You know Big Ten 75 Alumni’s, if ever you get get time, I recommend you read two books: Eviction by Mathew Desmond, Lies my teacher told me by James Loewen.
I also recommend you check out All things considered on LAist Podcast (formally KPCC), where it talks about American Fortune 500 companies hire North Koreans. Lastly, check out, revealnews.org podcast “40 acres and a lie”, narrated by this brother, can’t remember his name. He did homework for all of us.
Regarding the latter two recommendations, the gist of the Fortune 500 companies hiring hundreds of thousands of North Koreans to work in their companies over the years only to find out that these people had made over 500,000,000 over the years with the end goal to send all of their money back to North Korean to help finance their nuclear War project. The person who recruited these workers was a Korean woman who is an Attorney, and who now sits in jail waiting trail. I’ll let you hear the rest if you chose too. Some scary stuff.
In regard to the 3 pt episode “40 acres and a lie”, there are two things we all must take away from this podcast, and that is;
1) True Fact: Slave Owners did leave possessory land title to the slaves once they were emancipated. It was not always 40 acres, but it was some acres. Example, the slave owners may have given the slaves 40 acres and their descendants 5 acres. From what was told, beautiful land on the beach. Now don’t trip, because there is a sad part to this story. So, I suggest you hear the whole Broadcast for yourselves.
2) Truth be told: Did you know that descendants such as ourselves, are entitle to this land today, but the government claims they do not know the whereabouts of the titles, thus allowing people that is not entitle to this land to posses this land. Trip huh?
3) Lastly, did you know that the Mormon Church took census of everybody, including Slave Owners, Slaves, government records of ALL slaves possessory Land Title, and Children of slaves that had been taking from their parents during slavery and placed in other part of the States. Parents spent years looking for their children. And did you know that high in the Utah Mountains, the Mormons have millions and millions of Documents of what they collected. I’ll let you listen to the rest. Oh, there is more.

I was asked why the Mormons kept records of everyone and everything and you know I did not have an answer. However, I did reflect on a conversation I had with a friend of mine at dinner one night, where he told me in one of his business travels, he had stopped by the Mormons church in Utah to look up his ancestors. You know, I didn’t pay it no mind because I was eating at one of my favorite restaurants and was hungry. Don’t trip. Lol. From what he told me and from what I heard when I was not chowing down on my 5 course meal, that the Mormon church welcome him to find his ancestors, and he find many of them. He told me who he was related to, as well told me the files are so big that you have to know names of your ancestors because if you don’t you will get loss finding anything.

Also did you know that Alabama has a law that birth certificates are confidential records with restrictive access for 125 years from the date of birth. Ain’t that something. I know because I tried to get a copy of my grandmother and grandfather birth and death certs and was told flat out in no uncertain words, you are not getting those records, unless I was a daughter of my grand parents. Now does that make sense.

In conclusion, if you have time listen to the podcast. You will be enlightened, mad, sad, hurt, but you will come away with a tad bit of history that will help not hurt.

OK I’m done with my dissertation for a while.

Jerlilia
AKA: student of History.

Be well!

Jerlilia