WELCOME TO BLACK HISTORY
PAGE 2
CONTINUING THE HIDDEN HISTORY
ARTICLES OF INTEREST
‘A STORY OF SOCIAL JUSTICE’: A HISTORY OF RACIAL SEGREGATION AND SWIMMING
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*COARD: PHILLY'S TIES TO BIRTH OF SLAVERY 398 YEARS AGO
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*‘DISPLACED & ERASED’: THE UNTOLD STORY OF BLACK CLAYTON, MISSOURI RESIDENTS BEING PUSHED OUT OF THEIR COMMUNITY(ARTICLE BELOW)
*UNTOLD U.S. HEROES(ARTICLE BELOW)
*FROM 15 MILLION ACRES TO 1 MILLION: HOW BLACK PEOPLE LOST THEIR LAND?
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*THE UNTOLD STORY OF MEMORIAL DAY: FORMER SLAVES HONORING AND MOURNING THE DEAD
THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY OF THE FEDERAL HOLIDAY HAS BEEN NEARLY WIPED FROM PUBLIC MEMORY. (ARTICLE BELOW)
*THEY FOUGHT AND DIED FOR FREEDOM: BLACK SOLDIERS IN THE U.S. CIVIL WAR
( ARTICLE BELOW)
*THE UNTOLD STORY OF MEMORIAL DAY: FORMER SLAVES HONORING AND MOURNING THE DEAD (ARTICLE BELOW)
**THE EASTER SUNDAY MASSACRE IN COLFAX, LOUISIANA, AND THE AWFUL SUPREME COURT DECISION THAT FOLLOWED(ARTICLE BELOW)
*THE ROLE OF SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE IN BUILDING NORTHERN WEALTH(EXCERPT BELOW)
*HOW THE SLAVE TRADE HELPED FINANCE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY(ARTICLE BELOW)
*DEVIL’S PUNCHBOWL — AN AMERICAN CONCENTRATION CAMP SO HORRIFIC IT WAS ERASED FROM HISTORY(ARTICLE BELOW)
*185TH ANNIVERSARY OF NAT TURNER'S REBELLION(ARTICLE BELOW)
*PAUL ROBESON, A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY(ARTICLE BELOW)
*SLAVES: THE CAPITAL THAT MADE CAPITALISM(ARTICLE BELOW)
*"THE MEANING OF JULY FOURTH FOR THE NEGRO"(ARTICLE BELOW)
6 Startling Things About Sex Farms During Slavery That You May Not Know
By Curtis Bunn - atlanta black star
‘A story of social justice’: a history of racial segregation and swimming
A new exhibition highlights a shameful history of racism in pools but also a recognition of Black swimming heroes
Lisa Wong Macabasco - the guardian
Wed 23 Mar 2022 01.28 EDT
In the summer of 1962, demonstrators in Cairo, Illinois, protested the tactic of skirting anti-discrimination laws by putting public pools into the hands of private management, transforming them into ‘clubs’ for white people only. Photograph: Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos
Aquatic-safety advocate Angela Beale-Tawfeeq grew up swimming at the public pool in her predominantly Black neighborhood. “We always say, ‘In North Philadelphia, born and raised, in the swimming pool is where we spent most of our days,’ she recites, referencing the familiar lyrics of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song.
Now the education and research director of Diversity in Aquatics (one of the nation’s only organizations of Black and brown aquatics professionals), Beale-Tawfeeq is one of the many compelling voices contributing to Pool: A Social History of Segregation, a new wide-ranging exhibition about the United States’s history of segregated swimming and its connection to today’s alarming drowning rates in Black communities. Encompassing history, artworks and storytelling across a broad array of media, the immersive presentation uses public swimming pools as a lens through which to ponder social justice and public health.
The 4,700-sq-ft exhibition is now on view at Philadelphia’s historic Fairmount Water Works, a neo-classical landmark abutting the Schuylkill River that pumped water into the city until the turn of the 20th century and later became an aquarium and then one of the city’s first integrated pools, backed by the father of the actor Grace Kelly. After decades of preservation efforts, most of the building reopened in 2003 as an environmental education center, but the three-lane cement pool area was never restored due to lack of funding, according to Victoria Prizzia, the exhibition organizer.
“It felt very important to have that sacred space – a historic site and former public pool that had been neglected and captured in a state of arrested decay,” says Prizzia, a former lifeguard and competitive swimmer who since 2009 has directed many projects about water issues and the environment. “When you step inside, you really are transported. This is a reclaiming of that space, to tell the story in a different way.”
The exhibition’s projections bring the walls of the space to life. Near the entrance lies a digital pool of water that visitors are encouraged to sit around and virtually dip their feet into while listening to interview excerpts from athletes, activists and academics. “I love when you have the architectural elements speak for themselves, and in this case they really become another character,” Prizzia notes. (And this character has seen its share of floods due to its riverbank location: the exhibition was all set to open in September, but Hurricane Ida swept through mere hours after the opening reception; the space flooded, but miraculously nothing was damaged.)
Public pools have long been contested sites that reflect America’s racial and economic divisions, since the 1920s when pools began to be segregated by race instead of, as previously, by sex or class. A deep anxiety emerged around that time about people of different races and sexes sharing such intimate spaces. In the south, segregation was mandated through city ordinances and other official exclusionary rules; in northern states, de facto segregation occurred as a result of building public pools in white neighborhoods or, more frequently, through intimidation, harassment and violence.
A digital animation commission by the noted Philadelphia playwright James Ijames titled Moving Portraits interweaves the history of segregated swimming with the achievements of Black swimming heroes. Cast on to the Water Works’ historic facade opposite custom stadium seating evoking the golden era of public pools, it’s a highlight of the exhibition, according to Prizzia: “We’re not only showing tragedy but also revealing this other current – the accomplishments that have been forgotten, happening in parallel, by Black swimmers.”
