News & Articles

Will we complete a circle started more than 400 years ago?
We have had a Black man serve as president of the United States, but women had to be partners among the first 20 African Blacks sold into slavery in America in 1619. 

If Vice-President Kamala Harris is elected president in November 2024, she will be the first Black woman elected as president, completing a circle started more than 400 years ago. She will be leading a government operating out of a capitol built in the 19th century mostly by Black slaves owned by local White slaveowners. 

The following inscription approved by Congress is on a bronze plaque on a wall in Emancipation Hall installed on February 28, 2012: “THIS SANDSTONE WAS ORIGNALLY PART OF THE UNITED STATES CAPITOL’S EAST FRONT CONSTRUCTED IN 1824-1826. IT WAS QUARRIED BY LABORERS, INCLUDING THE ENSLAVED” 
A quote from the resolution described the situation: “The site of the new capital was located in an area that had few carpenters, bricklayers, stone cutters and other tradesmen necessary to construct such a project. The majority of the work fell on the laborers in the area, who were composed of mostly African-American slaves. These slaves, “rented” from owners, as well as other laborers, quarried the stone used for the floors, walls, and columns of the Capitol, sawed both wood and stone, and became skilled in brick making and laying. Carpentry was also one of the more significant contributions slaves made in the construction of the Capitol as they framed the roof and installed its shingle covering.” 

White presidents lived on the top floor while Black slaves served them and lived in the basement and ground floor
Not only did Black slaves build the capitol, they constructed the White House, and many other government buildings on land acquired from the slave states of Maryland and Virginia in 1792. 
Congress wanted to import workers from Europe as the work force, but few wanted to make the move. The bulk of the labor was eventually supplied by local slaveowners renting slaves to the government. Five slaves – Tom, Peter, Ben, Harry and Daniel – had important jobs and were on the payroll list of the White House architect James Hoban. 

The sandstone and marble used in the construction was quarried by Black slaves 40 miles from Washington and was first cut by Scottish stonecutters. 
If the Black-Asian Mrs. Harris is elected our 47th president, she and her “second gentleman” Jewish husband will live in the White House where many Black slaves lived in the basement and ground floor while serving at least seven presidents: Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Tyler, Polk and Taylor. 

Jefferson imported a dozen Black slaves from his Monticello home to assist his White House staff. President Andrew Jackson was another slaveowner who brought a number of Black slaves from Tennessee to staff the White House. 

President James Buchanan, opposed to slavery, required all White House staff to be White and be from England, Ireland and Wales. 

Black Elizabeth Keckley was born into slavery at Dinwiddie, Virginia, in 1818, bought her freedom by earning money as a seamstress, moved to Washington in 1860, and became dressmaker for First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, and was soon a close friend and confidante. Her memoir Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years as a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, proved to be a very accurate account of life in the 19th century. 

President Abraham Lincoln met with slave abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth in 1864 to discuss the Civil War and slavery.

A poem by my favorite Black poet Langston Hughes “I, Too”, also describes the circle that may be completed in November:
“I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. 
They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes.
 But I laugh and eat well, and grow strong.
 Tomorrow I’ll be at the table when company comes. 
 Nobody”ll dare say to me, eat in the kitchen,
Then, besides they’ll see how beautiful I am, and be ashamed.
I, too, am America.”
   
Why is the Lyin’ King of the MAGA cult so spellbinding? An answer!
James Risen of The Intercept seems to have the best answers to why evangelical and fundamentalist Christians and conservative Roman Catholics have succumbed to Donald Trump and MAGA in his article “Racism is Why Trump is so Popular.”

1. In the years 1980 to 2024 Whites have fallen from being 80% of the population to about 58%. Many older White people who live in flyover country or large metropolitan areas are terrified of becoming a minority in “their” America. There are still 195 million Whites in a country of 336 million, but population experts keep reporting that they will become a minority after 2040. The average age of the MAGA cult is around 60, so most will be in retirement while in a minority.

