There has always been a conscious effort to destroy any upliftment of the black race, whether that be physically, mentally, psychologically, morally, culturally, or economically.
It is not a new tactic for people to use any avenue they can to silence black activists.
'An Octoroon' was written over about three years but premiered in 2014. I'm writing about America's relationship to its own history. Race or not, it's a story about suppression and oppression and many populations being devalued systematically.
White America has seen to it that Black history has been suppressed in schools and in American history books. The bravery of hundreds of our ancestors who took part in slave rebellions has been lost in the mists of time, since plantation owners did their best to prevent any written accounts of uprisings.
It was the biggest suppression of voting rights in our country's history since Jim Crow. And the thread of race runs from the beginning to the end of my book.
It was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read.
I admit that we are not encouraging Negro voting. The Negroes prefer that control of the government remain in the white man’s hands.
A Negro has handicaps enough without having to pay taxes to support the education of white students to learn how to suppress him.