Also largely overlooked is the fact that many non-European peoples were proficient swimmers until the late 1800s, at which point a nascent white beach and pool culture drove people of color away from those spaces. In Pool, this essential and little-known historical context comes via archival images and narratives from Kevin Dawson, author of the 2018 book Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora. “The exhibit is really important in that it’s helping to encourage Black people to get back into the water,” Dawson tells the Guardian. “Many are seeing swimming as kind of their historical heritage that Jim Crow racism denied them.”
The legacy of that shameful history, compounded by the slashing of funds for public pools, is evident in today’s grim drowning disparities: in Pennsylvania, Black children have a 50% higher rate of accidental drowning than white children. Nationwide, Black youth are almost six times more likely than white children to drown in a swimming pool, and 69% of Black children have little to no swimming ability, compared with 42% of white children. “The story of water is really a story of social justice,” says Prizzia, pointing to inequities in land use, infrastructure and pollution in addition to access to swimming spaces.
Philadelphia has a uniquely rich public pool culture, opening the first outdoor municipal pool in the US in 1883 (which functioned as a public bath for poor and immigrant communities who didn’t have indoor plumbing) and, with more than 70 pools, still boasting the largest number of public pools per resident of any large American city. In response to an outcry over drownings in nearby rivers and creeks, seven swim clubs cropped up around the middle of the century to serve both urban and suburban Black swimmers. (Several are still going strong today, including the nation’s first Black-owned swim club.) “Philadelphians love their pools,” Prizzia says. “They’re really important to the fabric of local neighborhoods. They’re like your extended family.”
Beale-Tawfeeq knows that well: “I grew up understanding that learning to swim can actually save lives in more ways than one.” She joined the Philadelphia Parks and Recreation diving team at age 10, later was coached by the visionary Jim Ellis (who formed the country’s first Black swim team and was the subject of the 2007 film Pride), and eventually attended Howard University on an athletic scholarship. Now a physical-education educator, she touts swimming’s health benefits: “It’s a physical activity you can do from six months old until you’re 100.”
Beale-Tawfeeq notes there’s trauma in the exhibition’s narratives, but an exuberant mural at the exhibition entrance hopes to balance that. Created by El Salvador– born, Philadelphia-based artist Calo Rosa and representing an offering to a Yoruba water goddess, the piece exhorts visitors to “dive in”. “We wanted to create an invitation to come in and enjoy too,” Prizzia says. “By excluding people from swimming, you’re also excluding them from a very natural joy. People gravitate toward water; everyone wants to play in it. Hopefully the exhibition is a pathway for people to learn to swim and have access to something that would bring them joy.”
Now the education and research director of Diversity in Aquatics (one of the nation’s only organizations of Black and brown aquatics professionals), Beale-Tawfeeq is one of the many compelling voices contributing to Pool: A Social History of Segregation, a new wide-ranging exhibition about the United States’s history of segregated swimming and its connection to today’s alarming drowning rates in Black communities. Encompassing history, artworks and storytelling across a broad array of media, the immersive presentation uses public swimming pools as a lens through which to ponder social justice and public health.
The 4,700-sq-ft exhibition is now on view at Philadelphia’s historic Fairmount Water Works, a neo-classical landmark abutting the Schuylkill River that pumped water into the city until the turn of the 20th century and later became an aquarium and then one of the city’s first integrated pools, backed by the father of the actor Grace Kelly. After decades of preservation efforts, most of the building reopened in 2003 as an environmental education center, but the three-lane cement pool area was never restored due to lack of funding, according to Victoria Prizzia, the exhibition organizer.
“It felt very important to have that sacred space – a historic site and former public pool that had been neglected and captured in a state of arrested decay,” says Prizzia, a former lifeguard and competitive swimmer who since 2009 has directed many projects about water issues and the environment. “When you step inside, you really are transported. This is a reclaiming of that space, to tell the story in a different way.”
The exhibition’s projections bring the walls of the space to life. Near the entrance lies a digital pool of water that visitors are encouraged to sit around and virtually dip their feet into while listening to interview excerpts from athletes, activists and academics. “I love when you have the architectural elements speak for themselves, and in this case they really become another character,” Prizzia notes. (And this character has seen its share of floods due to its riverbank location: the exhibition was all set to open in September, but Hurricane Ida swept through mere hours after the opening reception; the space flooded, but miraculously nothing was damaged.)
Public pools have long been contested sites that reflect America’s racial and economic divisions, since the 1920s when pools began to be segregated by race instead of, as previously, by sex or class. A deep anxiety emerged around that time about people of different races and sexes sharing such intimate spaces. In the south, segregation was mandated through city ordinances and other official exclusionary rules; in northern states, de facto segregation occurred as a result of building public pools in white neighborhoods or, more frequently, through intimidation, harassment and violence.
A digital animation commission by the noted Philadelphia playwright James Ijames titled Moving Portraits interweaves the history of segregated swimming with the achievements of Black swimming heroes. Cast on to the Water Works’ historic facade opposite custom stadium seating evoking the golden era of public pools, it’s a highlight of the exhibition, according to Prizzia: “We’re not only showing tragedy but also revealing this other current – the accomplishments that have been forgotten, happening in parallel, by Black swimmers.”
Also largely overlooked is the fact that many non-European peoples were proficient swimmers until the late 1800s, at which point a nascent white beach and pool culture drove people of color away from those spaces. In Pool, this essential and little-known historical context comes via archival images and narratives from Kevin Dawson, author of the 2018 book Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora. “The exhibit is really important in that it’s helping to encourage Black people to get back into the water,” Dawson tells the Guardian. “Many are seeing swimming as kind of their historical heritage that Jim Crow racism denied them.”
