By Patricia Morris
Rita Mae Brown once said, "A life of reaction is a life of slavery, intellectually and spiritually. One must fight for a life of action, not reaction."
All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, hatred proceeds from the despising and neglecting of the precepts that come from the Bible, namely, we are to love one another as God loves us.
Julian Bond once quoted, "As legal slavery passed, we entered into a permanent period of unemployment and underemployment from which we have yet to emerge."
As we read and read again this letter in yesterday's Daily Star, we pondered its purpose and its meaning. In reading the first half of this letter, it is very offensive because the term used is one which demeans black children. In reading the second half of this letter, it lets these same children know you can be whatever you want to be, and the ill-effects of racism and slavery is not to be the determining factor of who you are as an individual. We concur with this latter assumption perceived in the verbiage of the writer's second half of the letter. Afterall, freedom of speech is a guarantee.
In reading this letter, I was reminded of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. I read this novel in grade school, and again as an undergrad in college. This novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the United States, so much in the latter case that the novel intensified the sectional conflict leading to the American Civil War. This sentimental novel depicts the reality of slavery while also asserting that Christian love can overcome something as destructive as enslavement of fellow human beings.
The novel, like this letter written helped to create a number of stereotypes about black people, many of which endure to this day, which include the term used in the letter written that is perceived by many as insulting to black children, but in the same voice can be depicted as an overshadowed historical impact of a vital antislavery tool.
As you read the story, will you see what we see this as possibly being the writers way of saying, while slavery was bad in yesteryear, it is yet bad in today's society, but black children should let no one define their destiny - they alone own that right to be all that they can be even in a society filled with hatred because their skin is black.
Finally, blood is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation that regards it as the final horror has lost it's manhood. There are many things more horrible than bloodshed, and slavery is one of them.
Young boys and girls, young men and women - life is but a vapor. Live it to its fullest, and cherish every moment given to you to excel. You owe that much to yourselves.
http://www.hammondstar.com/articles/2010/04/08/opinion/letters/9106.txt