"The Road to Freedom"

In the Sept., 2016 issue of Smithsonian, there is an article titled "The Road to Freedom," about the great migration of southern blacks to the North.  At best it was partial freedom, a freedom without justice.  It turned out that the North was almost as oppressive as the South.

The author mentions Richard Wright as an example:

"Richard Wright relocated several times in his quest for other suns, fleeing Mississippi for Memphis and Memphis for Chicago and Chicago for New York, where, living in Greenwich Village, barbers refused to serve him and some restaurents refused to seat him.  In 1946, near the height of the Great migration, he came to the disheartening recognition that, wherever he went, he faced hostility.  So he went to France."

How did the North react to the Great Migration?  "white flight, police brutality, systemic ills flowing from government policy restricting fair access to safe housing and good schools.  In recent years, the North, which never had to confront its own injustices, has moved toward a crisis that seems to have reached a boiling point in our current day."

"Thus the eternal question is: Where can African-Americans go?  It is the same question their ancestors asked and answered only to discover upon arriving that the racial caste system was not Southern but American."

This tragic story reminds me of Ezekiel 16:46, The Message:

"The sin [social evil] of your sister Sodom was this: she lived in the lap of luxury---proud, gluttonous, and lazy.  She ignored the oppressed and the poor. . . .  I did away with them."  Do justice or face judgment.