The legacy of that shameful history, compounded by the slashing of funds for public pools, is evident in today’s grim drowning disparities: in Pennsylvania, Black children have a 50% higher rate of accidental drowning than white children. Nationwide, Black youth are almost six times more likely than white children to drown in a swimming pool, and 69% of Black children have little to no swimming ability, compared with 42% of white children. “The story of water is really a story of social justice,” says Prizzia, pointing to inequities in land use, infrastructure and pollution in addition to access to swimming spaces.
Philadelphia has a uniquely rich public pool culture, opening the first outdoor municipal pool in the US in 1883 (which functioned as a public bath for poor and immigrant communities who didn’t have indoor plumbing) and, with more than 70 pools, still boasting the largest number of public pools per resident of any large American city. In response to an outcry over drownings in nearby rivers and creeks, seven swim clubs cropped up around the middle of the century to serve both urban and suburban Black swimmers. (Several are still going strong today, including the nation’s first Black-owned swim club.) “Philadelphians love their pools,” Prizzia says. “They’re really important to the fabric of local neighborhoods. They’re like your extended family.”
Beale-Tawfeeq knows that well: “I grew up understanding that learning to swim can actually save lives in more ways than one.” She joined the Philadelphia Parks and Recreation diving team at age 10, later was coached by the visionary Jim Ellis (who formed the country’s first Black swim team and was the subject of the 2007 film Pride), and eventually attended Howard University on an athletic scholarship. Now a physical-education educator, she touts swimming’s health benefits: “It’s a physical activity you can do from six months old until you’re 100.”
Beale-Tawfeeq notes there’s trauma in the exhibition’s narratives, but an exuberant mural at the exhibition entrance hopes to balance that. Created by El Salvador– born, Philadelphia-based artist Calo Rosa and representing an offering to a Yoruba water goddess, the piece exhorts visitors to “dive in”. “We wanted to create an invitation to come in and enjoy too,” Prizzia says. “By excluding people from swimming, you’re also excluding them from a very natural joy. People gravitate toward water; everyone wants to play in it. Hopefully the exhibition is a pathway for people to learn to swim and have access to something that would bring them joy.”
Coard: Philly's ties to birth of slavery 398 years ago
Michael Coard
From Philly Tribune: On Aug. 20, it will be exactly 398 years ago to the day that slavery in this country was birthed — actually spawned like a demonic creature — by European/British devilment in 1619. And that racist devil lived throughout America, including here in the so-called City of Brotherly Love.
Before exposing the history of slavery and this city’s ties to it, I gotta give a big shoutout to former FLOTUS, Michelle Obama, Esquire, for telling the truth and literally shaming the “devils” last year in Philly during her powerful sermon at the Democratic National Convention, when she said “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.” Despite the racist news commentators who said she didn’t know what she was talking about, she, being the scholarly Ivy League-educated lawyer that she is, knew exactly what she was talking about. Even the pre-eminent White House Association, a private educational organization founded in 1961, disclosed that the federal government used “African-Americans — both enslaved and free — to provide the bulk of labor that built the White House.” Moreover, the association pointed out that enslaved Blacks also built the “United States Capitol (1793-1800) and other early government buildings.” Now let’s get back to slavery’s origins in this country.
On that fateful Aug. 20, 1619, date as noted by English settler John Rolfe, a rich tobacco planter, “… there came a Dutch man of warre that sold us twenty and odd Negars” in the Virginia Colony at Old Point Comfort (now Fort Comfort in Hampton), making them the first enslaved Blacks on this land. Following raids in southern Africa by Luis Mendes de Vasconcellos and his Portuguese troops beginning in 1617, he invaded the village of Ndongo in Luanda, Angola two years later and loaded 60 of those Kimbundu-speaking human beings aboard the slave ship Sao Joao Bautista before ordering it sent to Vera Cruz, Mexico. After setting sail, that ship encountered an English privateer called the Treasurer, which was accompanied by its enforcer, the White Lion, a ferociously armed Dutch war vessel. Together, they later encountered the Sao Joao Bautista in the waters of the West Indies, attacked it, and robbed it of its entire cargo, including the Africans. Twenty of those 60 were loaded onto the White Lion, which arrived at Old Point Comfort on Aug. 20. The Treasurer arrived a few days later and its captain attempted to trade the remaining 40 but couldn’t get the value he wanted, so he transported them to Bermuda where they, too, were held in brutal bondage.
Among the 20 captured Angolans left at Old Point Comfort, two, namely Antonio and Isabella (whose Spanish Christian names were forced upon them like we name our pets today), were traded to Captain William Tucker for “badly needed provisions.” By the way, four years later, Antonio and Isabella became the parents of the first Black child whose birth was officially documented in Colonial America. And the name imposed upon him was William Tucker — the very same name of the very same captain who enslaved his parents. A third identified person, who was given the name Pedro, and the remaining 17 others were traded for additional products to Governor George Yeardley and his Cape Merchant Abraham Piersey who forced them to labor at plantations along the nearby James River in what would become Charles City.
But such trading, selling and forced labor were not unique to Charles City or James River plantations or Old Point Comfort or Virginia or even the South. They happened right here in Philly, too. On the southwest corner of Front and High — now Market — Street stood the London Coffee House, which opened in 1754 with funds provided by 200 local merchants. It was where shippers, businessmen and local officials, including the governor, socialized, drank coffee and alcohol, and ate in private booths while making deals. It was where, on the High Street side, auctions were held for carriages, foodstuffs and horses — and, by the way, human beings, specifically African humans beings who had just been unloaded from ships that docked right across the street at the Delaware River.
In 1991, a historical marker was installed on the corner of Front and Market streets which reads: “Scene of political and commercial activity in the colonial period, the London Coffee House … served as a place to inspect Black ‘slaves’ recently arrived from Africa and to bid for their purchase at public auctions.” The biddings happened like this: The captured Black men, women and children, usually about five or six at a time, were placed on a thick wooden board that was approximately three feet wide and eight feet long and that was set atop two heavy barrels on each end. These whipped and shackled human beings were paraded onto the boards, displayed by being forced to slowly turn around and bend over, inspected by having their mouths forced open, their genitals grabbed, their limbs and muscles flexed, and then they were auctioned to the highest bidder. Immediately afterward, they were sold off — mother from daughter, father from son, brother from sister, husband from wife. Following these forced separations, they were scattered across the country. And they would never touch or even see one another again.
