A growing number of black people are trying to connect the dots, putting together what they can of a family tree, using ancestry kits to determine where in Africa is their heritage and what European, and/or American Indian mix — or whatever – is in the bloodline. For many the research is daunting because of slavery’s brutal disconnect. However, once black people fully awaken from this more than 400 year nightmare and find the dots that lead directly to their slave traders’

names, something unforeseen will undoubtedly occur.

While H. R. 40, legislation written and introduced for years by longtime former black Congressman, John Conyers of Detroit, Michigan, calls for “Reparations,” until recently it has been ignored by Congress – save for the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). The paper chase game will continue on Capitol Hill while black people trace their last names to longtime American and European wealth, acquired directly and indirectly through African slave labor starting well before 1619.

Nobody, irrespective of his or her shade of black or brown, came kidnapped to America with the name Calloway; ain’t no way! Nobody black or brown came from Africa with the name Smith, or Williams, Jones, or Johnson, either. Arrogant white people, including so-called “founding fathers” wrote and signed The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of The United States of America and named their enslaved black people Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Franklin.

For both business and political purposes, white people were thorough record keepers of their black captives.

After the three-fifths compromise wherein black people were accorded the status of part property and part human, the white south became even more powerful for awhile having both the wealth producing plantations with their free black labor, and, as a result, the votes to control Congress, and at times the entire United States government. Slaves were counted as three-fifths of white people.

Those records are mostly still intact in various state historical societies, state and county records, among the Mormans’ enormous data base and among some white family members whose forbears gave blacks their last names. During slavery whites forbade black people to use their own names and to practice African religions and cultural acts of any and all kind. Therefore first and last names of all Africans brought to America are European names.

So you can let political people continue to futz around with H. R. 40 in the U. S.

House of Representatives while zeroing in on the real deal: your ancestry kit and its DNA results, and; your last name and information connecting it to how you happen to be in this part of the world. This one-two punch at historical reality, with just a modicum of successes, can change the course of America’s future. It may even save America, maybe Western civilization, as well?

While white America yet reaches for the black Christian preacher whenever they want to sell black folks a bill of goods, which always is “that which counteth not,” increasingly, primarily through social media, voices heretofore drowned out through power of the status quo are now being heard. The black church cannot propel black people into the future due to its hold onto white nationalist theology and history, which makes it complicit in the mis-education of its people.

Just imagine the impact if, back in the 1990s, black preachers and their congregations had organized in support of Rep. John Conyers’ H. R. 40. No other question is more relevant than this: Why did the black church forsake John Conyers and black people across America by not supporting the thrust of reparations? Conyers first introduced his bill in 1989. A year or two of national organizing through the black church at that time could have, at least, elevated the dialogue. At best, the black church could have initiated real economic development for black communities.

Instead, through this primary dearth of leadership during that critical period of black mass incarceration and overwhelming influx of drugs, white America planned and designed black inner city removal called gentrification, right under the church’s nose. And so here we are in 2019 and things have only gotten worse.

So what do we do now, huh? Why not get up off our knees, find these white namesakes, and support all manner of reparations – you can’t possibly be wrong — and organize, organize, organize!

Al.Calloway715@gmail.com