Written from inside a prison yet refusing a prisoner's mind, Emick Lee offers a clear, courageous summons to Black families, churches, and the global diaspora: pray it, then build it. With the cadence of the ancestors and the precision of a blueprint, Dear Black Nation moves readers from lament to logistics-household by household, block by block, nation to nation.
Across twelve covenant-driven chapters-The Covenant of One, Sovereign Wealth of the Spirit, Homecoming, The Crown, Deliverance, The One Drum, Exodus from the American Dream, Church Without Walls, Church Unbound, Nation Restored, From Pews to Streets, From Culture to Kingdom, and Spiritual Nationhood Rising-Lee braids prayer and policy into a daily discipline. Readers are called to honor mothers and fathers; defend women and children; apprentice the young; keep books open and power accountable; circulate economics ""like living water""; and turn sanctuaries into training grounds. The drumbeat is practical: discipline at dawn, diligence at noon, devotion at night.
What sets this book apart is its vantage point and its verbs. Lee writes from the belly of the machine but refuses despair, handing communities a kitchen-table constitution: draft family covenants, write wills and fund trusts, buy and keep land, restore language and craft, build councils that are clean, and measure wealth by the lives made whole-not by spectacle or status. Read a page, do a thing. Read another page, build a team.
Use it in circles-living rooms and classrooms, church basements and barber shops, reentry homes and youth centers. Read it aloud. Let every prayer become policy and every amen become an assignment. As the author insists: ""We begin now. And we do not stop.""