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If you’re among our estimated 2 million readers in the 30 major Texas cities and millions more that access our Webpage (www.aframnews.com), it’s safe to say that you’re familiar with our editorial policy to honor special occasions and holidays. If so, you more than likely consider the above head appropriate for our Valentine’s Day edition that’s celebrated during Black History Month. However, we might have been just a little bit too presumptuous when we wrote the head before doing the research to validate information that coincides with our premises. Inasmuch as our African forefathers were subjected to the most brutal form of human bondage in the history of civilization, It’s only logical to believe that slavery negated Valentine’s Day, i.e., romance, love and marriage. Logic notwithstanding, there’s truth to the proverb, “Love conquers all.”
We Must Understand, since it took a special kind of people to survive over three hundred years of brutal slavery, we certainly shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that just as slavery failed to kill many enslaved Africans indomitable spirits, it didn’t even come close to negating the kind of spiritual love that ultimately makes a people’s males and females soulmates. (FYI: Everybody or almost everybody knows the 7 biggest lies that almost everybody--poets, novelists, scholars, rappers--tells about Blacks, love and sex: 1) Black love collapsed in slavery; 2) Black love collapsed after slavery; 3) Black love collapsed after the Great Migration to the North; 4) The Black family has always been a matriarchy characterized by domineering women and absent men; 5) The history of Black love is a history of fussin' and fightin' by hard-hearted men and heartless women; 6) Black women are sharp-tongued sapphires who dis' and run; and 7) Black men are sex-crazed hustlers who love and run. Everybody--or almost everybody--knows that. The only problem is that the story almost everybody knows is almost totally false. As a matter of hard historical fact, the true story of Black love--love colored by, love warmed by, love Blackened by the Black experience--is the exact opposite of the traditional myth. For regardless of slavery, regardless of segregation, regardless of everything, Black men and women have created a modern love song in life and art that is the loveliest thing dreamed or sung this side of the seas. It is scarcely possible to understand the history of Black men and women unless we make at least an effort to understand this fact and the further fact that the African brought his mind and his ethos--and his eros--to America with him. It is perhaps the only reason Black people survived in this land.-Paraphased excerpt from Ebony magazine’s June 2003 edition.)
We Must Understand, since the powerful article (Written by Lerone Bennett, Jr., one of our greatest living historians and author of Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, 1619-1962), from whence the excerpt came isn’t required reading for African Americans, there’s a strong possiblity that Willie Lynch’s “niggerzation” still lingers in descendents of slave’s pysche. The book How to Make a Slave suggests, “Understanding is the best thing. Therefore, we shall go deeper into this area of the subject matter concerning what we have produced here in this breaking process of the female n-word. We have reversed the relationship in her natural uncivilized state she would have a strong dependency on the uncivilized n-word male. Nature had provided for this type of balance. “We reversed nature by burning and pulling a civilized n-word apart and bull whipping the other to the point of death, all in her presence. By her being left alone, unprotected, with the MALE IMAGE DESTROY-ED, the ordeal caused her to move from her psychological dependent state to a frozen independent state.” Denial aside, its logical to believe that if a people is able to make as much progress as we’ve made in the past 140 years (in spite of centuries of chattel slavery, brainwashing, miseducation and misresentation by a racist nation’s mass media), We Shall Overcome some day. Then again, when one stops, looks and listens to the mass media’s persistent attacks on “sorry Black males,” who cause Black women to justifiably proclaim, “I can do bad by myself,” Willie Lynch’s propehetic “niggerization” process resonates in Black America, because far too many of our women don’t know, or have forgotten our slave history and are now making the same mistake again. Consequently, even if love and/or romance aren’t endangered in Black America, there’s no denying that Slavery negated Valentine’s Day.