“In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free…” — Abraham Lincoln.
While the accounts of why President Lincoln freed the slaves may differ depending on what historian you believe, the point is his words imply that he was attempting to put America on the right path to ensuring that all who chose to live and die here would do it as a free man or woman.
Who would have believed that in 2017 America and what she has become would be shaken to the core after electing a president who saw no value in the human race? He groped women and joked about it as if it were normal. He mocked a disabled in public as if it were normal.
In spite of it all, many Americans thought that by electing Donald Trump they had elected a president that would begin to make America great again by putting an end to providing permanent homes to immigrants whose children were born in America.
They thought he would make America again by selling the same old trickle-down economics to poor and working-class people, failing to realize that many of the same ones who voted for Trump would be impacted the most. This view of what America has been reignited because we have simply forgotten the lessons of the past.
On Monday, Jan. 1, 2018, at 10 a.m., the St. Petersburg Branch NAACP will host its annual Emancipation Proclamation Service at Gethsemane Missionary Baptist Church, 2850 12th Ave. S. This year’s celebration is extremely important because we must begin on Jan. 1 to organize around a strategy that will send many of the ineffective and compromised politicians home in 2018 and then turn right around and ensure that America will have an opportunity to re-chart a course of inclusion by ensuring that Donald Trump is a one-term president.
Maria Scruggs
