Hyperbole
My body cringes under the weight of this history and our future and my soul aches like death itself. I can literally feel the pain of the hundreds of ancestors caught in the mass slaughter.
Today I am the same kind of fearful my extended ancestors must have been as the leaves turned crimson like the blood of at least 60 Black people who died on November 10th, 1898 when white supremacists staged a successful insurrection. My body cringes under the weight of this history and our future and my soul aches like death itself. I can literally feel the pain of the hundreds of ancestors caught in the mass slaughter.
Just a few months earlier, the summer heat wave in Wilmington North Carolina was hot enough to boil the pee in the outhouses in many homes of the newly freed Black people. Enslavement was over for only 33 years by that time and there were about 25,000 Black men to 8,000 white men living in the city. The city was growing and prospering, with many Black people gainfully employed in many professions. Nothing could be farther away from their minds than what was to come that late fall day.
I tremble to think of the level of thought some people were actively giving and the work being done to overthrow the government of Wilmington as the people continued…
