Black Lives Matter movement mirrors US slave rebellions

Micah Xavier Johnson is alleged to have pulled the trigger that ended the lives of five police officers in Dallas in reaction to the recent shooting of African Americans by police officers across America.

His actions mirror that of Nat Turner, a black slave who was executed after a slave insurrection. In fact, Micah’s action resembles that of Nat Turner in a number of ways.

Tired of widespread slavery and dehumanisation of the negro in vast white plantations in the American South, Nat Turner in August 1831 conspired with his fellow slaves and led one of the bloodiest slave insurrections in the Southampton County, Virginia.

Like Micah Xavier, and who in his own account is alleged to have admitted that he wanted to kill white police officers, Nat Turner was motivated and convinced that by killing whites in Southampton County, Negro slaves will be liberated at last.

At the end of his spirited killing spree, around 55 to 65 white men, women and children lost their lives.

Ironically, countless slaves were massacred to avenge Nat Turner’s action.

Suffice to say, despite the constitutional provisions that guarantees rights as espoused in the declaration of independence; “All men are created equal, they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” blacks in America find themselves hemmed in an ambivalent society that does not care what happens to them and hence these extreme actions by Xavier and his ilk.

Ironically, it is only blacks who entered in the ‘land of opportunity’ in chains.

STARK REMINDER

Their presence in America is well captured in Alex Haley film, Roots, and other numerous accounts.

The film shows how Kinta Kunte, a lead character, was captured in the West Coast of Africa, how he was transported in degrading conditions through the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean, how he was auctioned to the highest bidder when he landed in America, before he was subjected to the worst human mistreatment in vast cotton, sugar and tobacco plantations.

Secondly, pro-slavery and anti-slavery crusaders were at loggerheads.

While President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, that legally abolished slavery in 1863, the southern states opposed this move by instigating a bloody civil war.

Although the Confederate states were eventually defeated, they resorted to undermining the emancipation proclamation through the enactment of state-based Jim Crow laws soon after the end of civil war.

These laws openly promoted segregation policies for over a century.

This compelled civil rights movement firebrand Martin Luther King Jnr to denounce this system when he lamented thus: “When you are humiliated day in day out by nagging signs reading, ‘White’ and ‘Coloured’; when your first name becomes a ‘boy’ however old you are...”

While the Congress passed the necessary civil rights laws in 1960s and eventually proscribed Jim Crow laws, it is an understatement to say that the blacks folks continue to bear the brunt of racial discrimination 50 years later.

The advent of  the Black Lives Matter movement is a stark reminder that the civil rights movement of 1950s and 60s did not fully exorcise the ghosts of racial discrimination in America. 

As long as America is unable to tackle and deal exhaustively with the African-American question, then the country should brace for the perpetual metamorphosis of disciples of Nat Turner in the 21st Century, a good example being that of Micah Xavier Johnson who killed five innocent police officers in Dallas, Texas during Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

As America continues to project itself as a bastion of modern democracy, it should live up to its 240-year-old constitution by appreciating that charity begins at home. Undeniably, Black Lives Matter not only in the United States but in all parts of the World.