Terri Johnson of Greensboro, North Carolina, is a 2006 war resister who has been released from duty after leaving her basic training for the war on Iraq. Born in the era of the 1990 Gulf War, she says the US military recruiter promised a university education but did not tell her she would be deployed to Iraq.
“One of the important things to understand about organizing, in Mississippi, and I think in the South, certainly the black belt South, is young people. I think it’s not as if there hadn’t been organizing efforts all through the history of this country; I think when the first group of Africans stepped off the first slave ship, somebody was trying to organize something.” — Charles Cobb, Veteran Civil Rights Activist
Young people, African people in America continually get the worst of characterizations. In other words, the youth are imprisoned by the twisted ideas that others have created.
A myth in 2007 is that there is no political activism among the young African so called Americans. Not only have we as Political Exiles countered this in places like Ireland, Sweden and France, an ongoing educational effort is to have the real thread of African resistance to all forms of domination laid out for all to see. In short, the most vicious of lies is that we are a passive people and helpless unless directed by Whites, Asians, etc in matters of Human Rights.
Yet if pressed, and we have confronted the Irish, the Belgians, Canadians and the others, including Israelis, Arab desended people we meet, there is an admission that the period of African peoples struggles against American state racism in the 1950-1970 shaped European and world activism. From Taiwan to Warsaw, Poland, from Prague to Faslane, Scotland ‘We Shall Overcome’ became an anthem. In Derry, Ireland, we had a reception and obtained respect and acknowledgment for African resistance to USA persecution for centuries.
Along with the damaging images and untold pressures that young Africans in America must bear, there has to be recognition of the tremendous potential and historical power that saw young Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass fight for their freedom and that of their people.
13 July 2007
From Exile,
Bankole
www.geocities.com/exiledone2002
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