2. Not only is Trump the Lyin’ King, but he has also won the gold medal for lying every year for more than half a century, he has been a double gold medal winner for using women as sex objects while hating them because he has loved only one person in his lifetime – himself. He has also been a racist all his life – from military school, to being sued for renting apartments to Whites only in the 1970s with his sociopathic father, to taking ads in newspapers condemning the Black Central Park Five to death, to calling Mexicans, Blacks, Asians and Native Americans criminals, rapists and murderers while president of the Divided States of America.

3. He has already been convicted for committing 34 felonies and is awaiting sentence. For sexually harassing a woman once and defaming her twice, he must pay her $83.3 million. More than two dozen other women have charged him with sexual harassment.

4. Trump’s big tax cut in 2017 was split between 80% for about 700 billionaires and 20% for 336 million Americans.

5. In an exchange of “Christian” votes for power, Trump has switched to pro-life from pro-choice and has opposed the use of contraceptives so that Whites can have more babies than all the minorities! The other day I was reading a column by the legend Mike Royko and encountered his remarkable sentence: “The human brain is an incredible organ. In any given day, even the dumbest of us will have thousands of thoughts, impressions, images, memories.” I thought immediately of Lyin’ King Donald J. Trump.

Don’t evangelicals and catholics know about Dr. Faustus and the Devil?
Near the end of the 16th Century English playwright Christopher Marlowe wrote Doctor Faustus, a play about the Devil getting an educated man bored with the normal academic disciplines of the times to sign a 24-year contract where Faustus will get everything he has ever desired. What a great deal to experience! 

He dabbles in the magic available, he succumbs to the seven deadly sins as outlined, becomes invisible and plays tricks on friends, enemies, and the bishops, cardinals and pope in the Vatican, “consorts” with the most beautiful Helen of Troy, and views and spies on the world as if he is one of God’s angels. 

But the 24-year period passes quickly and now he must pay the piper, the Devil, because he has signed the contract with his own blood. At the end of the play, the Devil reminds Dr. Faustus of his hot “deal” as he marches the signor off to Hell.
 

Think about Marlowe’s message. Now it is the 21st century, and we have a wealthy socio-psychopath certified by 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts as a malignant narcissist who wants to “win” the presidency of the United States to gain more wealth and power. He hates losers because his dumb brain insists he only loves himself. So, he pretends he is a religious man who lives by the Bible and  the proverbs phrased by the alleged prophets of the time he has never read 

So, Donald Trump “signed” a four-year contract with the racist evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians dominated by the commandments of the Christian Dominonist and Christian Identity churches that teach that Blacks have been created by God for only one purpose – to serve Whites. 
At the same time, he promises the Vatican they can continue to teach that God created only two genders, that Eve has very painful births because she stole an apple, that homosexuals are “intrinsically disordered.” And that the Catholic churches can remain the largest landowner in the world. 
He also agrees to eliminate the Roe V. Wade abortion law, that life begins at the moment of conception, and that contraceptives should be banned and replaced by Vatican Roulette.
 

Now he wants another four-year contract. The red cap MAGA Christians have become “Christian” White Nationalists who no longer believe in the Bible of Jesus Christ which mentions the poor 2,000 times and teaches neighbors to love both friends and enemies. Trump is now “The Chosen One” of the Graham crowd and the American Taliban who carried torches, ran over protesters, and marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us!” and the “Blood and Soil!” of American and German Nazis.

Faustus is in a Very Hot Hell while “The Chosen One” may Make Earth Hell
Writer Tom Engelhart has just written “The Candidate from Hell.” His opening lines introduce his subject: “Donald Trump is all too literally the candidate from hell and, yes he’s threatening to take the United States and the world to – no place else! – hell and back. He’s the greatest danger to this planet imaginable. And I’m not even thinking about what else he’d do, were he to win election 2024 and return to the Oval Office having reassured his religious voters that should they opt for him this November, they’ll never have to do it again. He said: “Get out and vote this time….You won’t have to do it again”.”

  While talking to a rally in Phoenix it was 113F for Trump and his dark blue suit. We were in the 11th straight hottest month since temperatures were recorded. In Dubai it was 113F and the heat index was 144F! Back in Phoenix, 11 listeners at the rally were on stretchers hooked to IV bags, trying not to die on a hot day from heat exhaustion. Trump spent a lot time ranting against wind turbines and electric vehicles and yelling “Drill, baby, Drill!”