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A slave child who was 8 yrs old and lived to be 90, could have met and talked to YOUR parent.
If you are my age (56) or older, slavery is not "four-hundred years ago" as the media likes to pontificate. It was ONE generation removed from us.
That's a blink of an eye, in historical terms..
That 90 yr old (in 1947) could have told first hand experiences to your Mom or Dad, and certainly your grandparents. A child of 8 can remember a lot, and as an old woman/man, the childhood memories linger, even as the recent ones recede.
I can remember my mother telling me about how her old grandmother (90-something) could not remember lunch, but would ask her in German to "hitch up the team so Frank (grandmother's younger brother) could go to town"..
The powers that be would love nothing more than to convince people that slavery and oppression are long gone, and happened so many years ago, that people should have "moved on" by now.
There are many who fought the holiday because of bigotry, but probably a lot did so because of shame. Their communities were built, and the wealth of their families built, and the strength of their own "portfolios" , from the sweat and tears of enslaved people only a generation away from themselves.
My own grandparents were born only 23 years after the civil war ended, and I have vivid memories of them..
Slavery cannot be forgotten.. It's a stain that is always there. We can cover it up, or look away, but it's still there.
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