Pros And Cons Of Ebony

Which Way Black America? Separation, Liberation, or Integration

This article was published in Ebony in August in the year of 1970 by John H Johnson. Johnson was born January 19,1918 and he passed away at the age of 87 on August 8,2005. He first started his own publishing company called Johnson Publishing Company and later created Ebony and Jet magazine. He became so wealthy that he was the first African American on the Forbes 400. (TheFamousPeople.com 2017) He took his situation which was struggling and he promised himself he would succeed and that is exactly what he did. This goes to show that just because you are African American you can go pass the limit that whites have for you. In this edition of Ebony there were three main readings:

With liberation we are free to act as a race although we are limited to just how much we can act on things. For example, the situation with the NFL players taking a knee during the anthem, they are doing this as a result of white supremacy and it has caused a major uproar. This is our way in standing up for those that are being killed such as Trayvon Martin (17), Eric Garner (43), Michael Brown (18) and DeAunta Terrel Farrow (12) just to name a few. (Chan 2014) This is one of the cons in choosing liberation because with our since of freedom we are not at a pace where we can act on freedom of speech or being fully free to walk down the street without worrying about if you are going to come home. I was scrolling through Instagram one day and I came across a post on Nicey Nash’s page with Colin Kaepernick and he had a shirt with the saying, “We march, y’all mad. We sit down, y’all mad. We speak up, y’all mad. We die, y’all silent.” (Nash 2017) When I read the shirt, I had to sit back and process what was on the shirt. This saying hit home because it was so real and true from the 60s to now we see that marching worked for a brief moment then we tried to sit/ take a knee for the anthem, we have even tried speaking up and there is always backlash towards us. Then the moment we are killed nothing is ever said and no justice is served because this is what they want. To see us dead and until we can learn to talk and not bring guns into the picture we won’t even be able to stay liberated. This is also why we cannot integrate because we try and take a stand for what we believe in and whites down our situations but if the roles were reversed we would be wrong for not standing behind them and supporting their decisions. So, know that we have talked about why liberation is the best out of the three let’s talk a little about