Black Business Prosperity

Ancestors, go before me in 2026.

Remove what I cannot see.

Bless what I cannot reach.

Strengthen what I must carry.

Black lesbian writer and activist Audre Lorde and her partner and fellow activist Gloria Joseph. Audre and Gloria lived together in Gloria’s home of St Croix in the Carribean until Audre’s death in 1992. The last thing Audre wrote was a note reading “Gloria, I love you.”

📌 BLACK CODES

🧱 Land Ownership Restrictions

“You can live on the land… but you’ll never own it.”

Sadly this way of thinking and system is not only still being practiced today by the government and businesses, but also by our own black religious leaders.

🧾 What Were Land Ownership Restrictions?

After slavery ended, the Black Codes made it extremely difficult sometimes impossible for freed Black people to buy land. These laws were designed to stop Black families from building wealth, independence, and generational security.

They used rules like:

❌ You must have a white co-signer

❌ You can’t buy property in certain counties

❌ You can lease but not own

❌ If you fall behind on payments, the land returns to the seller

❌ You must live on employer-owned land to keep your job

This forced many Black families into systems like:

Sharecropping

Plantation rentals

“Company town” housing

Tenant farming

You could work the land, but never claim it.

🏚️ How It Worked Then

A Black family saves money to buy a small farm.

The white land office refuses their deed.

A banker says, “You need a co-signer.”

No white co-signer will help.

They are told:

“Rent the land instead. Work it. Pay us. But you can’t own it.”

They farm it for years.

They build it up.

Then one missed payment and the land is taken back.

Generational wealth stolen before it could exist.

🔗 How It Shows Up TODAY

Land ownership restrictions didn’t disappear they changed shape.

Modern versions can look like:

HOA rules blocking Black buyers in “certain neighborhoods”

Banks rejecting Black loan applicants at higher rates

Predatory rent-to-own housing deals

Churches or religious organizations buying land “Claiming to be for the community” but members never own anything

Leaders promising land, homes, or farms that legally stay in the church’s name, not the families living on it

So you get situations where:

People live on land for years…

but the deed is never in their name.

They build homes…

but legally own nothing.

They leave the group or disagree…

and lose everything.

⚠️ When does this become a problem?

When leadership says:

“The church owns everything.”

“If you leave, you leave with nothing.”

“God gave me authority over your property.”

“Your house is really ours.”

That is not generational wealth.

That is dependency disguised as spirituality.

If someone controls your land, they control your life.

🪬 A Hard Truth

Not all oppression comes from the outside.

Sometimes it’s rebuilt from the inside by the very people claiming to save us.

When a religious leader, pastor, prophet, imam, or self-proclaimed “chosen one” tells people:

“Give everything to me, and trust God.”

But the paperwork…the deeds…

the contracts…all lead back to them?

That’s not faith.

That’s ownership.

🧱 WHY IT STILL MATTERS

Land = power

Land = wealth

Land = stability

Land = freedom

Land = a future for your children

And that’s why they tried to keep it from us then —

and why some people still try today.

Because a person who owns nothing can be controlled.

A person who owns land can stand on their own.

✊ THE POINT

Black Codes weren’t just laws they were blueprints.

And any system government, business, or religious that demands: your land, your labor, your loyalty, your silence…

…is repeating history in a new uniform.

🖤 DID YOU KNOW? The real reason watermelons were used to disrespect Black people…

After slavery ended, newly freed Black families in the South began growing and selling watermelons as a way to survive and build independence. It was one of the few crops they could grow on their own land without needing white approval. Watermelons meant freedom, food, land ownership, and economic power.

Black farmers sold them at markets. Black children enjoyed them freely. Black communities used watermelon profits to buy land, homes, and tools. It was a symbol of self-sufficiency.

And that scared people.

So a deliberate propaganda campaign began in the late 1800s. Newspapers, postcards, cartoons, and advertisements started showing racist images of Black people as lazy, messy, childish, and obsessed with watermelon. The goal was clear:

➡️ Turn a symbol of Black success into a tool of humiliation.

➡️ Push the lie that Black people couldn’t handle freedom or responsibility.

And sadly… it worked. What once represented freedom and hard work was twisted into a racial insult that still affects how people think today.

Watermelon was never the joke.

Freedom was what they were scared of.

History didn’t just happen — it was engineered.

Let that sink in.

“Cooning” is a derogatory slang term that comes from old racist stereotypes. People use it to describe when a Black person is seen as acting against their own community’s best interests just to get approval, money, or acceptance from outsiders (usually white people).

It’s similar to calling someone a sellout — but harsher, because it ties back to racist caricatures used to mock Black people during slavery and Jim Crow.

Too often, we see people who are quick to tear down their own community just to get a pat on the back, a paycheck, or some approval from outsiders. That’s not strength — that’s betrayal.

When you put down your own people, ignore the struggles we face, or use stereotypes to get laughs or attention, you’re not helping anybody. You’re just feeding into the same systems that held us back in the first place.

Real power is lifting your people up, telling the truth about what we go through, and standing proud in who you are. Our ancestors didn’t survive slavery, Jim Crow, and everything else just for us to turn around and be the ones doing the tearing down.

How 76 Black Delegates Transformed a State in 1868

“'Africans sold their own people as slaves'” is a stock argument white Americans use when the subject of slavery comes up.

First, simply as an argument of fact it fails:

Africa was not a country. Africans were not selling 'their own', they were selling their enemies, just as the Greeks and Romans once did. Africa, then as now, was made up of different countries. They were no more selling 'their own' than, say, 'Europeans were killing 'their own' during the Holocaust.

