The West Oakland Residential Community Leaders will com­memorate the first day of our ar­rival from Africa by slaveship in 1619 till today, when the country is debating Reparations.

We will commemorate the “Afro-Redemption Day”, which represents the 400 year time span since the 1619 “importation” of the North American Negro at Jamestown Landing, Virginia, as America’s most important “cargo”.

The participants and speakers: Barrister Leo Bazile, Keynote Speaker; Babas Sidney Coul­ter, Ben Tucker, Loove Moore, Love-at-the-Lake, Zeff Amen, Mazee, and many others.

This year, 2019, is the span of an era that could possibly lead to a happy resolution of centuries-old political and social contradic­tions. And this observance is not only beneficial to African Ameri­cans, but to all American.

According to the old Negro Spiritual “Trouble Don’t Last Al­ways,” the time for the recovery of our lost value is now at hand.

Historically and politically, a celebration at this time would be premature. Our situation is analogous to Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Mountaintop” meta­phor, of seeing the promised land and of knowing that we are almost there.

We must have an internal transformation and a spirit of atonement for this commemo­ration to be “Redemptive” for all Americans. So let us resolve right now, that before we touch that “Black Reparations Benefits Card”, that first we knock off the dirt from the “Ages of our Ad­versities.”

References: “The Jamestown Landing and the First Twenty and odd Negroes;.” “Isabell and Antoney and their childe baptized;” “The Kingdom of Ndongo (Angola) and from whence Nzinga was Queen”; “The Jamestown Landing was as James C. Ballagh said, the result of a deliberate commer­cial design;” “Important as the Jamestown Landing was, it was only an episode in a larger drama that continued for almost 400 years and cost the lives of some 40 million Africans.”

This event will be held Sat., Aug. 24, 2019, at the Califor­nia Hotel, 3501 San Pablo Ave., Oakland, Ca., 12 noon to 4:30 p.m. For more information call (510)350-6210.

Kokavulu Lumukanda, Senior Resident Leader WORCL

Posts by Kokavulu Lumukanda, Senior Resident Leader WORCL