I made the above political grid at the end of 2022. That was approximately 5,000 years ago. It seems. I can’t possibly chronicle all of the outrages and obscenities that have occurred since. I can’t and don’t want to because to remember them all would probably render me catatonic. So, let’s revisit the grid and talk about where we are now.
NOTE: I know radical means getting back to the root. That is not how I’m employing the word. Radical for this exercise is a stand in for a person who wants to replace/destroy key elements of traditional American thought and practice. For the Left, that means getting rid of the Constitution and natural law. For the Right, it means atomizing communities to the individual. If you’re looking for conservative on this grid, well, you’re gonna have to tell me what one is in 2024.
Top Left Quadrant
Keep in mind, this is a political grid. Politically speaking radical ideas don’t gain much traction with American blacks outside of our intellectual and elite classes. In the late 1800s A.M.E. Bishop, Henry McNeal Turner started a drive for black emigration to Africa. He was serious about it. He expanded the A.M.E. church into western and southern Africa in a big way. He visited Liberia and South Africa personally. The pastors he appointed and the churches they started took root and remain in Africa to this day. Bishop Turner, though lost to history now, was enormously popular and influential for many decades prior to and after the Civil War. He was easily the equal of more familiar men such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, and Frederick Douglass. Turner was eloquent (the “Negro [Charles] Spurgeon”) 1and powerful but his back to Africa fervor was laughed out of town by American blacks. Washington and DuBois were united in shouting down Turner’s emigration ideas.
Turner’s call for 100,000 American blacks to emigrate to Africa was not heeded. Of the attempted $125,000 he solicited from blacks to buy ships to carry them back to the Mother Land, only $1,000 was raised. Washington joked, “I feel very sure if you could get Bishop Turner . . . to go to the Congo and settle there that you would have little trouble in getting the remainder to follow.” 2
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