NARRATIVE: General Petition
A “We the People” Body Politic
“The rich and the poor meet together: the Lord is the maker of them all.” — Proverbs 22:2
Commemorating the 62nd Anniversary of the 1963 “I Have a Dream” Prophecy
Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C.
In this Season of the 250th Anniversary of the 1776 Birth of the United States of America
This Memorandum of Fellowship is not a legal contract, but a sacred civic declaration—reaffirming our right to land, dignity, and the pursuit of happiness, i.e., property, real estate, and intellectual property, as envisioned in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the 1862 Homestead Act signed by President Abraham Lincoln #16.
President Lincoln’s vision included land for freed slaves and their descendants, yet, in 1862, they/we were left behind.
Yet, unlike the European immigrants huddled in oppressive Eastern urban centers—equipped with tools, training, and networks to go and occupy the opened federal lands—the “naked,” landless American Africans were naturally left behind, being too ill-equipped to stake a claim, as well as lacking the tools to cultivate it. That injustice echoes into the present day!
The American African Non-Immigration Experience
In this sacred season marking the 250th birth year of the United States—this Union Republic of sovereign States—we acknowledge the present and growing domestic circumstances that now threaten the nation’s continued existence. Chief among these national security crises is the visible and spiritually indicting manifestation of homelessness.
This crisis strikes a particularly grievous chord when viewed through the lens of the American African experience—that is, U.S.-federalized citizens, who hold an exclusive, superseding citizenship status under the direct jurisdiction of the President and the United States military. It was upon the whipped backs of their chattel-enslaved ancestors that this nation—falsely imagined by many as merely a “nation of immigrants under God”—was built, with the involuntary, that is, forced assistance of their unpaid labor.
And yet, after 405 years of unrequited injustice under both British colonial and U.S. constitutional regimes, American Africans—despite being fully legal citizens on paper—are still not practically recognized as such, by the intent and spirit of Section 1 of the 1866 Civil Rights Act—the legislative progenitor of the exclusive birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment.
That provision established, for the first time in U.S. history, formal citizenship documentation—a constitutional “certificate”—specifically for the U.S. military-liberated chattel slaves and the Freemen (non-enslaved American Africans), and for their descendants forever, so long as this “nation under God shall not perish from the earth.”
These descendants were to enjoy the full rights of U.S. citizenship, including “equal justice under the law” and “equal protection under the law, as is enjoyed by white citizens.”
Such is the essence of what the late young prophet, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., proclaimed in his 1963 I Have a Dream prophecy:
“There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.”
“We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.”
“It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.
Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.”
NOW is the time to cash that Promissory Note—for them, for ourselves, and as in the original, Biblical Exodus I, when the ancient Hebrew-Israelites exited the Egyptian house of bondage, we take with us a mixed multitude of fellow American citizens who still suffer under the weight of that long-deferred justice.
The American African Homelessness
Of all these injustices, homelessness stands as the most significant and most damning evidence of systemic betrayal. Though comprising only 11–13% of the general U.S. population, we constitute over 60% of the nation’s homeless.
In Los Angeles City and County, where we comprise just 8–9% of the population, we account for over 40% of the unhoused individuals. In contrast, on Skid Row, the nation’s epicenter of chronic homelessness, over 90% are Black males, followed by Black females.
Our claim to federal land is rooted primarily in the 1862 Homestead Act, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, who envisioned these lands opening to all citizens, but particularly had in mind the newly emancipated chattel slaves and Freemen, i.e., non enslaved American-Africans.
However, we have come full circle. Now, in this unfolding season of providential opportunity, emerging national conditions have made it possible—perhaps even inevitable—that Lincoln’s dream for us, the Posterity of the once-enslaved, can finally be realized.
We are the long-awaited generation of those who will finally overcome, for whom our ancestors prayed and wept.
We are the ones our ancestors cried out to “Ole Massa-GOD” to be birthed and mercifully brought forth—for such a time as this—that we may at last fulfill the unfinished hopes of our 16th President and lay claim to our rightful inheritance in peace, justice, and divine fellowship.