The 11th Plague of Egypt Overwhelms Detroit and Chicago

Black migrants from the south borrowed Old Testament stories to describe their quest for freedom; 2013 Chicago and Detroit represent the culmination of this mythical march northward

With news that the good Rev. Jesse Jackson has called upon Homeland Security to patrol the war-torn streets of black Chicago, it’s important to look back at the “Holy” (in hindsight, ‘unholy’) migration of black people to Chicago, which had Biblical undertones.

Allan H. Spear’s Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto 1890- 1920 is considered one of the seminal books on “The Great Migration” to the Windy City. Important to note that in 1890, Chicago had a population of one million people; only 14, 000 (or 1.1 percent) were black; by 1920, Chicago had a population of 2.7 million people, of which only 109,000 (or 4.1 percent) were black.

Those black people, who now represent the majority population of Chicago (33 percent) are the descendants of a Biblical migration, with Spear writing:

The early migrants had only vague notions of what they might expect at their destinations, and they often headed north with visions of fantastic wages and unbounded liberty. Moreover as the image of the North filtered south through the promises of agents, the glowing letters of friends, and the appeal of the Negro press [Chicago Defender], it took on a mythical quality that gave to the migration an almost religions significance. The rhetoric of the migration was highly charged with biblical imagery; the Flight out of Egypt; Bound for the Promised Land; Going into Canaan; Beulah Land. A party of migrants on their way from Mississippi to Chicago held solemn ceremonies when their train crossed the Ohio River; they stopped their watches, knelt down to pray, and sang the gospel hymn, “I Done Come out the Land of Egypt With the Good News.”

The lure of the Promised Land was particularly compelling for the younger generation. The emotions engendered by the exodus was closely linked to a growing Negro race consciousness. Despite the wide variety of individual motives, the migration developed a certain coherence; it grew out of the Negro people’s common historical experiences and common grievances. (p. 130 -131)

Well, “I Done Come out the Land of Egypt With the Bad News,” black residents of Chicago; you are threatening to completely destabilize one of the nation’s last remaining great cities.

Having already devastated Detroit with a plague conveniently left out of the Bible for the misery it can produce (black political rule), Chicago now is threatened with the same fate. Though black people don’t politically control Chicago, the ideology of Black-Run America (BRA) does, meaning that almost exclusive black violence found in Chicago can’t be properly addressed without pointing out that black people have created hellish conditions in the Second City.

In a city where 94 percent of gunmen who shot and wounded people didn’t get charged in 2012 (and stats show that overwhelmingly amount of people pulling the triggers of guns in Chicago are black; especially those who get caught), the streets run with blood in a manner far worse than any story from the Old Testament ['War on black youth': Former neighborhood resident reflects on violence that killed Hadiya Pendleton, shook city, Chicago Tribune, 2-1-13]:

Jameel Abdur-Rafia came to Harsh Park on Thursday to think about the meaning of it all.

He parked his SUV — a Honda Pilot with an "Eracism" bumper sticker — then walked into the little park and stood alone.

He looked around. The orange slides. The swing set. The metal canopy where Hadiya Pendleton and her friends had sought shelter from Tuesday's rain.

"Another little baby gone," he said when I approached.

He didn't know Hadiya or her family. Neither apparently did the few others who trickled past in the early afternoon, two days after Hadiya, who was 15, was shot in the back by a killer as yet uncaught.

Synira Allen, who lives a few blocks south, tucked a card behind the elephant. She was nudged toward the park, she said, by "a sense of urgency."

"It seems like a war on black youth in Chicago."

The war isn't new, and you could argue that it's not really worse than ever; it only feels that way lately. Allen, who remembers the organized gangs that ruled when she was in high school in the late 1980s, isn't sure it's worse or that Chicago is unique.

"This is going on in every urban city in America," she said. "Chicago's just being highlighted."

But Abdur-Rafia thinks some things have gotten worse since he was growing up not far away in the Clarence Darrow Homes, now demolished.

Over here on Oakenwald Avenue, he said, things were always different.

"This was always the nice part of the neighborhood."

Standing in the park, named after an African-American librarian, he looked up the street, at the mix of houses, brick and stone, mostly in good shape. "The dramas were a little bit west."

