Before each Black person in the United States has to take this life-threatening examination that is already swirling around our heads, he or she must review, hopefully, and embrace, strenuously, the teachings of our revered ancestors.
To understand the United States, let’s start with Marcus Garvey: “A people without power and authority is a people without respect.” Power and authority in the United States start with legal and political representation and not legal and political presence. The other ingredients are access to land, labor and capital.
These teachings, however, will never have any real meaning to us as long as we are “Doubting Thomases.” Over 400 years, whites have conditioned us to doubt ourselves and to doubt each other. This doubt in each other leads to a call for integration, which means a reliance on others. Please read the history of Thurgood Marshall at Lincoln University.
Thus, whites are planning for a glorious future while we are headed back to a horrifying past. The Dow Jones average and the rate of unemployment are both headed upwards. This is proof that TARP has worked for the rich while crippling the masses. This was its intended effect. It is a bad omen for Blacks.
We are approaching 1873. Our final destination is 1857. Graphs enable us to understand our direction of flight. Calculus permits us to understand the rate of change. The only thing that is constant in life is change. Our liberation must be scientific and not 30-second sound bites and nursery rhymes.
New York City is a prime example of the direction of flight for whites. Construction is booming. Gentrification, on the other hand, is pulling rugs from under our Black feet. This means that there must be, in fact, an ongoing “struggle” for land. Struggle means organized resistance.
While the alleys off Main Street are in a deep freeze, Wall Street is resembling Bermuda, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg commutes to and from daily. He is able to watch the rush hour traffic into and from New York City while perched in his business jet.
Of the 20 richest persons in the world, he is the only one who is in the black. The others are seeing red. His haul last year was $4.5 billion, according to Forbes. Every crime has a motive. This is Bloomberg’s motive for trashing term limits.
This explains why Revs. A.R. Bernard, Calvin Butts and Floyd Flake are kissing his ring. Meanwhile, Rev. Al Sharpton is eating from the public trough in New York City and travelling in a minstrel show with Newt Gingrich, who once misrepresented the Blacks in my hometown of Newnan, Georgia.
While these preachers are living large, the rest of us are not faring so well. A case in point is Kharey Wise, who spent approximately 15 years in prison arising out of a false claim of rape of Patricia Meili. Now, Bloomberg and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau refuse to compensate him or the other members of the Central Park Six.
Except for Councilman Charles Barron, who needs to replace Christine Quinn as the next council speaker, the other members of the City Council are hiding in the tall grass. The “Gang of Four” is moonwalking. None of them will provide financial assistance to Wise, who is homeless and hungry.
We are reaching this 1857 destination because Blacks are openly accepting a double standard of justice. If I had not come to New York City more than three decades ago, there would have only been evidence of shakedown artists engaging in civil disobedience for private gain. There was plenty of rhetoric but few results.
Maddox’s “Last Stand” may be Tawana Brawley. This is quite different than Custer’s Last Stand. It is the Black faces and not the pale faces that are in retreat and running for the tall grass. This is the history that will be written about Brawley. In 2009, there were no wagons to circle.
When the landlord’s attorney, Kevin Cullen, attacked me in legal papers for having represented an innocent 15-year-old, Brawley, I sought to subpoena the Brawley files from Andrew Cuomo, the state attorney general. He went into hiding.
The Civil Court of New York County claimed that it never received the subpoena despite postal records showing its delivery to the court. New York is having its cake and eating it too. Brawley is a supposed “hoax.” Yet, New York has sealed the Brawley files.
In the meantime, Henry Vargas, a Latino businessman, allegedly sold a commercial property in Harlem recently. Since he has been accused of not having a deed to the property, he was hauled into Manhattan Supreme Court on October 15 to face fraud and larceny charges.
In New York, there are two laws on the ownership of real property. If you are white and the victim is Black, it is “harmless error” if you are caught selling or renting real property when you lack a deed. Thus, a wrongful eviction is permissible. This sounds like “Negro Removal.”
This is the pronouncement of Manhattan Housing Court Judge Jean T. Schneider. Within the next few weeks, she will explain her decision. I will publish it even if I am homeless. It will be rooted in Dred Scott, which was decided in 1857.
The nominal landlord in PWV Acquisitions v. Maddox, on May 1, 2009, demanded a trial to dispossess the Maddoxes of their 33 years at the apartment. This landlord’s first move was to introduce a bogus deed into evidence. When I objected, Judge Schneider said that this was only a false start. This scam artist was entitled to a fourth bite of the apple.
Interestingly, Judge Schneider had dismissed a prior dispossess proceeding in 2002 between the same parties because the “landlord” lacked a deed. Usually, these sets of facts would invoke the doctrines of stare decisis and res judicata. Unfortunately, the law has two sides: benefits and burdens.
Last Friday, I asked Judge Schneider to explain the difference between the outcome in 2002 and the threatened outcome in 2009. She said that the law had changed since 2002 and she cited a World War II case to prove it. Instead, she proved my point. Blacks, are indeed, headed backwards. The Kerner Commission Report gave us a clue in 1968.
About three years ago, I complained to the Manhattan district attorney’s office about this nominal and fraudulent landlord. Prosecutors call it prosecutorial discretion. They can pick and choose their victims and their suspects. They chose to prosecute Vargas and they have ignored my complaint. Vargas supposedly had defrauded whites.
Blacks should call it selective prosecution. This means that we are not citizens in a country that we involuntarily built and the 14th Amendment, which was never ratified by the states, is a fraud. The 14th Amendment actually ratified Dred Scott.
I hope to be known as the Crispus Attucks of the 20th century. Five fingers of one hand are enough to count the Blacks who can connect these dots: freedom and representation. We are still stuck on the Emancipation Proclamation, another fraudulent document in our history. We are living in a mythological colony.
The election of Cyrus Vance Jr. to succeed Morgenthau is a maintenance of the status quo. His father, the former U.S. secretary of state, headed a committee to investigate my whistleblowing at Harlem Assertion of Right, a legal services program for the poor.
I had irrefutable proof that the white attorneys were in cahoots with white landlords against their Black and Latino clients. When the dust had cleared, I had been fired and was unemployed. This was 1976. Brawley has proven that I have never learned my lesson.
Oct. 23: The appeal of People v. John White will be heard in the Appellate Division, Second Judicial Department, 45 Monroe Place in Brooklyn at 9:30 a.m. The issue is self-defense and whether Blacks are still in slavery. Blacks need to be on hand en masse to hear the decision.
Oct. 28: UAM weekly forum at the Elks Plaza, 1068 Harriet Tubman (Fulton Street) near Classon Avenue in Brooklyn at 7:30 p.m. Take the “C” train to Franklin Avenue.