The Billionaire Boys Club Forgot Our History
They eliminated thousands of jobs.
They want to deport millions
They are attempting to deport Mahmoud Khalil
because he organized to stop the murder of babies
They forgot that the United States was born
because of a violent political revolution.
They forgot that Malcolm X quoted Patrick Henry when he said,
“Give me liberty or give me death.”
Frederick Douglass was born a slave
He witnessed beatings, rape, and murder
because human beings were owned
to make money for enslavers.
He said,
“For revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy,
America reins without a rival.”
“Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and it never will.
Find out what any people will quietly submit to
and you have found out the exact measure
of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them,
And these will continue till they are resisted
with either words or blows or with both.”
“It is not light that we need, but fire;
it is not the gentle shower, but thunder.
We need the storm,
the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”
Then 350,000 Union soldiers died
in the Civil War
and chattel slavery was no more.
Mother Jones was horrified at the sight
of ten- and twelve-year-old children
disfigured because they worked long hours in a textile factory.
She organized the 125-mile March of the Children.
Alice Paul organized so women might have the right to vote.
President Wilson ordered her arrested.
In jail she went on a hunger strike.
They inserted a tube in her throat to forced-fed her.
President Wilson had Eugene Debs arrested
for giving a speech protesting the First World War.
After serving three years in prison, President Harding pardoned Debs
and honored him with a visit to the White House.
Los macheteros, the sugarcane workers
did the seemingly unbearable work of cutting
the cane under the scorching hot sun
on the island of Puerto Rico, or Boriqua.
The Harvard University graduate Pedro Albizu Campos
led the macheteros in a strike that won significant benefits.
Also in 1934, strikes erupted in Minneapolis, Toledo, and San Francisco.
Workers then created the Congress of Industrial Organizations or C.I.O.
And James Baldwin said:
“Power, then, which can have no morality itself,
is yet dependent on human energy,
on the wills and desires of human beings.
When power translates itself into tyranny,
it means that the principles on which that power depended,
and which were its justification, are bankrupt.
When this happens, and it is happening now,
power can only be defended by thugs and mediocrities––and seas of blood.
The representatives of the status quo are sickened and divided,
and dread looking into the eyes of their young;
while the excluded begin to realize,
having endured everything, that they can endure everything.
They do not know the precise shape of the future,
but they know that the future belongs to them.
They realize this––paradoxically––
by the failure of the moral energy of their oppressors and begin,
almost instinctively, to forge a new morality,
to create the principals on which a new world will be built.”
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