August 13, 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 begins the 97th 98th 99th 100th 101st year since Red, Black and Green were designated as the colors of all Black people, at home in Africa and abroad in the diaspora. How does that day connect to melanin and why is August 13th World Melanin Day?
From our perspective, it is simple. Melanin puts the “B” in #RBG and the “Black” in Red, Black and Green. Our ancestors stepped into the fullness of time when the document known as the Declaration of Rights of the Negro People of the World manifested from their awareness as the fulfillment of destiny. The document drafted by the members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in a meeting chaired by that organization’s first President-General Marcus Garvey on August 13, 1920 states in Declaration 39:
“That the colors, Red, Black and Green, be the colors of the Negro race.”
Ever since then, those colors have symbolized Black people…African people…melanin people at home and abroad.
Before the Berlin Conference the only barriers between Black people at home and abroad were distance, and time. The colors Red, Black and Green symbolize a connection between Black people on the continent of Africa and the diaspora as old as humanity itself. That connection was born in the origin of the entire human race on the continent of Africa.
The symbolic meaning of the colors Red, Black and Green presented by in the Universal Negro Catechism, compiled by Reverend George Alexander McGuire are as follows:
Red is the color of the blood which men must shed for their redemption and liberty; black is the color of the noble and distinguished race to which we belong; green is the color of the luxuriant vegetation of our Motherland.
Is there any reason for Africa’s people to hold on to boundaries created during the Berlin Conference without their consent? There are Igbo people in Cameroon and Nigeria. Yoruba people are in Benin and Nigeria. Hausa traverse the entire Sahel region. Whose interest do the Berlin Conference boundaries serve?
The division between the different groups were not created by Africans. Nnamdi Azikiwe and Sir Herbert MacCauley created the National Conference of Nigeria and Cameroons to reunite the people who were divided during the Berlin Conference. Prior to the Berlin Conference African people related to each other through trade. One such device through which this was accomplished is known as the “silent market.”
Since the end of the Berlin Conference, intercontinental trade in Africa has diminished. This is due mainly to an emphasis on trade with the countries who claimed colonies in Africa. A return to the pre-Berlin Conference trade relations would, ideally, lead to a growth of African economies.
All the knowledge, skills and resources necessary to satisfy the needs of the Black people of the world exist on the African continent.
We see that there is a new era unfolding on this planet as you read these words. Melanin should never have been symbolic of any greater or lesser humanity. Here we now know the change taking place expands just as it is being denied by those who believe the status quo benefits them. We know this because we know melanin is worth more than gold, silver, platinum, palladium rhodium, and coltan…COMBINED!!!
Yet, those working against the rise of melanin awareness have not come to see they have internalized the idea of melanin being worth more than gold. That is cause to state a return to order is happening with effortless ease. Now is time for us to look with excitement towards what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called a “rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”
We who are living as much in the spiritual world as in the physical recognize the rise of soul force. We have seen the concern by those who have relied for too long on using physical force with the idea of melanin. Is their concern the manifestation of the meeting of physical force with soul force, to the detriment of physical force?
We know that there is little interest by those who rely on physical force to teach the world about soul force. Likewise, they do not seem to have an interest in increasing awareness of the aromatic biopolymer and organic semiconductor that makes people black. They have no interest in teaching people with the highest levels of skin melanin about our flag, the Red, Black and Green.
Nevertheless, we have seen RBG is melanin-centered. It has melanin symbolically represented at its center. With that recognition we also accept the role of teaching melanin, or mweusi in Swahili, as thoroughly as we teach about the Red, Black and Green.
With that acceptance, what better day than the day in which Africans, at home and abroad, entered into a new era of affirmation for their humanity and their ability to assert it with all the rights due to them. That day was August 13, 1920. We know it as the day the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World consecrated the Red, Black and Green as our flag.
With black symbolizing the entire African race, at home and abroad, we see no better day than August 13 to send out soul force on a mission. A soul force that knows the chemical which makes people black is worth over $350 a gram more than gold deliberately and intentionally. The mission is to do no less than usher in the era when all the generations of humanity can be called blessed.
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