Quote Of The Day

 I'm a Black man, and I love America.

I'm aware that's become a controversial statement.  "I love America" is something you now say if you take Fox News with your morning coffee.  I get it.  Every Independence Day, one of my favorite high school classmates posts Frederick Douglass's Fourth of July speech on his Facebook page.  You know the speech.  It contains the line, "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?"  I get that, too.  I know our past, and I know our pain.  Enslavement.  Peonage.  Jim Crow.  I know our present, and I know our pain.  Mass incarceration.  Red lining.  Extra-judicial police killings.  But the future is up for grabs. ~ Maurice Carlos Ruffin