
Black History Month is not just about Afrikans in Amerikkka. It’s about Afrikans on an international level. So therefore, Black History Month extends to every month and day of the year.

The situation for the homeless in Port au Prince is so grim that a 10-minute rain storm with high winds on Sept. 24 left at least five people dead, hundreds injured and thousands of shelters – tents, tarps and sheets – destroyed.

It is amazing that no one says a word on the fact that Haiti was the first country where 400,000 Africans, enslaved and brought to this land by Europeans, rebelled against 30,000 white owners of sugarcane and coffee plantations and succeeded in making the first great social revolution in our hemisphere.

Time is of the essence in Haiti, yet the international response has been painfully, tragically slow. Would this pace of rescue – where every minute counts in digging people out of the wreckage – have been the case if the earthquake victims were European?

In many ways, Black August, at least in the West, begins in Haiti. It is the Blackest August possible — revolution and resultant liberation from bondage. From its earliest days, Haiti was declared an asylum for escaped slaves, and a place of refuge for any person of African or American Indian descent.