Posted on 05/16/2002 4:26:57 PM PDT by IncPen
SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) - Poet and author Maya Angelou has ended a decade-long stalemate over a slavery monument by adding a single line to her quotation describing the brutal conditions aboard slave ships.
The amended inscription for the monument, a bronze statue of a black family with broken chains at their feet, won unanimous approval from the Savannah City Council on Thursday.
The wording was one of the final hurdles for black leaders who plan to unveil the monument July 27 on Savannah's cobblestone riverfront, where the first slaves came into Georgia.
Though city officials approved the statue last year, Mayor Floyd Adams and others cringed at black leaders' insistence on using the graphic quote by Angelou.
The quote reads: ``We were stolen, sold and bought together from the African continent. We got on the slave ships together. We lay back to belly in the holds of the slave ships in each others' excrement and urine together, sometimes died together, and our lifeless bodies thrown overboard together.''
In a January letter to the monument's planning committee, Angelou proposed an upbeat coda: "Today, we are standing up together, with faith and even some joy ..."
Some city officials had worried that the quote might be too graphic for public display on the riverfront, one of the most popular tourist spots in Savannah. Black leaders say the stalemate over the quotation slowed their ability to raise money for the monument, which will cost up to $750,000.
``It's extremely important because now those who have not been contributing money and were worried the city might renege on the location know these hurdles have been removed,'' said the Rev. Thurmond N. Tillman, one of the monument's boosters.
Angelou, author of ``I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings,'' said last year she understood why city officials were hesitant to approve her quotation.
``The picture of it, it's so horrible. And yet if we can see how horrible it is, then we might treat each other a little nicer,'' she told The Associated Press in February 2001.
City Alderman David Jones, who had previously asked for an uplifting sentence to end the quote, praised Angelou ``for taking her time out ... to make the changes we asked for.''
Angelou's letter offered the monument's organizers permission to use the revised quote ``under the condition that neither the quote nor my name be used for any purpose other than to appear on the monument.''
The passage has never appeared in published form, but Angelou has said that she's used it often in lectures.
05/16/02 17:04 EDT
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As for Ms. Angelou...I've heard better poetry from my alcoholic bil and I'm not trying to find something cute to say..I'm serious!
In a January letter to the monument's planning committee, Angelou proposed an upbeat coda: "Today, we are standing up together, with faith and even some joy ..."
"For we know that, talentless though we are, we have parlayed the guilt of the Wite Fokes into a lucrative career. Now, instead of being laughed off stages in Harlem, I can appear on talk shows and write endless tomes of politically correct gibberish. All at a profit. Eat excrement, Stupid Wite Fokes."
Oh, man! You are mired in an obsolete esthetic. A soul as large as Maya's can't be constrained by artifices like meter and scansion. Her spirit must be free to soar with majesty, to unleash the rainbow of her liberating words: "excrement, urine, buttholes, puke, phlegm." Get with it, Daddy-O! You must be in Squaresville.
Iambic pentameter is for Oreo boot lickers! < /sarcasm >
"We were stolen, sold and bought together from the African continent. Betrayed by our own kind, whose pockets were filled with the gold & silver given them by slave traders. They watched us being dragged away, yet never once did they feel any remorse for selling their brothers & sisters off. We got on the slave ships together. We lay back to belly in the holds of the slave ships in each others' excrement and urine together, sometimes died together, and our lifeless bodies thrown overboard together. Those of us unlucky enough to survive were taken hostage not only by the white man, but by wealthy, free blacks who treated us as badly as their white counterparts. What hell was this, that the black man wrought upon himself? What hell was this, that our fellow Africans willingly threw their kin into the dregs of slavery? Behold the power of greed! Our only hope is that the betrayers will one day have to pay reparations for their evil ways. Reparations! Yes! Reparations! If not on this earth, than in the afterlife!"
The protests got a pass because they didn't get scrutiny.
Keep the agitated masses stupid and you can control the mutiny.
Mostly the Kwanzaa crowd.
Has about the same amount of legitimacy, IMHO.
There is an historic marker already in place concerning the issue. One wonders if any of the people involved in this have ever read it.
Huh? What? Can't be. Life is so terrible here for blacks that most, just as soon as they can afford to, must return to Africa. No? Don't they want to get even with the black guys who captured and sold their ancestors?
...from other BLACK tribes. furthermore, sugarpants, nearly ALL races were enslaved at some point in history....i am willing to bet, my barbaric german ancestors were at some time enslaved by the romans. get over it, racist.
I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.
One and God make a majority.
The soul that is within me no man can degrade.
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
When men sow the wind it is rational to expect that they will reap the whirlwind.
Frederick Douglass
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