• Home
  • Gallery
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • WHERE THE WORK STARTED
  • Hope And Redemption Team
H & R


​my voice

CASH BAIL

11/9/2020

0 Comments

 
As I sit here the night before what could possibly be the most important election of my lifetime…. I think about my forefathers and foremothers that were brought to this country in chains…. I wonder what they would have said if they had a say in their freedom…. Imagine if the conversation went like this….
I have two choices for you today. The first choice, you can all be free today. Let me explain what will happen. After we free you, we will enact laws called Black Codes that we will use to arrest you and re-enslave you. We will call it Convict Leasing, we won’t have to feed you, because you will be free, and freedom means you have to feed yourself. You will still work for free, but we will not take care of you as we always have. We will let you buy land, but then we take back from you by stealing it from you or killing you. We will create a terrorist group that will call themselves the “Christian Knights”, and they will hang you, beat you, burn you and your children. We will invent Laws called Jim Crow that will allow us to continue to beat you, kill you, turn dogs loose on you and your children. When you build wealth like Rosewood, or Tulsa, we will kill you, burn it down, and take it all from you…. We will do this for at least another 150 years. After 150 years we will find new ways to lynch you. We will dump dope and guns in your communities to justify putting you in cages and re enslaving you. Those that are supposed to protect you, will murder you for walking, driving, sleeping, just for being black. That’s what freedom will look like for you for at least 150+ years.
The second choice is to stay where you are. You can continue to be slaves, and we will continue to give you a change of clothes once a year. We will continue to feed you the best scraps off our tables, and you can continue to live in the shacks that we have given you. Only your master will beat you, and if you are good slaves then he will not beat you. The choice is yours…. What would you like to do?
I am certain that most of my ancestors would say I want to be free no matter the consequences of the unknown. And some, a few would say “What’s better than what we got here?” “Lets keep this system, because the other one “might be worse.” 
Reminds me of Prop 25…..
Harriet Tubman said: “I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.”
Just my thoughts for the night……
0 Comments

    Author

    I grew up in South Central Los Angeles during the height of the gang and crack crisis.  At that time, Los Angeles was called "The gang capital of the nation", and I was then a part of the problem.  I was a gang member and a crack dealer.    By the time I was 17 I had been shot twice, stabbed once, and my mothers house had been shot up by rival gang members.  By the age of 18 I was  in state prison sentenced to life.  On July 12, 2012,  after 24 years of incarceration and a court ruling in my favor, I was granted parole.  

    Today I am a husband, son, father, grandfather, mentor to incarcerated youth and leader in my community.  I am a living, breathing example of what redemption is, and what is possible when given a second chance.

    Archives

    November 2020
    May 2020
    September 2019
    June 2018

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
  • Gallery
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • WHERE THE WORK STARTED
  • Hope And Redemption Team