Slavery was a key component of daily life in Pennsylvania generally and Philadelphia particularly. In the 1760s, nearly 4,500 enslaved Blacks labored in the colony. About one of every six white households in the city held at least one Black person in bondage. This cruel institution began here in 1684 when the slave ship Isabella from Bristol, England, anchored in Philadelphia with 150 captured Africans. A year later, William Penn himself held three Black persons in bondage at his Pennsbury manor, 20 miles north of Philly. Even George Washington enslaved Blacks; 316 to be exact. And he held nine of them right here in the so-called City of Brotherly Love at America’s first “White House,” which was known as the President’s House at Sixth and Market (then High) streets.
Remember Aug. 20, 1619, even after 398 years! In fact, never forget and always avenge. And you can do that by attending a memorial event sponsored by Avenging The Ancestors Coalition (ATAC) on Sunday, Aug. 20 at 3 p.m. at the Slavery Memorial/President’s House at Sixth and Market streets. For more info, call 215-552-8751.
The spirit often moves me to end my weekly columns, whenever appropriate, with a particular inspirational quote from one of the greatest rappers in hip-hop history. In his song entitled “1-9-9-9,” Common said and I’m now saying, “Check it. It’s like I’m fightin’ for freedom, writin’ for freedom. ... My ancestors, when I’m writin’ I see ‘em and talk with ‘em. Hoping in the promised land I can walk with ‘em.”
Before exposing the history of slavery and this city’s ties to it, I gotta give a big shoutout to former FLOTUS, Michelle Obama, Esquire, for telling the truth and literally shaming the “devils” last year in Philly during her powerful sermon at the Democratic National Convention, when she said “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.” Despite the racist news commentators who said she didn’t know what she was talking about, she, being the scholarly Ivy League-educated lawyer that she is, knew exactly what she was talking about. Even the pre-eminent White House Association, a private educational organization founded in 1961, disclosed that the federal government used “African-Americans — both enslaved and free — to provide the bulk of labor that built the White House.” Moreover, the association pointed out that enslaved Blacks also built the “United States Capitol (1793-1800) and other early government buildings.” Now let’s get back to slavery’s origins in this country.
On that fateful Aug. 20, 1619, date as noted by English settler John Rolfe, a rich tobacco planter, “… there came a Dutch man of warre that sold us twenty and odd Negars” in the Virginia Colony at Old Point Comfort (now Fort Comfort in Hampton), making them the first enslaved Blacks on this land. Following raids in southern Africa by Luis Mendes de Vasconcellos and his Portuguese troops beginning in 1617, he invaded the village of Ndongo in Luanda, Angola two years later and loaded 60 of those Kimbundu-speaking human beings aboard the slave ship Sao Joao Bautista before ordering it sent to Vera Cruz, Mexico. After setting sail, that ship encountered an English privateer called the Treasurer, which was accompanied by its enforcer, the White Lion, a ferociously armed Dutch war vessel. Together, they later encountered the Sao Joao Bautista in the waters of the West Indies, attacked it, and robbed it of its entire cargo, including the Africans. Twenty of those 60 were loaded onto the White Lion, which arrived at Old Point Comfort on Aug. 20. The Treasurer arrived a few days later and its captain attempted to trade the remaining 40 but couldn’t get the value he wanted, so he transported them to Bermuda where they, too, were held in brutal bondage.
Among the 20 captured Angolans left at Old Point Comfort, two, namely Antonio and Isabella (whose Spanish Christian names were forced upon them like we name our pets today), were traded to Captain William Tucker for “badly needed provisions.” By the way, four years later, Antonio and Isabella became the parents of the first Black child whose birth was officially documented in Colonial America. And the name imposed upon him was William Tucker — the very same name of the very same captain who enslaved his parents. A third identified person, who was given the name Pedro, and the remaining 17 others were traded for additional products to Governor George Yeardley and his Cape Merchant Abraham Piersey who forced them to labor at plantations along the nearby James River in what would become Charles City.
But such trading, selling and forced labor were not unique to Charles City or James River plantations or Old Point Comfort or Virginia or even the South. They happened right here in Philly, too. On the southwest corner of Front and High — now Market — Street stood the London Coffee House, which opened in 1754 with funds provided by 200 local merchants. It was where shippers, businessmen and local officials, including the governor, socialized, drank coffee and alcohol, and ate in private booths while making deals. It was where, on the High Street side, auctions were held for carriages, foodstuffs and horses — and, by the way, human beings, specifically African humans beings who had just been unloaded from ships that docked right across the street at the Delaware River.
In 1991, a historical marker was installed on the corner of Front and Market streets which reads: “Scene of political and commercial activity in the colonial period, the London Coffee House … served as a place to inspect Black ‘slaves’ recently arrived from Africa and to bid for their purchase at public auctions.” The biddings happened like this: The captured Black men, women and children, usually about five or six at a time, were placed on a thick wooden board that was approximately three feet wide and eight feet long and that was set atop two heavy barrels on each end. These whipped and shackled human beings were paraded onto the boards, displayed by being forced to slowly turn around and bend over, inspected by having their mouths forced open, their genitals grabbed, their limbs and muscles flexed, and then they were auctioned to the highest bidder. Immediately afterward, they were sold off — mother from daughter, father from son, brother from sister, husband from wife. Following these forced separations, they were scattered across the country. And they would never touch or even see one another again.
