Out In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program-Eight- A Home Of One's Own

 

Lettie Morse had been sitting on the rim of the world.  Lettie , all of eighteen, and sweet child- mother of three young children (ages, if you can believe this, and you will once the facts become known, two girls four and three and a boy, one) was just that moment sheltered against the rawness of life, if just for that moment, over at that Sally ‘s Harbor Lights safe house (Salvation Army for those not in need of their facilities and only familiar with their operations at supermarkets and the like ringing bells and seeking dollars at Christmas) in the deep South End section of  Boston over by Blackstone Park.  And like all such citizens caught up on the rim of the world Lettie had a story, and a dream too. Not a long story, not at eighteen, and not when one is on the rim of the world when just getting by from one day to the next, hell, just one step in front of you to the next, took up your hours, and not the stuff of story, or parable either.                  

See Lettie, sweet child-mother Lettie, considered herself, and was considered by friend and family alike to be, how to put it kindly, an ugly duckling (although motherhood became her as she held forth black Madonna-like in facing that one step after the next day), the runt of the litter of seven children when Vernon and Eleanor Morse (yes, named after the former First Lady, Mrs. Roosevelt, for her kindnesses toward  the Negro people) when they had come up from Clarksville down in the Mississippi delta after hearing that Boston was the “land of milk and honey” and had landed smack dab in the recently constructed Columbia Point Housing Project over by the waters of Dorchester Bay. As so whether that was a wise or foolish decision (probably wise given hellhole Mister James Crow Mississippi goddam) the “projects” was where Lettie came of age, came of age fast, too fast.     

She would not speak of her troubles adjusting, adjusting as best she could, to northern urban life, bunched up in a shared small corner room with two other pretty sisters slightly older, of the slow heavy as molasses drawl she inherited from her maternal grandmother and which drew howls of laughter at the junior high school that serviced the projects, or of the cruel ugly duckling taunts from boys (and a wayward girl or two). Like a lot of not pretty girls (and maybe pretty girls too but that is best left for another story, today we are on the rim of the world with black Madonna Lettie) she substituted being sexually available to the boys for anything else she might have felt. And they, as boys will, when the midnight whistle blows and they hear of some “easy piece” had their way with her, and then left her, left her that first time, well not exactly empty- handed, but with child, one of them anyway, and hence Christine .

Things went along okay for a while in that “projects”  Morse home, she making room for her baby in her shared room, but Lettie, got a little restless as young girls will, and a boy, a not from the projects boy, took an interest in her. What she did not know was that he was selling reefer like crazy to the kids over near Uphams Corner (a school nearby the central point) and eventually got busted, busted flat and sent away to reform school for a while. However, not leaving her empty-handed and thus Shana. That episode broke the camel’s back in the Morse household as fragile as it was. Lettie was unceremoniously told to pack her bags and she did. And so with two small children, no money, no home and no prospects she hit the streets, the mean streets. Lettie said to tell you no matter how bad things get, no matter how rough you think life is stay away from Mister’s streets, from his trick streets, from his walking daddy hustler’s streets, from his pimp daddy streets. She learned that lesson the hard way although she was not left empty-handed and hence Robert, father unknown, maybe unknowable.

So things kind of went downhill from there for a while, as Lettie tried to keep her little family together, tried to get off the streets, tried to get off the rim of the world, and so she landed at the Sally’s  safe house. She would stay there as long as it took for that promised apartment in the Orchard Park Housing Authority to come through. And that thought, the thought of  getting off the rim of the world, that thought of fixing up a home, a home to keep her children safe, a home of her own kept her focused… 

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On the Rim of the World
Notes: words and music by Malvina Reynolds; copyright 1973 Schroder Music Company, renewed 2001.


She inches along on the rim of the world,
Always about to go over,
How she can manage I never will know,
To get from one day to the other.
Scrounging a buck or a bed
Or the share of a roof for her head,
This nobody's child, this precarious girl,
Who lives on the rim of the world.

She looks like a princess in somebody's rags,
She dreams of a world without danger,
Climbing the stairs to a room of her own
With someone who isn't a stranger.
But now she eats what she can,
And accepts what there is for a man,
This nobody's child, this precarious girl,
Who lives on the rim of the world.

She inches along on the rim of the world,
Always about to go over,
How she can manage I never will know,
To get from one day to the other.
Scrounging a buck or a bed
Or the share of a roof for her head,
This nobody's child, this precarious girl,
Who lives on the rim of the world.


Malvina Reynolds songbook(s) in which the music to this song appears:---- The Malvina Reynolds Songbook

Malvina Reynolds recording(s) on which this song is performed:
---- Held Over---- Ear to the Ground

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 The Ten Point Program

 

The original "Ten Point Program" from October, 1966 was as follows:^[39][40]

 

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.

We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.

We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.

We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.

7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.

8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.