No other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil.

That is one thing that other immigrant groups haven't had to face.

The other thing is that the color became a stigma.

Americans decided to make the Negroes color a stigma.

America freed the slaves in 1863 through the emancipation proclamation of Abraham Lincoln.

They gave the slaves no land or nothing in reality, and as a matter of fact, to get started on.

At the same time, America was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest,

which meant that there was a willingness to give the white peasants from Europe an economic base.

And yet it refused to give its black peasants from Africa who came here involuntarily in chains

and had worked free for 244 years in a kind of economic base.

And so emancipation for the Negro was really freedom to hunger.

It was freedom to the winds and rains of heaven.

It was freedom without food to eat a land to cultivate,

and therefore it was freedom and famine at the same time.

And when white Americans tell the Negro to lift themselves by their own bootstraps,

they don't look over the legacy of slavery and segregation.

I believe we ought to do all we can and seek to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps.

But it's a cruel gesture to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps

and many Negroes by the thousands and millions have been left bootless as a result of all of these years of oppression

and as a result of a society that deliberately made his color a stigma and something worthless.

Betches media presents.

Donald Trump was a stain on our country.

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