Wake Up! Our Call to Accountability Crashed into Our Lives Recently!

Exactly 219 years ago this August, a few thousand Africans who had been stolen from their lands and enslaved by the millions in the French West Indies colony of St. Domingue--today known as Haiti--launched a 12-year revolution that resulted in the second free republic in the western hemisphere and the first one governed by Africans. Beyond that significance, this revolution, let by a brilliant military strategist--Toussaint Louverture, a former Creole slave--who, with his lieutenants-- brought the French "kingdom" headed by Napoleon Bonaparte to its knees.

That's not all! The revolution by a few thousand slaves in St. Domingue also triggered two of the most critically defining moments in United States history--The Louisiana Purchase and the Civil War. When these outmanned, outgunned Africans, aided by the French soliders' susceptibility to Yellow Fever, won their revolution, the victory ended Napoleon's drream of a French Empire in the western world, west of the Mississippi River and made the fledgling United States, beginning about 1803 a land that extended literally from sea to shining sea.

When the new nation of Haiti became the first western republic run by Africans, it became the nightmare of slave holders in the southern US, and the focal argument of Northern abolitionists. That victory gave hope to millions of African brethren, enslaved in the United States. The pressure triggered the Civil War, which led to the Emancipation Proclamation, effective on Jan. 1, 1863 and all of the sterling strategies for freedom engineered by the brightest and the best descendants of Africa in world history. You know some of their names, but most of them you do not know. For example did you know that in 1897--just 34 years after the Emancipation Proclamation--John A. Lankford opened one of the first black-ownen arhitecural office in Washington, DC?
Did you know that in 1903, just 100 years after the United States expanded from sea to shining sea because of the revolution in what we now know as Haiti, Maggie Lena Walker became the first black woman bank president?

Let's face it! From the hard work of a Booker T. Washington, the scientific accompllishments of George Washington Carver, the successful exploits of a team of geniuses assembled by the great legal strategist Charles Hamilton Houston, all those accomplishments developed from a group of courageous Africans fighting for freedom on a island that has now become the poorest nation in the western hemisphere.

How does a nation fall from being the first republic ruled by descendants of Africa, the second free republic in the western hemisphere , the catalyst that fired the greatest nation in the world to unprecedented prominence to being the poorest nation in the western hemisphere? You see, no one wants to consider these questions now that Haiti has been racked with mind numbing devastation.

I see the devastation from a different perspective. I see it as the crashing death of a nation that lost its way, but more importantly, a nation to whom the United States has never said thanks.

You see, it's senseless to me that the United States bombed Europe into submission in World War II and then under the Marshall Plan rebuilt it and laid the foundation for the European Union that now wreaks havoc with our national economy. Where is the Haiti Touissaint Plan? So it's not enough to just find the bodies, feed the survivors, and try to get Haiti back to what it was. From the rubble of an earthquake, this nation must become the jewel of the western hemisphere it has always had the potential to become.

The United States owes the descendants of this great people a debt it's never paid, a debt that has been bearing interest for 219 years this August. Without the courageous Africans in Haiti there would have been no Louisiana Purchase. Without the Port of New Orleans, the United States could not have become the world's greatest maritime nation, replacing the United Kingdom as it sank into decline.

Wait a minute! Descenants of Africa, living in the United States, the best educated, the best trained, the most brilliant, the most blessed sons and daughters of the motherland in world history, you cannot escape your responsibilitiy. Here we live with a national economy approaching a trillion dollars annually. We cannot wrap ourselves in our $1,500 per outfit clothes and drive ourselves in our $50,000 cars, and live in our multi-million dollar mansions and believe we've done our part with checks for a paltry hundred dollars or so.

Now I am not saying that everyone should not give whatever they can afford. Give your dollars, five dollars, ten dollars, whatever you can. All of us must do that. Yet when you consider the historical role of those amazing, courageous brothers and sisters, who stood like a ragtag David confronting a well-armed Goliath and won, in opening the doors of our opportunities, we must do more!

Let me define specifically what I mean by more. Let's begin with this quote from Darrick Scruggs, writing for another website:

"We have far too many examples of our greatness for us to fail to see what we can accomplish if we set our minds to it and seize the many opportunities for greatness, success and abundance that exist for us in the world today. Between 1983 and 2001, the number of black households with net worth of $1 million or more increased 79 percent, from 61,000 households to 109,000. [Emphasis Mine]. These Black millionaires built their fortunes in large measure by owning their own businesses such as real estate, funeral homes, medical practices, construction, retail and service sector businesses. It is time for the African American community to begin to nurture more millionaires or at least financially stable, free people and far less prisoners. It's time to think ourselves out of our constriction."

I challenge 100,000 African American millionaires, or black millionaires, whatever designation you prefer, to organize a Haiti To the Top fund, and each give $100,000 to launch this fund. If my math is correct, that's $10 billion. Then let us go together our engineers, architects, urban planners, general contractors, social and political scients, educators, medical professionals as much of the educated and trained among ourselves we can muster. Let's build Haiti into the Caribbean pearl it once was and should have remained. The professionals sponsored by this fund must work alongside the experts financed by the United States government's Haiti Toussaint Plan.

Let's have no more dictators, no more feudal lords. No one senseless, greed-driven violence. Let's have no more hovels and shacks, no more narrow, muddy roads, no more stagnant water and no more children starving to death. Rather, let's build from the ruins of this devastation an entreprenurial Haiti, a solid economy that produces prosperity for its people, a vigilant nation seeking opportunity for greater and greater service.

Why should we do this? Because the United States and all of us--descendants of Africa-stand squarely today in the unwavering sights of God's judgment. In His word to those He positions as "watchmen," God says that when he speaks to an individual, a family, a people or a nation that they will die in their sins, and the watchmen do not speak to warn those confronting God's righteous judgment. The sinners shall die in their sins, but their blood with be assigned to the silent watchmen.

In his paper--The Haitian Revolution and the Forging of America, Jim Thomson described the wealth and potential of St. Domingue: " In 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, St. Domingue was the world's most prosperous colony. It was 'an integral part of the economic life of the age, the greatest colony in the world, pride of France, and the envy of every other imperialist nation." Its plantaiton economy produced an abundance of crops, of which sugar was by far the most important. At its peak, St. Domingue produced more sugar than all the British Caribbean islands put together and weas responsible for forty percent of the overseas trade of France. The entire economic structure of St. Domingue rested on the backs of a population denied any participatoin in the colony's prosperity--the most than one-half millin black slaves who were raided from their homelands in Africa and brought in slave ships to the New World to fill an ever-expanding demand for labor and profits."

In Part 3 of this series, I will give you a detailed look at the interconnecting events that shaped the pivotal role Haiti played in US history, both regarding the Louisana Purchase and the Civil War. In Part 4, I will view this history frm the perspective of Bible prophecy and show you, from the pages of your Bible and the historical records why these events occurred when they did. I will also show what they mean to us today.

Stay tuned..