Where Is the Black Man in America?

By Jerry Lee Cook

This book shows some of the struggles that the blackman in america is going through. Ths provides expert advice from a person who has gone through the ups and downs of life of a balck man and making him aware of the struggles of the blackman's life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669824992

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Copyright © 2022 by Jerry Lee Cook.

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Rev. date: 07/29/2022

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Where Is the Black Man in America?

INTRODUCTION

This book is written based on a black man’s life here in America. It’s also written out of concern for the black man as a whole. There is hope, and this is one reason why I wrote this book. There are just too many men falling by the wayside and forgotten by society. This is to show a little knowledge to uplift and show a different mindset. This book prescribes ways and means for self-examination and reevaluation. The material in this book is based on fifty years of life experiences, truths, and facts. Other information is part of my research obtained through many interviews.

WHERE IS THE BLACK MAN IN AMERICA?

This story is about the black man’s life within the black culture in America with his struggles, displacements, despair, brokenness, lack of self-esteem, lack of cooperation, hopelessness, and insufficient long-term vision of life here. First, we need to know more about where we black people came from. There are so many differences in variables surrounding the life of the black man. In the mid-1500s, the Europeans began to bring black Africans to America as slaves. It was also in the eighth century that Moorish merchants traded humans as merchandise throughout the Mediterranean. Many West African people were kept as slaves. West African slaves were usually prisoners of war, criminals, or the lowest-ranked members of the caste system.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, people were kidnapped from the continent of Africa and forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work as indentured servants and labor in the production of crops such as tobacco, rice, and cotton. There was a slave revolt in the colony in 1739, and a group of slaves escaped and traveled another, Stone Rebellion South Carolina. These southern colonies had twenty-five colonists, and thirty to fifty Africans were killed during the revolt. The uprising was led by native Africans, who were likely from the Central African kingdom of Congo; even some of them spoke Portuguese.

I would think back on those times, and I believe the mind of the black man was to save his family in spite of the consequences of his actions. Black men began to struggle mentally cause of being in conscious denial of being incapacitate the greater effort continue to recognize his importance to the expectation with the hope that him and his family could stay together and not be separated. I think day-to-day resistance was the most common form of opposition to slavery, doing things like breaking tools, faking illnesses, staging slowing down in working, and also committing arson and sabotage. Fear takes on many forms, and it was fear that caused the slaves to explore ways to escape and find freedom.

The following year, in 1740, the Negro Act was put in place, codifying white supremacy. The First Maroon War in 1730 (Jamaica) showed strong resistance, and they were victorious. This same kind of resistance just was not ordinary; it was about life or death. A strong resistance was required, and at this point, I think the black man began to fight the suppressor. The psychological effect is what I think caused the black man to fall under total submission.

The Negro Act of 1740 restricted slave assembly, education, and movement; there was a moratorium, and ten years after, the law was activated. The white man decided to stop receiving slaves imported from Africa because the black man was becoming more rebellious. This resulted in a big psychological shift as he refused to stay bonded because he was removed from his natural environment.

I am going to pause for a second to say that even before the 1740 act, in 1726, under the Act for the Better Regulation of Negroes, numerous provisions restricted slaves and free slaves. At the same time that law was enacted, there was a slave rebellion. It occurred in 1741 in New York, and it was called the New York Conspiracy or the Great Negro Plot.

The scale was large. The scheme involved black slaves and poor white settlers burning down New York and taking it over. In a short while, the white man suppresses that uprising. I believe there were many sleepless nights for the black man. He had to wrestle with himself psychologically to stay alive.

There was a place called Fort Mose, which is underwater these days. Before I go any further here, I think that the whites weren’t fully aware of the coming trouble as long as he had slaves, but this was his mindset. He believed the black man was ignorant, had a lack of knowledge/awareness, uneducated, and unsophisticated until they encountered Francisco Mendez. He was a black leader of a militia group. I believe that Fort Mose was where Francisco protected the slaves who sought freedom. I think the slaves continued to escape from South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, West Virginia, Virginia, Arkansas, Texas, Maryland, and Florida.

In the earlier months of 1726, on March 29, the first large shipment of slaves arrived in New Orleans. The ship called L’Aurore arrived with 290 black people captured in the Gambia by traders from Britain, France, and Portugal. They all were competing to establish trade with Whydah.

