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Thousands watch as lynchers prepare to torture Henry Smith on a ten-foot-high platform at the county fairgrounds. Lynching in America Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror
Analysis | by Nehemiah Frank, Editor-in-Chief and Founder
The Merriam-Webster’s 2018 word of the year was ‘justice’.
To most Americans, justice is an unweighted word that merely reminds them of the judiciary system, a framework that enforces law and order and locks up the ‘criminal’.
Nevertheless, to the millions of African Americans living throughout the country, the word justice is contrarily and heavily burdened with many complexities.
Loaded into the bellies of buoyant beasts and forcibly brought to the ‘new world’, African Americans had been ‘stamped from the beginning.’
Since then, we endured unimaginable violence.
Slavery!
Lynching!
Jim Crow!
Now, police brutality coupled with mass incarceration.
And as a collective people, we have received no justice from America’s judicial system, not even in the form of quality education.
Black Americans had hoped that justice in the form of quality education would come roaring like a powerful rainstorm after a thousand-years drought.
Yet even after the US Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate American schools, justice for the descendants of America’s human commodities are bleak.
What we got, however, was injustice in the form of low academic expectations, inferior schools that produce low test scores, all culminating to more poverty, less efficacy, and more dependency on a system that to all appearances wasn’t designed for us to succeed.
Now, the Black ethos quails at the thought of reparations — for that would be taboo to demand it.
But reparations?
Isn’t that justice?
Nehemiah D. Frank is the founder and executive editor of The Black Wall Street Times. He graduated from Harold Washington College in Chicago, IL, and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Oklahoma State University. A rising voice in America and an emerging leader in the education reform movement, Nehemiah frequently travels for speaking engagements around the country, is a blogger for Education Post, and has been featured on NBC as well as in Blavity and Tulsa People. Nehemiah is also a teacher at Sankofa School of the Performing Arts in Tulsa, OK, a 2017 Terence Crutcher Foundation honoree, a recipient of the 2017 METCares Foundation Community Impact Award, and a 2018 Oluko Fellow. He gave a TED Talk at The University of Tulsa in the spring of 2018.