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[[header]] GENOCIDE AND BLACK ECOLOGY    SINNETTE [[header/]]

of our noblemen and vassals and our relatives, because the thieves or men of bad conscience grab them and get them sold: and so great, Sir, is the corruption and licentiousness that our country is being completely depopulated, and your Highness should not agree with this or accept it as in your service..." (italics mine). That these gears were justified is borne out by the unbelievable loss of black lives which occurred as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Estimated have placed the figure between 15,000,00 and 50,000,000 black souls.
The next three hundred years of bondage and unspeakable human misery wreaked havoc on the forcibly transplanted African. Although he had somehow managed to service, his existence was by no means secure. Frederick Douglass realized the precariousness of this existence. Under the rubric, "A Few Words To Our Own People," appearing in the January 19, 1849 edition of The North Star, Douglass wrote, "Already are our enemies gravely speculating upon our final extinction, and even venturing upon the probable time it will take to blot us out from the face of this nation.... Yes, we say that our enemies are gravely and boldly speculating upon the final extinction of the colored people of this country. They say that both the Indian and the African must perish beneath the car of the advancing civilization of America."
More germane to the question of genocide vis-a-vis discriminatory health care for blacks is the booklet, "The Problem of Negro Health In Atlanta and Fulton County Georgia." This tract, part of the collected papers of W. E. B. Du Bois in the Fisk University Library, was written in the early 1930's and drew attention to the blacks residing in the two counties. A section of this pamphlet reads:

"No community in which a third of the population must be fed, clothes, housed, nursed, and buried by the other two-thirds can remain prosperous nor can it long survive."

The vulnerability of their position in the society was just as manifest to blacks suffering in the throes of the Depression as it was to generations long gone. 
In addition to those mentioned in this essay, the names of E. Franklin Frazier, Marcus Garvey, and Dr. A. Adu Boahen of Ghana, can be added to the long line of eminent black leaders and scholars who have reflected on the question of black genocide. No, it is not the empty catchword or slogan of jive-time revolutionaries. It is an
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