Slavery was a key component of daily life in Pennsylvania generally and Philadelphia particularly. In the 1760s, nearly 4,500 enslaved Blacks labored in the colony. About one of every six white households in the city held at least one Black person in bondage. This cruel institution began here in 1684 when the slave ship Isabella from Bristol, England, anchored in Philadelphia with 150 captured Africans. A year later, William Penn himself held three Black persons in bondage at his Pennsbury manor, 20 miles north of Philly. Even George Washington enslaved Blacks; 316 to be exact. And he held nine of them right here in the so-called City of Brotherly Love at America’s first “White House,” which was known as the President’s House at Sixth and Market (then High) streets.
Remember Aug. 20, 1619, even after 398 years! In fact, never forget and always avenge. And you can do that by attending a memorial event sponsored by Avenging The Ancestors Coalition (ATAC) on Sunday, Aug. 20 at 3 p.m. at the Slavery Memorial/President’s House at Sixth and Market streets. For more info, call 215-552-8751.
The spirit often moves me to end my weekly columns, whenever appropriate, with a particular inspirational quote from one of the greatest rappers in hip-hop history. In his song entitled “1-9-9-9,” Common said and I’m now saying, “Check it. It’s like I’m fightin’ for freedom, writin’ for freedom. ... My ancestors, when I’m writin’ I see ‘em and talk with ‘em. Hoping in the promised land I can walk with ‘em.”
‘Displaced & Erased’: The Untold Story of Black Clayton, Missouri Residents Being Pushed Out of Their Community
By Gus T. Renegade - August 1, 2017
From Atlanta Black Star: Sounding as if she were describing a mafia hit, Donna Rogers-Beard said Clayton, Missouri’s Black “community was slowly suffocated and then finally snuffed out.” Rogers-Beard, a retired Clayton educator, and other Clayton citizens describe this mid-20th century expulsion in the new documentary film “Displaced & Erased.” Filmmaker Emma Riley exhibits how hundreds of Black residents, many of them homeowners, were methodically ejected from the region beginning in the 1950s. Urban renewal (infamously rebranded “Negro removal”) campaigns nonviolently compelled Black residents to leave and compensated them with market value for their property. City planners plotted an agenda for a prosperous new town, that, according to recent census data, has fewer than 10 percent Black citizens today. Rogers-Beard and scores of former residents described tremendous anguish about being forced to abandon prime property. Nestled minutes beyond the St. Louis city limits, Clayton is now a plush, commercial, nearly all-white enclave.
The eviction of Clayton’s Black inhabitants is part of a pattern in American history of repeated instances of often violent mass expulsions of Black people. The evictions and killings are censored from history, and the Clayton removal is only a more recent illustration of Blacks being wiped off a land.
Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Elliot Jaspin devotes a book to the history of racial cleansings but was forced to limit his work to a dozen of the “worst of the worst” incidents. In “Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America,” Jaspin concludes there were more than 260 incidents where whites violently forced all Black people to flee an entire county. Jaspin’s tally omits nonviolent or small-town removals like Clayton, although he concedes hundreds of these “lesser” cleansings occurred.
A linchpin of Jaspin’s book and the Clayton documentary is white lies. Riley describes this deception as “deliberately leaving information out.” Years after locales like Clayton, Mo., and Forsyth County, Ga., (one of the “worst of the worst” racial cleansings in “Bitter Waters”) were melanin-free, Jaspin submits, “The white community would construct a lie.” As opposed to acknowledging that grandma and grandpa were racist goons who criminally ejected, or killed, legions of Black people, many white descendants offer bogus histories about voluntary, cordial departures of Black residents. Jaspin believes the lies absolve whites of guilt for the ransacking of Black people and further obscure Black property claims and legitimate requests for restitution.
In 2006, the Wilmington Race Riot Commission published findings to offset more than a century of constructed lies about the November 1898 purge of Wilmington, North Carolina. The New York Times provides a tidy summation of their findings: “Scores of black citizens were killed during the uprising — no one yet knows how many — and prominent Blacks and whites were banished from the city under threat of death.”
Filmmaker Christopher Everett, a North Carolina native and creator of the documentary “Wilmington on Fire,” believes the untold number of Black casualties could top a thousand. Highlighting that Wilmington was a majority-Black town at the time of the massacre, Everett cites census data showing Wilmington lost half its Black population in the year following the “cleansing.”
“You had thousands of people that were exiled, but the population change was too drastic for just a hundred or a couple hundred people to get killed,” says Everett.
Texas native E.R. Bills was inspired to investigate the 1910 slaughter and expulsion of Black citizens from Slocum, Texas because of the dubiously low numbers of casualties reported. The conservative estimates of two dozen fatalities or fewer strongly clashed with his extensive research, which includes testimony from the white sheriff at the time of the massacre. Bills says the lawman reported, “There are Black bodies everywhere. Mobs of white people went around killing as many Black people as they could find and run down.” The sheriff’s record and corresponding mass grave sites compelled Bills to conclude the number of Black casualties could easily exceed two hundred.
While writing “The 1910 Slocum Massacre: An Act of Genocide in East Texas,” Bills worked with Constance Hollie-Jawaid, whose great-grandfather was a Slocum business owner and a victim of the massacre and expulsion. While advocating for a historical marker recognizing the assault on Black Texans, Hollie-Jawaid said that some whites thought her ancestor was “uppity,” and used the purge to return him to “his place.”
“They spread rumors and lies, and killed members of my family. Shot and wounded members of my family. And took the granary, the mercantile store, and seven hundred acres of prime fertile land in east Texas. And Texas still refuses to give it back,” said Hollie-Jawaid.
Jaspin reminds us that these expulsions happened more than 260 times.
When describing the long-term economic violence of the Clayton eviction, Emma Riley told St. Louis Public Radio, “This has greater implications for how wealth is transferred from generation to generation because these weren’t just Black people who were renting. They were property owners.”
Underscoring the pattern, John Hopkins University historian N.D.B. Connolly notes similar financial plunder in the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma slaughter, where approximately 300 people died according to the 2001 Tulsa Race Riot Commission. In addition to the bloodletting, Connolly says whites “burned whatever proof existed about the land owners.”
