Tuesday, July 25, 2023
In the next few days, we in Belize will be celebrating this new holiday, Emancipation Day, with many of us not really understanding what that day means. For those of you who don’t have any idea why we celebrate this day, I will try to be as brief and as honest as possible. Once upon a time we black people were slaves. We were kidnapped from our homes and villages in Africa, mostly by other tribes who had a beef with us, and sold to the white man, who came with ships and trinkets and guns and alcohol. The trinkets and guns and alcohol were the currency used to purchase us. After hundreds of years in bondage, black people in the British territories were given their freedom in 1838. In America it took a few more years, until the mid-1860s, for the slaves to be emancipated, or freed from bondage. Before we start celebrating that momentous occasion, let us temper our joy or glee or expectations with the fact that after emancipation was when the real hell was let loose on black people everywhere.
Billie Holiday got in trouble for singing a song called “Strange Fruit”! It was a song about the systematic lynching of black people down south after Emancipation, and on into the mid-20th century!
“Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”
The lynching, the poll tax, the discrimination, the dehumanization, the humiliation, the disregard for the freed blacks were atrociously condoned by the government, by the courts. The white people in power made sure that the niggers would be kept in their place. They killed anyone who had the audacity to question their methods, and made an example out of Emmett Till, this uppity 14-year-old from up north who dared to look at a white woman in the state of Mississippi. The way they butchered that kid in 1955 is forever engrained in the mind of every black person in the United States.
Ron Desantis, the racist Florida governor, has tasked his education department to water down black history in his state. Apart from not wanting to offend white students with the raw, cruel history of slavery, so as not to hurt their feelings, he has also suggested that slaves benefited from slavery because they worked in professions that would serve them well after they were no longer slaves! To add insult to injury, he has tried to wipe out the achievements, the sufferings, the history of black peoples in America. He is running for president! He will NEVER be president of anything except for the little klan that he belongs to!
I hope that people realize that history is history, not some story you can change to your liking, to have the ending you desire. It doesn’t work that way. Try as hard as you might, you cannot bury the truth with your alternate reality, no matter how hard you try! We are not illiterate or ignorant anymore; we will fight you with everything within us, and we will win!
So, we will be celebrating Emancipation Day in Belize, as our numbers continue to dwindle, through our own genocidal behavior toward each other, through incarcerations and exodus and old age. Meanwhile, our new society, mostly imported, could care less about our holiday, except as a day off from work. I’m glad that we have this holiday, even if it’s a bittersweet one! Many people made sacrifices so that we can be reminded of our past, our history. They are the real reason to celebrate Emancipation Day!
“Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.”
— Lewis Allan (songwriter)
Glen