All Over the Place: Reparations – Part 2

By Michael H. Brownstein











1898, election day, Wilmington, North Carolina,
the business elite include all races, all ethnicities,
lawyers and doctors, teachers and store owners,
no color boundaries, no issues with racism –
the city an integrated government duly elected –
and then – black voters head to the voter’s booth,
are blocked by gun-wielding whites, forced to leave,
and for the first time in our nation’s history, a coup,
a government overthrown and then, and then, I stutter now,
the shooting began – the Massacre of 1898, murder,
mayhem – guns given freely to whites, guns denied to blacks,
a starship of racial equality ransacked in a moment of racism
and terror. Women ran with their children to hide in swamps,
sixty men, maybe three hundred, gunned down in the streets,
and a town predominantly black is no longer a town of hope,
but a place of rearrangement, white terror, a grossness.
Again I stutter. Many more in its aftermath were told to leave,
do not ever return, we have the guns, we are white, we can do this,
and they do – again and again and again. I do not know
if we can track down the doctors, lawyers, teachers, fathers,
storeowners, and journalists, but we need to – far too many
lost too much that day and in the days that followed.

Wealth within a black middle class was stolen by tyrants in white skins,

with no consequences. Two of the leaders became governors,
over a dozen more State or US senators, one a Superior Judge,
one more a member of President Wilson’s cabinet. I choke,
I lose my way, I can no longer stutter. The mob leaders prospered,
the black community – did not. The Insurrection of 1898 –
this is the reason for reparations, why it needs to be made now.

Copyright © 2020 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.