Feel the Bern & Vote for Truth, Justice, and Liberty

(M)an: Dude! Luther Campbell’s The Book of Luke: My fight for truth, justice, and Liberty City is a powerhouse history book. Listen to this, beginning with page 6,

The history of black Miami is unique, different from any other major city in the South. There was no slavery here. Some landowners had tried to bring it down, before the Civil War, but the swampland was so brutal that for a long time every attempt to settle the area failed. The blacks who did come to south Florida were escaped slaves who’d fled from Georgia and Alabama to disappear into the Everglades with the Seminoles. Or they were Bahamians or other free Caribbean folk who came to fish and farm. White people didn’t know how to live and thrive in the tropics. Bahamians did. They knew the agricultural practices to use, how to fish, and how to use lime mortar to build homes. There would be no Miami if blacks hadn’t built it.

When south Florida was a sleepy backwater, cut off from the rest of the state, it was an okay place for blacks to live. There was more equality. The black people here were fiercely independent, proud, hardworking, educated. We had our own thriving community and business district in what would become Coconut Grove. There was a high level of home ownership and civic engagement. When the city of Miami voted to incorporate in 1896, over 40 percent of the registered voters were black.

(D)ude: Man! Women and minorities need to see past the smoke and mirrors about the Clinton Surplus and placing a woman like Hillary Rodham Clinton into the White House. Look how Hillary Clinton is attacking Bernie Sanders with surrogates like Barbara Boxer stating over and over again that he’s not been a Democrat for long or at all. Whoa! Bernie Sanders has been in the Democratic Caucus all these years, staying away from the onslaught of Hillary and Bill Clinton’s attempts to tear down the Democratic Party. In fact, right now, the Democratic Party is unaware of Hillary Clinton’s destructive intentions for them to lose as well as her losing the White House. Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown is one such Democrat, look how he’s lost a devastating amount of weight under the influence of the Clintons, although he is up for reelection in 2018. Similarly, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand too has lost weight so significantly that she’s actually got a pale graying complexion like that of Sherrod’s. This has to end. Hillary Clinton’s harassing these folks for their votes as super-delegates and I want to know what dirt has Hillary Clinton figured out to be in the power position she is in right now. The Republican Party’s already read Dolly Kyle’s nonfiction reading Hillary the Other Woman: A Political Memoir, but Hillary Clinton is acting like none of the dirt about her is going to make a difference in the campaign. Well, that dirt is already up in the air and falling down hard because Hillary Clinton is willing to lose the election for hundreds of millions of dollars from the Koch Brothers.    

We were here from the beginning. This was our town. But then the railroads came. The railroads brought capitalism, and capitalism brought exploitation. Once Miami became a lucrative resort destination, all that black pride and independence was no match for the power of white money. White businessmen and real estate speculators poured into Miami and began buying it up and selling it off, piece by piece. Wealthy white tourists started coming. Miami needed blacks to dig the ditches and clean the hotels, but those blacks had to be kept out of sight and out of mind. Racial covenants and restricted zoning started pushing us across that same railroad tracks that we’d built, into a neighborhood called Overtown. It got its name because it was on the other side of downtown from Coconut Grove, and you had to go “over town” to get there.

Miami began to take off, especially Miami Beach. It was the American Riviera, full of beautiful oceanfront mansions and art deco resorts. By comparison, Overtown was a slum, families living in wooden shacks with no city services and no sanitation. There were lots of houses without electricity or running water; people still used woodstoves and oil lamps. Despite how we were forced to live, the black community thrived in its own way. We built our own banks, our own hotels, our own restaurants and nightclubs. Anything you could get in Harlem, you could get in Overtown. It was separate and segregated, but it was ours.

Then they started kicking us out.

