Oscar Brown Jr. On Citizenship

"What you mean we, white man?"

There's no point in (black people) trying to ingratiate ourselves with these people because we're not...we didn't come here right. We're not in the situation in the right way. We came as a degraded race and were held that way. Even when we were told we were citizens it was not with the freedom that everybody else became citizens. Everybody else who wanted to be a citizen, came, and was naturalized and bought into it. We were just declared citizens by edict, which meant that the slaves had to cast their political lot with the masters!

...My grandfather was born in 1860 in Hines County, Mississippi; he was not considered a person. In 1865, they decided he was a person, and that person was a member of this political organization and all his descendants would then be likewise, if they remained here. Well...that's crap. We're kidnap victims. We were brought here; the country acts like it didn't affront us at all. They act like they owe us no apology and that they bear no blame - that we actually benefited from having been dragged here in chains and having the shit beat out of us. We have been bred to go along with it - we have been bred to be afraid.

-James Porter interview with Oscar Brown Jr., Roctober 1996.

Sadly, with verdicts like the one in the Trayvon Martin case tonight, this looks to be as true now as it was then.

We've still got a long way to go to change this. All of us.