National Holiday Status For Juneteenth Day!

We Were
Slaves in America! National Holiday Status for Juneteenth Day!

Y2k17.09.28

We were
slaves in Egypt…

____________________________________________
The Passover Seder Haggadah

Black people were slaves in America
with the same brutality that the Jews (ancient Hebrews) were slaves in Egypt.
Each year for the five thousand years plus history of the Jewish people, we
celebrate our liberation from slavery during a holiday called Pasach
(Passover). This so we never forget the barbaric behavior of one people against
another, but also to remember the importance of freedom and liberty to human
kind for generations. It is time that we have a holiday here in America to
remember the barbarity of slavery and to remember the liberation of Black
people from their chains. It is time for this holiday because the USA seems to
be going backward, because when they decided to have a white supremacist as
president of our country, I knew, as sure as the Jews of Nazi Europe should
have known, that the blood red writing of racist murder is on the wall.

We Jews have vicariously placed
ourselves into our two-hundred-year enslavement to the Egyptians and our
liberation therefrom through the observance of the Passover Seder. I believe it
is time for this entire country to symbolically put themselves into the shoes
of our beleaguered black brethren and understand what it was like to be
enslaved through the observance of an African-Caribbean Seder that will serve
as a constant reminder of what was done in the name of religion and greed to
other human beings in the Americas.

There is an actual holiday called
Juneteenth Day (19 June) which marked the end of slavery in our country
beginning with Texas. This should be a national holiday including a new Seder.
But it should not end there. The persecution of black people did not end with
Juneteenth. Thanks to Andrew Johnson and the end of reconstruction in the
south, racist bigotry came back with Jim Crow fury and racist lynching and
murder along with it. Black people suffered another 100 years of racial
bigotry, disenfranchisement, and segregation after the end of slavery where our
society found other ways to persecute these beleaguered people.

Imagine if you were Emmett Till, a
black youngster from the north visiting his relatives in the south during the
early 1950’s. Imagine that during your visit you commit the “crime” of
whistling at a white woman. Do you feel the fear winding in your guts now that
you see the panic among your friends and relatives who saw you do this and now
hurry your ass out of the vicinity so you can be safe? That was only the
beginning of the nightmare for this child of the god white Christians are
always screaming about. Emmett Till could not imagine that he left the USA when
he entered Mississippi. Down south, whites could routinely force their way into
the private homes of black people and remove anyone they wanted to murder as
they did to Emmett Till. Authorities found his 14-year-old tortured and ruined
body in the Tallahatchie River after he was forcibly removed from his
relative’s house in the above manner.

Again, the violent persecution of
black people continued for 100 years. Prominent black communities like Rosewood
in Florida and Greenwood in Tulsa, OK were burned to the ground during white
racist generated riots where hundreds, including children and babies were
murdered. Black people were denied their voting rights, housing rights,
education rights under the filthy noses of our whites only government. Imagine
being Emmett Till and being tortured and murdered because of who you are! Once
we can walk in the shoes of our black neighbors, we can begin healing our race
relations. Juneteenth should be a national holiday and have its own Seder. None
of us in the USA should be allowed to forget our racist dark side and the
imperialistic religious extremism that gave us permission to persecute other
peoples of our planet.

When we elected our first
African-American President, my hope for our future did not last. I knew that
the racist sickness that helped to found our country was not dead because we
followed one of our best presidents with a racist bigot named Trump who, along
with his white supremacist base, wants to bring all that nightmare back again. We
cannot forget and cannot forgive what was done to black Americans, many of whom
whose ancestors were slaves in this American Egypt. Juneteenth must be
inscribed in our hearts and in our minds or else the racist bullies will return
to do worse. Never Again!!