Connolly adds that the confiscation of Black land undergoes upgrades. What was smash and loot in 1898 Wilmington, becomes “eminent domain” and “urban renewal” in 1950 Clayton. But the result is the same. “Negro (wealth) removal.”
“Displaced and Erased” was screened at the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase near the three-year anniversary of the shooting death of Ferguson’s Michael Brown Jr. This year is also the centennial anniversary of the 1917 East St. Louis “race riots,” where the number of casualties remains unknown. All three tragedies reflect the unending racist violence targeting individual, collective, and generational Black well-being. (video)
The eviction of Clayton’s Black inhabitants is part of a pattern in American history of repeated instances of often violent mass expulsions of Black people. The evictions and killings are censored from history, and the Clayton removal is only a more recent illustration of Blacks being wiped off a land.
Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Elliot Jaspin devotes a book to the history of racial cleansings but was forced to limit his work to a dozen of the “worst of the worst” incidents. In “Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America,” Jaspin concludes there were more than 260 incidents where whites violently forced all Black people to flee an entire county. Jaspin’s tally omits nonviolent or small-town removals like Clayton, although he concedes hundreds of these “lesser” cleansings occurred.
A linchpin of Jaspin’s book and the Clayton documentary is white lies. Riley describes this deception as “deliberately leaving information out.” Years after locales like Clayton, Mo., and Forsyth County, Ga., (one of the “worst of the worst” racial cleansings in “Bitter Waters”) were melanin-free, Jaspin submits, “The white community would construct a lie.” As opposed to acknowledging that grandma and grandpa were racist goons who criminally ejected, or killed, legions of Black people, many white descendants offer bogus histories about voluntary, cordial departures of Black residents. Jaspin believes the lies absolve whites of guilt for the ransacking of Black people and further obscure Black property claims and legitimate requests for restitution.
In 2006, the Wilmington Race Riot Commission published findings to offset more than a century of constructed lies about the November 1898 purge of Wilmington, North Carolina. The New York Times provides a tidy summation of their findings: “Scores of black citizens were killed during the uprising — no one yet knows how many — and prominent Blacks and whites were banished from the city under threat of death.”
Filmmaker Christopher Everett, a North Carolina native and creator of the documentary “Wilmington on Fire,” believes the untold number of Black casualties could top a thousand. Highlighting that Wilmington was a majority-Black town at the time of the massacre, Everett cites census data showing Wilmington lost half its Black population in the year following the “cleansing.”
“You had thousands of people that were exiled, but the population change was too drastic for just a hundred or a couple hundred people to get killed,” says Everett.
Texas native E.R. Bills was inspired to investigate the 1910 slaughter and expulsion of Black citizens from Slocum, Texas because of the dubiously low numbers of casualties reported. The conservative estimates of two dozen fatalities or fewer strongly clashed with his extensive research, which includes testimony from the white sheriff at the time of the massacre. Bills says the lawman reported, “There are Black bodies everywhere. Mobs of white people went around killing as many Black people as they could find and run down.” The sheriff’s record and corresponding mass grave sites compelled Bills to conclude the number of Black casualties could easily exceed two hundred.
While writing “The 1910 Slocum Massacre: An Act of Genocide in East Texas,” Bills worked with Constance Hollie-Jawaid, whose great-grandfather was a Slocum business owner and a victim of the massacre and expulsion. While advocating for a historical marker recognizing the assault on Black Texans, Hollie-Jawaid said that some whites thought her ancestor was “uppity,” and used the purge to return him to “his place.”
“They spread rumors and lies, and killed members of my family. Shot and wounded members of my family. And took the granary, the mercantile store, and seven hundred acres of prime fertile land in east Texas. And Texas still refuses to give it back,” said Hollie-Jawaid.
Jaspin reminds us that these expulsions happened more than 260 times.
When describing the long-term economic violence of the Clayton eviction, Emma Riley told St. Louis Public Radio, “This has greater implications for how wealth is transferred from generation to generation because these weren’t just Black people who were renting. They were property owners.”
Underscoring the pattern, John Hopkins University historian N.D.B. Connolly notes similar financial plunder in the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma slaughter, where approximately 300 people died according to the 2001 Tulsa Race Riot Commission. In addition to the bloodletting, Connolly says whites “burned whatever proof existed about the land owners.”
Connolly adds that the confiscation of Black land undergoes upgrades. What was smash and loot in 1898 Wilmington, becomes “eminent domain” and “urban renewal” in 1950 Clayton. But the result is the same. “Negro (wealth) removal.”
“Displaced and Erased” was screened at the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase near the three-year anniversary of the shooting death of Ferguson’s Michael Brown Jr. This year is also the centennial anniversary of the 1917 East St. Louis “race riots,” where the number of casualties remains unknown. All three tragedies reflect the unending racist violence targeting individual, collective, and generational Black well-being. (video)
UNTOLD U.S. HEROES
John N. Mitchell Tribune Staff Writer
From Philly Tribune: Perhaps no people had tougher decisions to make regarding the Revolutionary War (1775-1783) than did African-Americans, free or enslaved.
At issue was fighting for the 13 colonies, all of which had slavery in some form in 1776, or fighting alongside the Armies of the British Empire.
It is estimated that as many as 5,000 Blacks fought in the Continental Army in some capacity. However, records show that Blacks opting to fight in the Armies of the British Empire numbered anywhere from 10,000 to as high as 30,000 30,000.
“It was an incredibly complex life and death decision for people of African descent to make,” said Phillip Mead, chief historian and director of curatorial affairs at the Museum of the American Revolution.
The museum has committed an entire portion of its exhibit to the complex role of Blacks in the Revolutionary War. Titled “Finding Freedom,” the exhibit focuses primarily on the role Blacks played in the war and the some of the legal battles that were fought for freedom.
