Campus Chronicle

Issue date: 2/25/08 Section: Expressions

I am disgusted to join you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration of bondage in the history of our nation.

Five score and many years ago, a great American signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of slaves who had been incinerated in the Hell of withering injustice.

But one hundred years later, the Nigger still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Nigger is still sadly crippled by the jaws of this nation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Nigger lives on a lonely reservation of poverty and ignorance in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity and knowledge. One hundred years later, the Nigger is still banished into the corners of American society and finds himself a self-made exile in the land that he helped to create. And so we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we've come to cash a check; a check that we know we'll never get. When the architects of this country, this country that was founded on the eradication of one race and the enslavement of another, wrote the deceitful words of the Constitution, they were singing a song of exclusion. This song was a promise that black men were granted "rights" of little justice, lynchings, and the pursuit of a public defender. It is obvious that this great nation has held true to the song in every sense, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. But when justice is mentioned, America has given the Nigger a bad check; a check which has come back marked "no coloreds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of discrimination of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of enslavement and the horror of justice.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Nigger's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality instead of greed and enslavement. 2008 is not the beginning, but the end; the end Abraham Lincoln's America. This is an end to an America that decrees that a person is free. We need no such documentation. We are free and this is the end of the America that grants Nigger their Miranda rights instead of his citizenship rights.

Continued...

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