SEPTEMBER 2020


“…America has found itself in the wilderness. The question is, will we be leaning on the Lord? And once we face our nightmares, the same way those people on those slave ships faced theirs, what will be our song? ”


nation, by people who knew that they were commanded out of gratitude to be mindful of the other. No. Te most “God-fearing” people who came to this country immediately decided, even though they were sojourners in a strange place, that they would claim the land as their own and put the original inhabitants into the status of the enslaved, the oppressed, and the exiled . . .


We have never learned American history accurately—I’ve been saying that for almost fifty years of teaching. We have got to go back to the


source, but we can do it if we are going to sing the music that frees our spirits—that music must also free our imaginations. Tere is nothing more basic to what we have to be about today than to understand this: that in the midst of the worst oppression possible, in the nightmare that was enslavement, people found a way to imagine something better.


And they sang.


Fr. Joseph Brown is a Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he has taught since 1997. Since 2014, he has served


as the Chair of the East St. Louis 1917 Centennial Commission & Cultural Initiative. A prolific writer and poet, he also publishes the blog, Te Sankofa Muse, found at sankofamuse.blogspot.com.


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