Jerry’s Blog–Because Wit Happens

What she actually said:

“Young people, I want you to know: when you are true to what God wants you to do, the path just opens up, and things just come come to you, you know. God is good, I can tell you that.

When I made that commitment, I was making that commitment to black people, and to black people only. But you know God will show you things, and he’ll put things in your paths so that you realize that the struggle is really about poor people. You know, the first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm, he took a long time talking, but he was trying to show me he was superior to me. I knew what he was doing, but he had to come to me for help. What he didn’t know, while he was taking all that time tryin’ to show me he was superior to me, was I was trying to decide just how much help I was goin’ to give him.

I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland, and here I was faced with havin’ to help a white person save his farmland. So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough so that when he — I assumed the Department of Agriculture had sent him to me, either that or the Georgia Department of Agriculture — and he needed to go back and report that I did try to help him. So I took him to a white lawyer that had attended some of the training we had provided, because Chapter 12 bankruptcy had just been enacted for the family farmer. So I figured if I take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him.

That’s when it was revealed to me that it’s about poor vs those who have, and not so much about about white — it is about white and black, but it’s not, you know, it opened my eyes. Because I took him to one of his own, and I put him in his hands and said “okay, I’ve done my job.” But during that time we would have these injunctions against the Department of Agriculture and so they couldn’t foreclose on him, and I want you to know that the County Supervisor had done something to him that I have not seen yet that they’ve done to any other farmer black or white, and what they did to him caused him to not be able to file Chapter 12 bankruptcy.

So, everything was going along fine, I’m thinking he’s being taken care of by the white lawyer, and then they lifted the injunction against USDA in May of ‘87 for two weeks and he was one of 13 farmers in Georgia who received a foreclosure notice.

He called me.

I said, we’re going to make an appointment at the lawyer, let me know when it is and I’ll meet you there. So we meet at the lawyer’s office on the date they had given him, and this lawyer had sat there — he had been paying the lawyer, that’s what got me — he had been paying the lawyer since November and this was May — and the lawyer sat there and looked at him and said, “well, you all are getting old, why don’t you let the farm go.”

I could not believe he said that. So I said to the lawyer, I told him “I can’t believe you said that! It’s obvious to me if he cannot file a Chapter 12 bankruptcy to stop this foreclosure, you have to file an 11.” And the lawyer said to me, “I’ll do whatever you say, whatever you think.” — that’s the way he put it. But he’s paying him! He wasn’t paying me any money. So the lawyer said he would work on it.

Then, about seven days before that land would have been sold at the courthouse steps, the farmer called me and said the lawyer wasn’t doing anything. And that’s when I spent time there in my office calling everybody I could think of to try see and help me find a lawyer who would handle this, and finally I remembered that I had gone to see one only forty miles away

[tape edit, reportedly due to tapes being switched]

but working with him made me see that it’s really about those who have vs those who have not. They could be black, they could be white, they could be hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people — those who don’t have access the way others have.

I want to just share something with you and I think hit helps to — you know when I learned this I’m like ‘oh, my goodness.’ You know back in the late 17th and 18th century, there were black indentured servants and white indentured servants. And they all would work for the seven years and get their freedom. And they didn’t see any difference in each other — nobody worried about skin color, they married each other, you know, these were poor whites and poor blacks in the same boat. They were slaves, but they were both slaves and both had the opportunity to work their wayout of slavery. But then, they started looking at the injustices that they faced, and started — the people with money, they started the poor whites married each other and lived together, they were just like we would be!

And they started looking at what was happening and decided “we need to do something about this!” The people with money, the elite decided “we need to do something here to divide them.” So that’s when they made black people servants for life. That’s when they put laws in place forbidding them to marry each other. That’s when they created the racism that we know of today. They did it to keep us divided. And it started working so well, they said “gosh, we’re glad we’ve come across something there that could last generations.”

And here we are, over 400 years later, and it’s still working. What we have to do is get that out of our heads. There is no difference between us. The only difference is the folks with money want to stay in power and whether it’s health care, or whatever it is, they’ll do what they need to do to keep that power. It’s always about money, y’all.

I haven’t seen such a mean spirit in people as I’ve seen lately about healthcare. Some of the racism we thought was buried — didn’t it surface? Now we endured eight years of the Bushes, and we didn’t do the stuff these Republicans are doing because you have a black president.

I wanted to give you that little history, especially to young people. I want you to know they created it not just for us, but we got the brunt of it because they needed to elevate whites just a little bit higher than us to make them think they were so much better, and then they would never work with us to try and change the situation that they were all in.

But where am I going with this? I couldn’t say 45 years ago, I couldn’t stand here and say what I will say to you tonight. Like I told you, God helped me to see that it’s not just about black people, it’s about poor people. And I’ve come a long way. I knew that I couldn’t live with hate. As my mother has said, if we had tried to live with hate in our hearts we’d probably be dead now. But I’ve come to realize that we have to work together. And it’s sad we don’t have a room full of whites and blacks here tonight, because we have to overcome the divisions that we have. We have to get to the point where as Toni Morrison said, “race exists but it doesn’t matter.”

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FOX News again proves that they are evil and have no shame. Nice editing, slimeballs.