subsume the largely African-American, majority Democratic community under the governance of Tipton County, which is predominantly white and Republican.

“This is our home. We were born and raised here. The majority of the town is homegrown people that live here,” Vice Mayor Virginia Rivers said. “He is trying to conquer and divide us. It’s akin to a hostile take-over and it’s not hard to figure out why here, why now.”

Town leaders are accusing Mumpower and other state officials of big-footing a long-ignored, largely Black community now that major investment is heading its way.

Mason is 60% Black and includes descendants of men, women and children enslaved in the area before Emancipation. For more than a century the town was led by White elected officials.

That changed in 2016, when fraud and mismanagement allegations led to the resignations of nearly all City Hall officials, all of whom were White. Mason’s current mayor, vice mayor and five of its six alderman are Black.

“It’s because of the Black people that are in office,” said Rivers, who first became Vice Mayor in 2021.

“And it’s because of all the places in the world, Blue Oval could have selected, they selected here. There’s no way Mason won’t prosper and grow. And now they want to take it away from us.”

Read more

The Comptroller’s office:

Yet again like in the past. New day, new Jim Crow-esque tactics, perfectly timed takeovers. This Black American town needs to be promptly saved without handing a damn thing over. The town elected mostly Black officials back in 2015. They’ve been trying to pay off the debt from when the town was previously ran by mostly white officials. Literally playing catch-up. 

This ain’t nothing but a glimpse of what it looks like before eventually uprooting and displacing Black people off the land they have resided on since forever and where their ancestors labored said land as property in chattel slavery and the move into Jim Crow.  

There’s a change.org petition to sign and share to get the word out there.

This person suggested to put Ford in the hot seat by sending a letter like this. Others are suggested to call their office. 

This is the CEO of Ford’s twitter.

Something gotta give. 

This shit should be on the news. But as usual, they make it known after the deed is done or not at all and you end up finding out years later. 

Martin Delany: This is his personal response to the newly enacted Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.

He is addressing the then mayor of Pittsburgh, PA:

“Honorable Mayor, whatever ideas of liberty I may have, have been received from reading the lives of your revolutionary fathers. I have therein learned that a man has a right to defend his castle with his life, even unto the taking of life. Sir, my house is my castle; in that castle are none but my wife and my children, as free as the angels of heavens, and whose liberty is as sacred, as the pillars of God.

If any man approaches that house in search of a slave, I care not who he may be, whether constable, or sheriff, magistrate or even judge of the Supreme Court, nay, let it be he who sanctioned this act to become a law. (President Millard Fillmore) surrounded by his cabinet as his bodyguard, with the Declaration of Independence waving above his head as his banner, and the constitution of his country upon his breast as his shield, if he crosses the threshold of my door, and I do not lay him a lifeless corpse at my feet, I hope the grave may refuse my body a resting place, and righteous Heaven my spirit a home. O, no! He cannot enter that house and we both live.”

“Up in the Clouds” by Oboh Moses

🇹🇹🇹🇹🇹🇹

Honestly . We couldnt go through half the shit our Ancestors been through and you negoes still want to be weak against them . Who want to keep letting our children get killed . Waiting on some fictional character to come save us or for them to create fictitious policies to protect something we should already have a human beings .

“Your being racist toward white people “ “Let’s march” “Let’s protest for a few months but only 100 of us actually gonna go through with it “ “Hate is not the way “

Fuck you and the oppressor you trying to protect . I don’t understand why y’all want to be nice , not retaliate against them . Just say you scared and move on . A lot of you would have been shot by Harriet Tubman . Because you snitches and weak minded against being oppressed . Protecting and fighting for true freedom is not hate . Hate is oppression people because of their skin or anything . All the shit our ancestors went through white people deserve it . All the shit we going through now . Are y’all fucking crazy . We been through enough . This is what Kanye meant . It’s a choice to stay a slave for so long .

You are not the minority

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