E Pluribus Unum

Published on September 21, 2025 at 4:20 PM

One from many…

We began our journey in chains

The transition from physical

To psychological took decades

The heart was broken long before the mind

Forced down a pathway to annihilation

Breadcrumbs were left so that we could find

our way back home… to self-

Generations of losing battles

And winning wars,

The conception of the

American ideology destroyed,

sensibilities

We began our journey in chains

“Just as the ancestors of the American Negro came from no single region, so he was of no single tribe or physical type… There was no such thing as one African “race”. Slave ships bound for American carries a variety of genetic stocks, from the tallish, dark skinned Ashanti to the lighter and shorter Bantu.” (Quarles, 1996). One from many.

From the barbarism of slavery came the Black American race, culture, creed, and value system. It was put together, brick by brick, in opposition to the dehumanization and caricaturization of many groups of people who were pigeonholed into an ethnic group to become an admixture of phenotypical greatness. A new race. E Pluribus Unum.

“The American Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sighting this American world, —a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.” (Dubois, 1903)

Long before

The tired and poor,

Those huddled masses;

The wretched and refuse

Of teeming shores

Were given the chance

To carve out their piece

Of the American pie

The Black American had been solidified

As a race of people.

Suffering for centuries to maintain on the American terrain, Inundated with the ideology of the plantation, the former slave came into the arms of Jim Crow and his northern brother James Dandy. There was no shortage of racist practices, the region in which monster they’d have to grapple with. Throughout the centuries of suffering Black Americans have created salves like the songs of sorrow to heal the wounds of abuse from a society that is hostile to its existence.

“Oh, the stars in the elements are falling

And the moon drips away into blood,

And the ransomed if the Lord are returning to God

Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Singing songs of sorrow, the sorrow song singers sang about a freedom they hadn’t yet experienced. From the creative ingenuity of the sorrow song came sorrow artistry; and the sorrowful artist, whose artistic expression ushered in a renaissance that opened the doorway to therapeutic expressionism. Those doors have never been closed, they have remained open and free to walk through with all the encumbrances of previous eras and epochs but also with the chains that we have began our journey in.

“The contributions of the American Negro to art are representative because they come from the hearts of the masses of people held together by like yearnings and stirred by the same causes.”

Way down yonder

Along the path that leads

To freedom from despair,

there sits at the intersection

Shame and fear-

Shame from being held hostage

In chains,

Whipped and abused

Fear of a potential

To reappropriate what it means

To be society’s muse

“He has in superlative measure that fire and light which, coming from within, bathes his whole world, colors his images and impels him to expression. The Negro is a poet by birth.” (Barnes, 1923)

From many come one,

Fixtures of the American plantation

Transplanted and uprooted-

Transformed.

Terraforming the landscape

to produce

Anew

Beyond the chains

Forged by pain

The contemporary Black being

E Pluribus Unum

Quarles, B. (1996). Negro in the making of America: Third Edition Revised, Updated, and Expanded. Simon and Schuster.

E Pluribus Unum

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