Brutality against black people began the moment Africans were snatched from their peace and tranquility. They were placed in irons and walked many miles to terrible slave ships, and then the long, torturous voyage to what became America — for those that survived the Middle Passage to endure chattel slavery.

The wealthy class of transplanted Europeans that formed this so-called democracy, men such as slave owners George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, men who became America’s first, third and fourth presidents, institutionalized plantation brutality of African slaves which brought them, and many others, unprecedented wealth.

These men along with other dealers in human flesh literally snatched babies, adolescents, teens, fathers and mothers from each other’s arms and sold them elsewhere. Despicable, yes; but it was Madison who worked it out that black people would constitutionally be part property and part human being.

In The FEDERALIST Papers No. 54: Madison, James Madison wrote: “Let the case of the slaves be considered, as it is in truth a peculiar one. Let the compromising expedient of the Constitution be mutually adopted which regards them as inhabitants, but as debased by servitude below the equal level of free inhabitants; which regards the slave as divested of two fifths of the man.”

After the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln’s assassination, the Democrat Andrew Johnson served one term as president from 1865-69. Reconstruction was dismantled and Posse Comitatus (which means force of the county in Latin) became widespread. It made the county Sheriff the only law. It reigned as common law, especially in the south, until it was enacted as federal law in 1878 as the Posse Comitatus Act.

Through Posse Comitatus, blacks were arrested, lynched – supervised by the sheriff or his deputies — property confiscated, beaten, conscripted as virtual slave labor and imprisoned on chain gangs. And black women were abused — threatened, raped and forced to work for whatever little whites wanted to pay. From this treatment emerged The Black Codes which later morphed into Jim Crow.

Laws and custom have criminally brutalized people of African descent in the United States of America for 400 years. These are crimes against humanity. They are especially egregious as America propagates so-called democracy around the world. Because of America’s economic and military power, most disdain remains quiet and a diplomatic face and dialogue is a constant.

It is both the internal peaking of dissolution and the mounting external struggles abroad through which America is becoming a long hot anytime. As in any combustion, there are predisposing and precipitating factors. What’s coming quickly to a head, mainly as a result of the police state mentality, the utter dependence on posse comitatus, subjugation as a so-called “law and order” fix, is about to blow its gasket!

America is so utterly dependent on violence of any and every kind that the country seems bent on ratcheting up the final phase of the American Revolution. Technology has caught up with reality and people throughout the world see the white nationalistic police violence waged against America’s black and brown population as a strategic attempt to destroy people of African descent.

Shakers and movers have President Obama, Rev. Al Sharpton and other so-called civil rights “leaders,” ministers and a few misguided “intellectuals” in the media pleading that most law enforcement personnel are good officers of the law and there are only a few rotten apples in the barrel.

However, no one has offered up a single piece of data, no research, believable or otherwise, to prove the assertion that mainly white police violence against black and brown Americans, especially against men and boys of African descent, is mainly incidental and not spread widely throughout America.

Of all people, President Barack H. Obama, what with a wife whose undergraduate work at Princeton University was in sociology, would publicly assert that which is totally unfounded is, indeed, disappointing. On the other hand, I understand that he wants to keep the lid on while his Justice Department tries to placate black and brown America with “reforms.”

Mr. President, and anybody else listening, America is becoming a long hot anytime.

Al Calloway is a longtime journalist who began his career with the Atlanta Inquirer during the early 1960s civil rights struggle. He may be reached at Al_Calloway@verizon.net