Focused mostly on the summer of 1781 in Virginia, which at the time had the largest slave population, both armies were moving through the state and casualties were high.
One story is that of London Pleasants, a 15-year-old slave owned by Quaker Robert Pleasants. Robert Pleasants wanted to free his slaves, and it was written in his father’s will. However, Virginia law did not permit the freeing of slaves.
In 1779, British General Henry Clinton published the Phillipsburg Proclamation, intended to encourage slaves to run away and join the Royal forces. Infamous traitor Benedict Arnold, now a British general, offered London Pleasants his freedom. Pleasants accepted the offer and became a trumpeter in the Royal Army.
London Pleasants’ story is just one of five interactive displays in the exhibit that tells the story of the quest for freedom.
The Phillipsburg Proclamation was the second enticement for slaves to join the Royal Army; Dunmore’s Proclamation of 1775, which offered the first large-scale emancipation of slave and servant labor in the history of colonial British America, was the first.
Born a free man in Philadelphia, 15-year-old James Forten loved his life in the colonies, so much so that he joined a maritime service to fight the British. Captured and offered both his freedom and an education in Britain, Forten requested and received a return to the United States.
This worked well for Forten, according to Mead, as Forten “came back here and became quite wealthy and an abolitionist.
“He could have had his freedom in either place but he chose the United States,” Mead said.
The Treaty of Paris, which marked the British surrender in 1783, promised the return of all property, including slaves. However, the British kept their promise of freedom to the runaways, never returning about 3,000 slaves to former masters and instead freeing them to British territories such as Nova Scotia.
Mead said there were probably many other Blacks who helped the Continental Army — mostly from northern states where some Blacks already had their freedom and slavery was far less brutal — than history accounts for. However, he added that it made sense for slaves in places such as Virginia and the Carolinas to join the Royal Army with its promise of freedom.
“It’s tempting to say one side is fighting for freedom and the other isn’t,” he said. “It’s a complicated story. In some ways the British and the U.S. were competing to say they were the land of liberty. It became a big issue for both sides.”
At issue was fighting for the 13 colonies, all of which had slavery in some form in 1776, or fighting alongside the Armies of the British Empire.
It is estimated that as many as 5,000 Blacks fought in the Continental Army in some capacity. However, records show that Blacks opting to fight in the Armies of the British Empire numbered anywhere from 10,000 to as high as 30,000 30,000.
“It was an incredibly complex life and death decision for people of African descent to make,” said Phillip Mead, chief historian and director of curatorial affairs at the Museum of the American Revolution.
The museum has committed an entire portion of its exhibit to the complex role of Blacks in the Revolutionary War. Titled “Finding Freedom,” the exhibit focuses primarily on the role Blacks played in the war and the some of the legal battles that were fought for freedom.
Focused mostly on the summer of 1781 in Virginia, which at the time had the largest slave population, both armies were moving through the state and casualties were high.
One story is that of London Pleasants, a 15-year-old slave owned by Quaker Robert Pleasants. Robert Pleasants wanted to free his slaves, and it was written in his father’s will. However, Virginia law did not permit the freeing of slaves.
In 1779, British General Henry Clinton published the Phillipsburg Proclamation, intended to encourage slaves to run away and join the Royal forces. Infamous traitor Benedict Arnold, now a British general, offered London Pleasants his freedom. Pleasants accepted the offer and became a trumpeter in the Royal Army.
London Pleasants’ story is just one of five interactive displays in the exhibit that tells the story of the quest for freedom.
The Phillipsburg Proclamation was the second enticement for slaves to join the Royal Army; Dunmore’s Proclamation of 1775, which offered the first large-scale emancipation of slave and servant labor in the history of colonial British America, was the first.
Born a free man in Philadelphia, 15-year-old James Forten loved his life in the colonies, so much so that he joined a maritime service to fight the British. Captured and offered both his freedom and an education in Britain, Forten requested and received a return to the United States.
This worked well for Forten, according to Mead, as Forten “came back here and became quite wealthy and an abolitionist.
“He could have had his freedom in either place but he chose the United States,” Mead said.
The Treaty of Paris, which marked the British surrender in 1783, promised the return of all property, including slaves. However, the British kept their promise of freedom to the runaways, never returning about 3,000 slaves to former masters and instead freeing them to British territories such as Nova Scotia.
Mead said there were probably many other Blacks who helped the Continental Army — mostly from northern states where some Blacks already had their freedom and slavery was far less brutal — than history accounts for. However, he added that it made sense for slaves in places such as Virginia and the Carolinas to join the Royal Army with its promise of freedom.
“It’s tempting to say one side is fighting for freedom and the other isn’t,” he said. “It’s a complicated story. In some ways the British and the U.S. were competing to say they were the land of liberty. It became a big issue for both sides.”
FROM 15 MILLION ACRES TO 1 MILLION: HOW BLACK PEOPLE LOST THEIR LAND?
BY DAVID LOVE - JUNE 30, 2017
From Atlanta Black Star: At its height, Black land ownership was impressive. At the turn of the 20th century, formerly enslaved Black people and their heirs owned 15 million acres of land, primarily in the South, mostly used for farming. In 1920, the 925,000 African-American farms represented 14 percent of the farms in America. Sadly, things turned for the worse, as 600,000 Black farmers were forced off their land, with only 45,000 Black farms remaining in 1975. Now, Black folks are only 1 percent of rural landowners in the U.S., and under 2 percent of farmers. Of the 1 billion acres of arable land in America, Black people today own a little more than 1 million acres, according to AP.
During the Obama administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture settled with Black farmers for $2.3 billion for their longstanding claims of discrimination in farm loans and other government programs.
Over the years, Black people have lost their land through a number of circumstances, including government action, deception and a reign of domestic terror in the South that forced Black people from their homes through threats of violence and lynching. That terror and economic exploitation precipitated the Great Migration, which resulted in the uprooting of over 6 million Black people from the South and their relocation to the North, Midwest and West between 1916 and 1970.
