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Point Lookout, Maryland
People will talk in great length about Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream Speech, even laud it as one of the greatest ever delivered by King. However, when it comes to putting into practice his vision of the day when sons of former slaves will sit down at the Table of Brotherhood with the sons of former slave owners, few know how or even desire to recognize the parameters in which to cause such an action.
And I don’t expect the Poverty Pimps whose only desire is to fill their depleting coffers by aligning themselves with the Northern protagonist whose sole desire is to break the spirit of the Southern people by their renewed attack on the Confederate Flag while using the black man as their weapon of choice to accomplish their goal. And banking their success on the assumption that the Southern Black man has no real knowledge of the events that took the South to war against the North, or the place of honor that Blacks earned beside a man that they not only called master, but family and friend, or the treacherous modus operandi used by the North during the so called period of Reconstruction, to this very day to divide him from his Southern white family.
Having said all the aforementioned, I come now to Point Lookout, Maryland, where I, the son of former Southern slaves, on Saturday, October 10, 2009 had not only one of the greatest honors bestowed upon him to deliver a speech about the many who had died, survived and suffered unconscionable inhumane indignities in a place where so many who look like me had brought themselves to dishonor by participating in the horrors encouraged by a man from the North wearing the Union Blue.
Yet, I was able to drag the Table of Brotherhood into this place of horror before my Southern family, as I reminded them that it was trained cadre of Black folks on plantations all across the Southland of America who made all the implements of war, provided the food stuffs for Lee’s beleaguered army, stayed at home and help the Southern White women protect their families as best they could while the men were away, went off to war alongside his White family, serving in all kinds of capacities, even taking up arms. I reminded them that in this place there were so many Black men who showed acts of kindness towards the Confederate soldier. And that in more times than not, the Black Confederate soldier who came here fared much worse than his White counterpart.
In conclusion, I told my Southern family that the Southern Black people have a sense of fair play about them, and should be told not only about what happened here at Point Lookout, but also about the acts of reconstruction that led to the planned hostilities to separate them from the only man in America who ever cared about them, the Southern White man who called them family.