Later on, I will explain this part of Africa. In the meantime, the US Army attacked Florida, and the group of runaway slaves was recaptured. Sure, some were killed when they fought with Francisco when he fled to Cuba. They were even compared with their brothers and sisters in Brazil, Cuba, Suriname, and Haiti.

Now, the kingdom of Whydah was located on the coast of West Africa, and it was a large trading hub. This is the place where it all began. Families were brought there by other countrymen who raided their villages and took them captive to Whydah and sold them. This is the reason why some blacks can speak the Creole language, as well as Portuguese, French, and Spanish. This region of Whydah has eight areas, and don’t forget that this regional port is where the black man’s mind was completely transformed. I truly believe that this transformation has been passed down through generations.

On March 29, 1726, the first large shipment of slaves arrived in New Orleans. The ship L’Aurore arrived with 290 black people captured in the Gambia; and countries like Britain, France, and Portugal wanted to trade with Whydah.

Those were fearful times when they reached the town port of Whydah and witnessed each other pass over and over to be sold off and go to places they knew nothing about. They were chained to one another and given the notion that they would be better off dead.

Historian Herbert Aptheker explains it in this way: the problem in American institutions and the intellectual life reduced to the status of the passive perpetual child lack of courage and manhood of the African American slaves. There were other laws already on record like the 1680 act passed to prevent insurrection among slaves. The act of 1691 was the first act prohibiting intermarriage, and the slaves were codified. Following that act some years later was the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act passed by the United States Congress to give effect to the fugitive slave clause of the US Constitution (article 4, section 2, clause 3), which was later superseded by the Thirteenth Amendment. The former guaranteed a right for a slaveholder to recover an escaped slave. All this was a legal mechanism by which that could be accomplished—and it was accomplished. Of all the bills that made up the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act was the most controversial. It gave anyone all rights for harsher, more evil, more heinous acts against runaway slaves. I think during that time, the mind of the black man was to get free and stay that way. The struggle continued as time passed until 1798 when the Amelioration Act was enacted. It was passed to improve the condition of the slaves.

Moving into the 1800s is where I think that the white man began to get into trouble about the black slaves taking a rebellion stance against being hanged, dragged, burned alive, and some were even drowned. These were some of the things that they did to continue putting fear into the black man to control him. Fear was what he gave, becoming the terminator to keep blacks in check. In most cases, blacks stayed silent and obeyed against their free will. This was the black man’s only way to stay alive on foreign soil. This is part of my point up until the Revoke.

As you read more later, you can see or have an idea of when the black men began to band together and tried to stop the onslaughts of their race. In 1861, James Madison called slavery America’s original sin, chattel slavery. The Southern states were determined to establish their independent slave republic, which led to four years of war. During the war, 20 percent of Southern white males were wiped off the face of the earth.

Right after the Civil War came the Emancipation Proclamation that brought three separate constitutional amendments that abolished slavery, defined citizenship and the right to vote, and created the Freedmen’s Bureau with the mandate to provide land and education. There had to have been conscious involvement for what would come next. There was a redemption toward slavery because they knew how they treated the black man was wrong. The Americans were in a state of fear just like the blacks were in fear from day one of their arrival. Also, it was generational chains of enforced ignorance and subjugation.

Lincoln had two intellectual heroes. One, in particular, was Thomas Jefferson who advocated the expulsion of blacks from the United States to save the nation. Lincoln laid out his resettlement plans. He selected Chiriqui, a resource-poor area in Panama, to be the new home for millions of African Americans. But now he had one big problem, which was to convince them to leave.

The other was lecturing five black leaders whom he had summoned to the White House. In the meeting between both sides, Lincoln went on to say that it was their duty given what their people had done to the United States. They had to accept the exodus to South America. He also stated that before a race among us, there could not be war. He went on to say to the five black men how and why our race came to be among them. Lincoln conveniently ignored the five men’s questions, and he began to talk about his framing of racism and patriotism.

That anger was directed at blacks who fully supported the Union and did not want to leave the United States. This piece of the document was written, I presume, by one of the five. It goes on to say,

We claim freedom as our natural right ask in harmony and cooperation with the nation at large you should cut u by the roots the system of slavery. It is not only a wrong to us but the source of all the evil which at present affect the states for slavery corrupt itself, corrupted nearly all around it. It had influenced nearly all the