When the drama leaked onto this street Tuesday, taking another child's life, devastating another family, shaking the city deeper, the familiar cry rose: Why? What to do?

On Thursday, the mayor announced that 200 police officers would be reassigned to the streets. Abdur-Rafia had another suggestion.

"Jobs," he said. "People are just fighting for money. They want a nice car, a nice pair of shoes. We can send robots to Mars, and we can't stop the violence on the South Side of Chicago?"

It’s a melancholy thought to contemplate where white civilization (Western Civilization) could have sent humans were we not so busy funding the proliferation of a people whose greatest contribution to civilization has been the mandatory growth of a police state to patrol the ‘communities’ they create.

We could easily stop the violence on the South Side of Chicago, where those black migrants from the south – guided by delusions biblical in nature – set up shop and called it ‘home’. But what does it look like today? [Chicago murder rate far worse than during Al Capone 'gangland' days, ABC 7 Chicago, 2-2-13]:

The surprising stats show the city is worse off now in the category of murder than at the height of the era that has driven Chicago's reputation for almost a century, Capone's "gangland" Chicago.

Let's compare two months: January 1929, leading up to the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, and last month, January 2013. Forty-two people were killed in Chicago last month, the most in January since 2002, and far worse than the city's most notorious crime era at the end of the Roaring Twenties. January 1929 there were 26 killings.

Even though the image of Chicago, perpetuated by Hollywood over the years, was that mobsters routinely mowed down people on the streets, the crime stats tell a different story. January 2013's bloodshed has caught the attention of Chicagoans, politicians, the White House and people around the world.

Forty-two people were killed in Chicago last month, the most in January since 2002, and far worse than the city's most notorious crime era at the end of the Roaring Twenties.

With Friday's fatal gunshot attack on a vehicle on a Lake Shore Drive, February is starting as January left off. But if the current murder rate continues, February 2013 will far exceed February 1929, when there were 26 killings, and that number includes the attack known around the world, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. In that single slaughter, seven people were lined up against a warehouse wall on North Clark Street and gunned down. It was a bootlegging dispute between North and South Side mob gangs.  

Remember the words of Allan H. Spear, “The early migrants had only vague notions of what they might expect at their destinations, and they often headed north with visions of fantastic wages and unbounded liberty.”

Behold, the horsemen of the apocalypse, unbounded by the liberty present in the northern cities like Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago, they have unleashed a plague on earth more gruesome then the stories of the Old Testament.

Instead of instantaneous death like that which befell Sodom and Gomorrah, we watch Detroit slowly fade into the nether like an Alzheimer’s patient whose body and mind withers away, no longer capable of remembering all of his former glories.

Now we do the same with Chicago, for in BRA no one can dare point out it is black people themselves to blame for the sorrowful conditions they create in their communities.

Even the good Rev. Jesse Jackson, who bragged “It’s our turn now,” on the night Harold Washington was elected the first black mayor in 1983, is calling for Homeland Security to patrol the South Side of Chicago – the very area of Chicagoland where those ‘modern-day Egyptians’ called home when they were granted their freedom [Chicago marchers urge Obama to come home to address gun violence, Reuters, 2-2-13]:

Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and relatives of victims of fatal shootings in Chicago urged President Barack Obama on Saturday to come back to his hometown and address the gun violence plaguing the city.

Before a march on the city's South Side, Jackson, a former Democratic presidential candidate, said America's third most populous city needed more help than Mayor Rahm Emanuel and police superintendent Garry McCarthy could offer.

"When the president shows up, it shows ultimate national seriousness," said Jackson, a Chicago resident. He also called for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to help patrol the streets of Chicago.

The Ten Plagues of Egypt has described by the Old Testament have nothing on what is going on in Chicago and what already has come to pass in Detroit. The Promised Land that white people created in both cities, which attracted black migrants in the 1920s, is now has gone through plagues worse than boils, hail, locusts, blood, frogs, or darkness.

While the Chicago Tribune once lamented the ‘Odds Stacked Against Young Black Males’ (11-24-1991), they did so without placing any of the blame for black dysfunction on black people themselves.

So if the ‘Great Migration’ of black people to places like Chicago, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Detroit and Buffalo were peppered with biblical allusions, it’s time to point out the obvious: the 11^th Plague of Egypt is “Manifest Destruction.”