Chapter 2

Since the end of slavery in the 1860s and up to now, there have been eerie data points related
to Black Americans achieving equality in the United States. While it seems no one was paying attention,
every fifty years since slavery ended, crucial milestones have occurred. The parallels between both of
the sixties decades (the 1860s and 1960s) are eerily behooving. In both those decades, exceptional
citizens put their lives on the line for the sole purpose of preserving the cultural norms and values
intended by our forefathers (including Abraham Lincoln, the more than two hundred thousand Union
soldiers in the 1860s, Martin Luther King, the Kennedy brothers, and so many more freedom fighters in
the 1960s). As a result, significant positive outcomes for Black Americans were yielded almost exactly
fifty years after the sixties decades. Slavery was legitimately ended in our country in the 1860s, and
voting rights, civil rights, and more for Black Americans were achieved in the 1960s. In what I refer to as
the tens decades (1910s and 2010s), Black American citizens achieved major milestones that were
directly linked to the freedoms provided from the 1860s and the 1960s. Fifty years after slavery ended in
the 1860s, in the 1910s, freed slaves lived and thrived in a city called Greenwood, Oklahoma, founded
by a Black American, O. W. Gurley. The success of this city of Black American citizens was so exceptional
that the city became internationally known as Black Wall Street. Then, fifty years after the 1960s, in the
2010s, the citizens of the United States of America elected Barack Obama as the first Black American
president of the United States.”