Modern Day Slavery

In the March 26, 07 issue of People there is a editoral entitled The Last Slaves of Mississippi, ironically with a question mark (as in saying is this for real) According to the Walls Family it is real and they were held in peonage (a modern relic of slavery) up until the early 1960s in Gillsburg Miss. only finding freedom when Mae Walls (Miller) ran away after refusing to clean a house of a another white family in Kentwood La.
History teaches us that slavery was abolished in 1865, why were these people held in bondage for almost 50 years? I shrudder at the fact that they were living off of whatever they could find, beaten and the woman were raped, forced to pick cotton and clean the homes of the white family that kept them in bondage and were also passed along to other white families.

According to the article peonage is an illegal practice and nobody knew of the nightmare that the Walls family lived until Mae Miller told her story to her family in 2001. You may ask how could they not know. Simply they were not allowed to listen to radio nor watch TV and none of them could read. You can contribute that to having no radio, electricity nor phone and they were forbidden to visit family or go into town and church.

My people, we need to educate ourselves, we are being pacified with little to nothing that this society has given us. After reading this I learned that I take a lot for granted and the things that are happening today that we are taking a stand and fighting for doesn't compare to what this family lived through, wake up and take account for the things that we have access to in this society that can free our minds from the "enslavement" that we are still trapped in. Events are happening right before our eyes and we are being blindsided by the N, B and H-Word and Don Imus issues. Recent events like the Jena Six and the Walls family as well as others leads me to believe that although it may seem that we have gained altitude in the past 142 years, the "airplane" has barely skimmed off the ground.