When I was a small girl in Atlanta, Grandma’s lap and bedroom remained my soft landing if I had misbehaved and Mama was patiently waiting to give me that lecture about my behavior.
Grandma’s bed had a ton of blankets where I couldn’t move if I got in it, but the visit was worth the trip because Grandma had a sweet tooth. There was candy I wasn’t supposed to have in her nightstand and her pockets.
Before I began going to school and even after I started school, Grandma and I had a daily routine of debate and opinions and arguments that could only be had between a 78-year-old woman and her 4-year-old granddaughter whose job was to help sort home grown tomatoes, snap beans, squash and peas from the garden except when I stopped to make mud pies from the rich red Georgia clay after a rain.
We spent hours discussing everything like two old women, but I was a midget version of an old woman. Grandma insisted on me having a reason and an explanation for why I believed certain things, nurturing propositions and hypotheses from my diminutive brain before I knew what a proposition or a hypothesis was.
I remember back when Arthur Herman Bremer shot former Alabama Governor and presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972. Wallace ended up in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He had been an avowed segregationist for most of his life.
He became a humanitarian after he was shot and paralyzed from the waist down. To his credit, he did assist Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm with passing legislation that aided workers and farmers. Their alliance, brought on by his tragedy, was unique in the annals of American political history.
Wallace assumed he was invincible. Yet, no matter how much power you have or think you have, you cannot hold that power forever.
No matter how many times you kiss the ring of those in power, and swallow your pride and principles for the approval of those in power, you too will eventually be sacrificed with neither your dignity nor principles to hold your legacy together.
The Muskrat and Felon 47 will die, just like all of us will. History will record them as monsters because that is exactly what they are. The politicians who shy away from questioning the rationale of their policies will be recorded as the cowards they are.
Shutterstock photo of depressed man/New Africa
As activist Audre Lorde said, “Your silence will not protect you.” In the end when the folks upon whose altar you have sacrificed all of your principles are done with you, you will be no more than the rest of us. All you will ever be is mortal.
Power does not transfer to the grave. Your progeny will live long enough after your death to be vilified and hated while struggling to figure out what it is that they have done. History will answer them the same way it has answered all others in perpetuity, “Your crime is your having been born unto monsters.”
I originally wrote about this on Christmas Eve, 2024:
The United States imports most of its strategic minerals. China is our largest supplier. Polysilicon, Geranium, Palladium are vital to semiconductors. Magnesium metals, and etcetera all come from China.
We also import critical minerals from Australia, South Africa, Chile, Brazil and Peru.
Out of the 35 critical minerals that are absolutely essential to our economy and to the efficacy of our military, we only produce 4 of those necessary minerals. The other 31 are imported.
While folks in Canada and Greenland and Panama are naturally and rightfully insulted and concerned about Felon 47’s bluster about invading their countries to bring them under the US umbrella; it’s not likely to happen. It is the USA that better be concerned.
(Photo by Martin Konopka, EyeEm/Getty Images)
The only thing that would need to happen is for the United States to be isolated by both its enemies and its friends where no nation sells us any critical minerals anymore. With a weakened economy and weakened military we are ripe for the pickings.
China has already banned the sale of critical minerals to the United States. That’s what all that early “let’s ban Tiktok” mess from the U. S. Congress was about. Congress already knows that China can thumb its nose at the USA. Elon and his demented minion Trumpolini can fool around and they will find out.
Today on March 2, 2025, I had a great exchange with one of the best young minds out there challenging us to think. His name is Kahlil Greene—look him up. He waxed poetically and flawlessly about this past week’s fiasco of a talk between Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky and our bully-in-chief that I personally refer to as Felon 47. Greene brought up the striking contrast between Biden and Felon 47.
After I brought up the USA’s ongoing need for strategic minerals, he reiterated that US dependence on these strategic minerals had serious repercussions for our natural environment and for our indigenous Native American nations.
Here’s another age-related reminder that I wrote to him:
“Kahlil, you may be too young to remember these protests: But back in the late 1980s when we were clamoring and protesting to get universities, companies, and etcetera to divest from the racist apartheid regime in South Africa, the response from Washington was often ‘South Africa supplies many of our strategic minerals that support our military.’