(D)ude: Man! Tarrant County has hired companies to build and/or expand highways like I-35W across the D/FW Metroplex, and is using the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System as well to finance the building of such transportation infrastructure. It’s ridiculous how the wealthy avoid paying taxes and then expect us working classers to pay our fair share while they make their billions with tax breaks and speculating or gambling with our insurance and retirement plans. According to the Dallas Morning News’ Tristan Hallman and Robert Wilonsky, the FBI had to intervene in the finances of a firm hired to allocate the funds of the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System. CDK Realty Advisors had taken over messily the management of $700 million plus dollars of this pension fund from the previous administrator, a Richard Tettamant. CDK Realty Advisors had made risky real estate investments while charging those paying into the pension system inflated fees on top of misinforming them about what was going on the entire time. And, get this, the Fort Worth Star Telegram, the Dallas Morning News, and all the local news coverages online regarding D/FW do not identify the party affiliation of the politicians they address. I’m still trying to figure out whether Dallas City Council member Lee Kleinman is a Republican or not! Guess what? He’s “nonpartisan” and wanting to reduce Dallas’ debt in ways that make me consider him a Republican. It is politicians like Lee Kleinman that made Bernie Sanders identifying with the Democratic Party as a presidential contender necessary. Again, Bernie Sanders is the embodiment of the Democratic Platform! Independents must be embraced into the Democratic Party! It is baffling when Debbie Wasserman-Schultz insists that Independents are unwelcome. You know, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is also gaunt and scared sick of Hillary Clinton, not knowing whether she (Debbie) will be reelected or not this fall.

Overtown sits right down by the water, about two blocks from where the Miami Heat arena is today. As the city grew around it, it became some of the most valuable property in the whole south of Florida. Developers wanted the land for more condos and office buildings and hotels. At the time, the federal government was building the interstate highway system, and I-95 was going to be run straight down through the heart of Miami. Urban renewal, they were calling it. The original plan called for running the highway over the old Florida East Coast railroad tracks, which was already a transit corridor and would have caused little disruption. But the plan was deliberately shifted west to run through the heart of Overtown.

The community was destroyed, intentionally, to make way for white developers. Overtown’s business district was gutted. They razed whole city blocks and started moving families out. The houses that weren’t destroyed, the city went through and started evicting people. After years of forcing blacks to live in substandard housing, the city sent out inspectors and if they found any code violations (which they always did), they’d use it to evict us.

The other part of clearing us out was building someplace for us to go. Beck in the 1930s, there was a white neighborhood just north of Overtown called Liberty City. Responding to the overcrowding conditions in Overtown, in 1937 the federal government had gone into Liberty City and built the Liberty Square Houses—it was only the second public housing project in the country and the first in the South. The white families in Liberty City were so panicked about all these poor blacks moving in that the city actually built a wall that ran down the middle of Twelfth Avenue, from Sixty-Second Street to Seventy-First Street, to separate the new projects from the white parts of town.

Liberty Square had modern kitchens, electricity, hot water, all these conveniences that were going to entice black families to move out of Overtown. The projects were very different than when I was growing up. By the time I was a kid, they were already falling apart. Same as with Overtown, they weren’t maintained. There was no investment from the city to keep them nice. Eventually nobody called it Liberty Square anymore. Everyone called it the Pork N’ Beans, because that’s all the people who lived there could afford to eat.

Some black families moved out to take advantage of the new homes, but most black families wanted to stay in Overtown. Then the interstate Then the interstate came and black families started pouring out, spreading north into Brownsville and Caledonia and Carver Village. Sometimes the families moving in were met with protests, sometimes with dynamite. They kept coming because there was nowhere else for them to go.

(D)ude: Man! Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are going to be following these exact blueprints of disastrous results for the working poor! They are going to keep us wandering afoot all over the map and then when we finally reach a dead end, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are going to send those of us who haven’t found firm ground to stand but are standing nevertheless into a third world war. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will never finance the green revolution, but will go after Middle East oil infrastructures for themselves to pocket while killing the civilians on the ground. Mohamed Morsi is imprisoned and facing the death penalty right now. The Republican Party wants Morsi dead to provoke the masses once again to act out their differences in public, an easy route for terrorism to spread further into Egypt. To really up the ante, the Republican Party target practiced with that Egypt Air crash, making certain all the lines of defense remained in their terrorists’ hands. Has ISIL claimed responsibility yet? Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are planning to confuse the American electorate by campaigning on the fears of the masses like George Walker Bush did after 9/11/01. The solution is too long term to resolve the unrest in Egypt. Instead, the Republican Party is financing death and destruction on the ground, killing civilians rather than rebuilding the falling economies in places like Egypt. The way they are going to confuse the American electorate is that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will toss the names of the terrorist organizations into an indecipherable heap, like Morsi’s appalling statements and alliances with the Muslim Brotherhood, for example, and forgetting the interactions of Morsi with a delegation John McCain led in 2013. Remember how Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush oversaw the selling of arms inside the Middle East and how that led to the mayhem on the ground over there in which George Herbert Walker Bush declared there was too much confusion for anything less than warfare? Well, get ready for that same nonsense and blathering with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton!

(M)an: Dude! Feel the Bern! No wars, just peace!