Negro Hill Burial Ground Project ~ 36th Annual Cap to Cap Trip

By Michael Harris, Director
Negro Hill Burial Ground Project

Sacramento, California ~ Inhabitants of the Sacramento Valley for over 10,000 years have balanced development in harmony with the annual inundation from winter rains and spring snow in one of the most fertile agricultural regions on the planet.

50 years ago the Folsom Lake inundated a community of early Black Pioneers in a community called Negro Hill, California. Today, we seek dignity, honor and respect for the East Coast Black pioneers from Washington D.C.

Business and Civic leaders from the Sacramento region have come to our Nations capitol to maintain and establish relationships since California became a state and those enslaved residents of the District of Columbia were set free in 1850. Often the dialogue centers upon a notion of a “fair share” and rarely considers any notion of ‘fair share’ based upon “previous condition of servitude.”

Black Sacramento has never received a fair share in the Sacramento Valley since the inception of the State of California and a reminder to all is the continuing inhumane, degenerative behavior exhibited by our treatment of early Black Pioneers.

Imagine an historic ‘racial epithet” on any other ethnic cultures grave marker.

When California became the 31st State of the Union the first State Governor, Peter Burnett proposed to export every Black person out of the State. When California became the 31st State of the Union, those enslaved people of African ancestry in the Nation’s Capitol were given freedom from physical bondage, yet they still do not have a full measure of U.S. citizenship in 2006.

A complete lack of dignity, respect and honor for the early Black Pioneers from the Eastern United States who arrived in late 1848 Mexican California to establish the region called Negro Hill, California is astonishing to a casual observer.

Our awards winning Black Newspaper, the Sacramento Observer, is unwilling and to this date unable to voice an opinion on the nationwide disrespect towards on Black people by our 1954 U.S. Government that found it necessary to rename a historic region of Negro Hill, “unknown niggers.”

Several regional newspapers have run front page stories over the past few months and the Sacramento Bee, flagship of a national conglomerate, has finally begun a process to purge it’s demons since gaining advertising revenue facilitating “slave auctions and human trafficking” in early regional Sacramento history.

Modern, delusion of inclusion is on full display by an honest assessment of the facts on the ground in the “Most Diverse City in America” while a cry for federal assistance is made with sincerity.

Our 2006 Sacramento Regional Leadership will celebrate “36” in grand style and acknowledge silent capitulation to a position of privilege facilitated by 150 years of institutional racism, bigotry and systemic oppression against Black residents in both regions in a Cap to Cap notion of the American Dream.

The Negro Hill Burial Ground Project is firmly resolved in reestablishing high intellectual ethical standards, historical authenification and one moral standard for humanity.

We do indeed hold these truths to be self evident and live to form a more perfect union with behavior in alignment with our words. The number 36 has a synergistic element of completion and offers a bright new beginning