And it overlooks a few other things:

A. Most African countries did not sell slaves and some even fought against it. But because Europeans back then could control the supply of guns there was little Africans could do to stop it.

B. The Transatlantic slave trade was on a much greater scale than anything the Africans or anyone else ever did in the history of slavery. Countries were destroyed and millions died. Over 12 million were sold in less than 400 years, something so huge that it changed the genetic map of the world.

C. The Transatlantic slave trade was racist. The African slave trade, for all of its other ills, was not that. Neither was the Greek and Roman slave trade. So slavery in places like Haiti, Barbados and America was much more cruel.

[Second] As a moral argument it fails too:

It uses what I call the Arab Trader argument: it excuses an evil of one’s own past by finding the same sort of evil done by others. 'Whites sold slaves, but Africans and Arab traders did too!' Which, morally speaking, is at the same level as an eight-year-old saying, 'He did it too! when caught doing something bad. We do not accept this argument from eight-year-olds, nor from bank robbers or wife beaters. 'Africans did it too!' is no better.

But it is as a derailing argument that it comes into its own:

1. Its main purpose is to draw attention away from what whites did by turning the tables. That part of their past makes white Americans uncomfortable. But instead of facing up to it, they have built up defences against it:

1. Africans sold their own people as slaves.

2. Africans are still selling slaves.

3. Arab traders sold slaves too.

4. Slavery goes back thousands of years.

5. All races have practised slavery.

6. Whites stopped slavery.

7. My family never owned slaves.

8. That was Ancient History.

9. You are living in the past.

10. Get over it!

11. It was the times.

12. Slavery did not make economic sense.

13. Whites got to where they are by their own hard work

14. Blacks are better off in America than in Africa

15. Africans were savages.

And on and on.

On this day, November 12th, in Black Ourstory

In 1964, the Deacons for Defense and Justice were celebrated. This was an armed African American self-defense group founded in the mill town of Jonesboro, Louisiana, during the 20th-century American Civil Rights era.

It is intended to protect civil rights activists and their families. They are threatened by white vigilantes and discriminatory treatment by police under Jim Crow laws. On the day of Malcolm X's assassination (in 1965), the first affiliated chapter was founded in Bogalusa, Louisiana, followed by 20 other chapters in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama. The Bogalusa chapter gained national attention during the summer of 1965 in its violent struggles with the Ku Klux Klan.

Blacks were harassed and attacked by white Klan vigilantes in the mill town of Jonesboro, Louisiana, in 1964, including torching five churches, a Masonic Hall, and a Baptist center. Given these threats, Earnest "Chilly Willy" Thomas and Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick founded the Deacons for Defense to protect civil rights workers, their families, and the Black community. Most Deacons were veterans of the Korean War and World War II.

The Deacons had relationships with other civil rights groups that practiced nonviolence. Such support by the Deacons allowed the NAACP and CORE to observe their traditional parameters of peace. The Deacons protected CORE leader James Farmer Jr. in 1965. Farmer arrived in Bogalusa to aid in desegregation and required the protection of the Deacons. They ensured his safety upon his arrival at the New Orleans airport and provided security while Farmer spoke and marched at desegregation events. The Deacons attracted media attention for protecting Charles Evers' desegregation campaign in Natchez, Mississippi.

Attention was given to them because, unlike similar groups that had come before, the Deacons did not hide their names from the media. This, coupled with their use of armed self-defense and modest beginnings, made them heroes in harassing Black communities. By 1968, the Deacons' activities were declining following the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the entry of blacks into politics in the South, and the rise of the Black Power movement. Blacks worked to gain greater control over political and economic activities in their communities.

AFRICAN ORIGIN OF CAESAREAN SECTION

Caesarean sections were performed in Africa long before they were standardized across the world. They were invented in Africa long before Europe, and the rest of the world fully mastered how to conduct them (Young, 1944). The procedure is said to have been started since time immemorial. When a baby could not be delivered vaginally, midwives and surgeons would turn to C-sections in order to deliver the baby safely and alive. In areas around Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria, midwives and surgeons would perform this procedure (Davies, 1959).

When a baby could not be delivered vaginally, the midwives and surgeons would sedate the mother in labour with a lot of banana wine. A knife would be sterilized using heat, while the mother would be tied to the bed for her safety. An incision would be made quickly by a team, and the quickness was to ensure that there would be no excessive loss of blood, and also that other organs would not be cut. A combination of sterilized knives and sedation would make the experience less painful for the mother (Felkin, 1884). During these times, women rarely developed infections because antiseptic tinctures and salves were used to clean the area and stitches were applied. Shock and excessive blood loss were uncommon. Uganda, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) were the countries where this was most practised. In Uganda, C-sections were normally performed by a team of male healers, but in Tanzania and the DRC, they were typically done by female midwives (Davies, 1959).

It was in the Ugandan kingdom of Bunyoro that this procedure was most documented. The procedure was performed so well that Robert W. Felkin, a Scottish medical anthropologist, documented all of this in the book The Development of Scientific Medicine in the African Kingdom of Bunyoro Kitara. He witnessed the procedure in 1879 and was captivated by it. What got his attention was that back in Europe, a C-section was considered to be an option only to be used in the most desperate situations. At this time, "nearly half of European and US women died in childbirth, and nearly 100% of European women died if a C-section was performed" (Felkin, 1884).

References

Felkin, R. W. (1884). Notes on Labour in Central Africa. Edinburgh Medical Journal.

Young, J. H. (1944). Cesarean Section: The History and Development of the Operation From Early Times. H.K. Lewis, London.