At the time, I was quite young and did not know what a strategic mineral was, but I started paying attention.
Ukraine is about as mineral rich as any country you can find on earth. Without certain minerals, the USA cannot be militarily secure and we cannot build semiconductors that support our electronics industries. You made a damned good point about the environment and what this could mean for our First Nation brothers and Sisters. I am going to leave this discussion right here.”
Harriet Tubman was a nurse, a scout, and a spy for the Union Army during the Civil War. She is best known, however, as a leader of the Underground Railroad where she led many African American enslaved people from the state of Maryland to head north to Canada.
A majority of Black American runaway slaves never made it to Canada, which was the intended destination. Most of them landed somewhere in the Northeast where American chattel slavery was abolished during the 18th through the early 19th centuries.
I want to point out two things about Tubman and about Black American women during the late 19th century.
First, Tubman always kept a rifle or gun under her dress just in case one of her runaway slaves decided to run back to their plantation. After all, these journeys required hundreds of miles on foot while they worried about bounty hunters who searched for runaways in order to reap financial rewards. Slave patrols roamed all night looking for slaves out after dark without permission. If a slave was caught, punishment was severe, and occasionally fatal.
Tubman let her fellow Black freedom-seekers know that she would shoot them dead before she allowed any one of them to run back to their former owners who would inevitably beat them until they confessed about her mission, which would jeopardize the safety of everyone involved. All of the slaves who headed North with Tubman believed her. She never once had to use her gun.
Second, Tubman was clear about her mission to free and save her people. Her demand to, “Kill the Snake before it Kills you,” was her reference to the slave-holding Confederacy and its Army in the American South.
She did not necessarily want anyone to be killed, but she underscored that the Confederate Army was the Snake; and the Snake had to be stopped no matter the casualties it suffered.
During Reconstruction (1863 to 1877) after the Civil War ended, the Republican Party of the North sought to solidify its political dominance and economic control over the South. So, by 1870 it gave Black men who were former slaves the right to vote.
In spite of the fact that no women were granted the franchise, Black families sat down together and decided together how to cast that one vote afforded to male adults in their households. Many Black men were escorted to the polls by their wives, sisters, and mothers who also hid guns and rifles under their dresses just in case some white southerner/s, aka snake/s, decided to harm these Black male voters.
In this new year of 2025, we are again at a moment in our history where our capacity to protect ourselves and those we love, and our capacity to survive economically and to be free is at stake.
We must face the reality that we may have to do things we never thought we would ever have to do in our lifetimes. We must do more than complain about our representatives who are complacent, thereby complicit, about the objectives of the incoming administration.
We do not yet know what we may have to do. But I think about all of those Black women in the late nineteenth century prepared to protect Black men who were going to vote for the first time in their lives.
I also think about some of my sheroes like Congresswoman and former presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm. I think about her mentee, Congresswoman Barbara Lee. I think about the fact that Black Panther Party membership was 70 percent Black women. Then I think of Vice-President Kamala Harris and former First Lady Michelle Obama.
After I remember all of these sisters I admire, I then think of my late maternal grandmother who was a coed at then Clark College during the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906 with her gun under her dress for her protection. I then remember my paternal aunt who had molotov cocktails thrown at her during protest marches in the 1960s, and one thrown in her home because she dared to register Black folks to vote.
Then I remember Tubman’s order to “Kill the Snake before it Kills you.” Then I prepare myself in the event I have to carry out this order, figuratively and literally.
I know a lot of great actors and Henry G. Sanders is one of them. I have watched him perform for over 50 years from “The Killer of Sheep” to “Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman” to “Selma” and beyond. His most recent and notable role has been the character “Prosper Denton” on Ava DuVernay’s “QUEEN SUGAR.”
Yesterday I was relieved when Henry, who lives in Altadena, California, texted me to let me know that he and his family were okay, but “We lost the house.”
It hurt to think of this gracious man, at age 82, having to rebuild. And contrary to popular belief most actors are not rich. The stories about how Henry and his wife have taken in so many struggling young people are too numerous to mention in a single blog. His generosity with his time to me will never be forgotten.
Leslye Joy Allen 