How we lost the land is an untold story. An investigation by AP documented the process by which people were tricked or intimated out of their property. In this study of 107 land takings in 13 Southern and border states, 406 landowners lost over 24,000 acres of farm and timber land and 85 properties such as city lots and stores. The property, which today is owned by white people and corporations, is valued in the tens of millions of dollars. In recent years, groups such as the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in Atlanta and the Land Loss Prevention Project in Durham, N.C., receive new reports of land takings on a regular basis, while the Penn Center in St. Helena Island, S.C., has gathered 2,000 such cases. One story from the AP provides the context by which families lost their land to thievery and violence:
After midnight on Oct. 4, 1908, 50 hooded white men surrounded the home of a black farmer in Hickman, Ky., and ordered him to come out for a whipping. When David Walker refused and shot at them instead, the mob poured coal oil on his house and set it afire, according to contemporary newspaper accounts. Pleading for mercy, Walker ran out the front door, followed by four screaming children and his wife, carrying a baby in her arms. The mob shot them all, wounding three children and killing the others. Walker’s oldest son never escaped the burning house. No one was ever charged with the killings, and the surviving children were deprived of the farm their father died defending. Land records show that Walker’s 2 1/2-acre farm was simply folded into the property of a white neighbor. The neighbor soon sold it to another man, whose daughter owns the undeveloped land today.
Land is among the most important assets people can own. Certainly, for the rural society in which many African Americans traditionally have lived, land represented prosperity, intergenerational wealth, family and community. According to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), land can be “a vital part of cultural and social identities, a valuable asset to stimulate economic growth and a central component to preserving natural resources and building societies that are inclusive, resilient and sustainable.”
“It’s more about land as a home, it’s about economics and culture, all rolled up into one,” Jennie L. Stephens, executive director of the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation said. Based in Charleston, S.C., the organization serves 15 counties in the Palmetto State, including the Lowcountry, where Gullah-Geechee have struggled to hold onto their ancestral homelands on the Sea Islands in the face of development, gentrification and corporate intrusion. For generations, families have had the land, procured through the blood, sweat and tears of their ancestors, until many are forced to sell it.[...]
(read more)
During the Obama administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture settled with Black farmers for $2.3 billion for their longstanding claims of discrimination in farm loans and other government programs.
Over the years, Black people have lost their land through a number of circumstances, including government action, deception and a reign of domestic terror in the South that forced Black people from their homes through threats of violence and lynching. That terror and economic exploitation precipitated the Great Migration, which resulted in the uprooting of over 6 million Black people from the South and their relocation to the North, Midwest and West between 1916 and 1970.
How we lost the land is an untold story. An investigation by AP documented the process by which people were tricked or intimated out of their property. In this study of 107 land takings in 13 Southern and border states, 406 landowners lost over 24,000 acres of farm and timber land and 85 properties such as city lots and stores. The property, which today is owned by white people and corporations, is valued in the tens of millions of dollars. In recent years, groups such as the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in Atlanta and the Land Loss Prevention Project in Durham, N.C., receive new reports of land takings on a regular basis, while the Penn Center in St. Helena Island, S.C., has gathered 2,000 such cases. One story from the AP provides the context by which families lost their land to thievery and violence:
After midnight on Oct. 4, 1908, 50 hooded white men surrounded the home of a black farmer in Hickman, Ky., and ordered him to come out for a whipping. When David Walker refused and shot at them instead, the mob poured coal oil on his house and set it afire, according to contemporary newspaper accounts. Pleading for mercy, Walker ran out the front door, followed by four screaming children and his wife, carrying a baby in her arms. The mob shot them all, wounding three children and killing the others. Walker’s oldest son never escaped the burning house. No one was ever charged with the killings, and the surviving children were deprived of the farm their father died defending. Land records show that Walker’s 2 1/2-acre farm was simply folded into the property of a white neighbor. The neighbor soon sold it to another man, whose daughter owns the undeveloped land today.
Land is among the most important assets people can own. Certainly, for the rural society in which many African Americans traditionally have lived, land represented prosperity, intergenerational wealth, family and community. According to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), land can be “a vital part of cultural and social identities, a valuable asset to stimulate economic growth and a central component to preserving natural resources and building societies that are inclusive, resilient and sustainable.”
“It’s more about land as a home, it’s about economics and culture, all rolled up into one,” Jennie L. Stephens, executive director of the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation said. Based in Charleston, S.C., the organization serves 15 counties in the Palmetto State, including the Lowcountry, where Gullah-Geechee have struggled to hold onto their ancestral homelands on the Sea Islands in the face of development, gentrification and corporate intrusion. For generations, families have had the land, procured through the blood, sweat and tears of their ancestors, until many are forced to sell it.[...]
(read more)
The Untold Story of Memorial Day: Former Slaves Honoring and Mourning the Dead
The African-American history of the federal holiday has been nearly wiped from public memory.
By Sarah Lazare / AlterNet May 30, 2016
Union General John Logan is often credited with founding Memorial Day. The commander-in-chief of a Union veterans’ organization called the Grand Army of the Republic, Logan issued a decree establishing what was then named “Decoration Day” on May 5, 1868, declaring it “designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”
Today, cities across the North and South claim credit for establishing the first Decoration Day—from Macon, Georgia to Richmond, Virginia to Carbondale, Illinois. Yet, a key story of the holiday has been nearly erased from public memory and most official accounts, including that offered by the the Department of Veterans Affairs.
During the spring of 1865, African-Americans in Charleston, South Carolina—most of them former slaves—held a series of memorials and rituals to honor unnamed fallen Union soldiers and boldly celebrate the struggle against slavery. One of the largest such events took place on May first of that year but had been largely forgotten until David Blight, a history professor at Yale University, found records at a Harvard archive. In a New York Times article published in 2011, Blight described the scene. While it is difficult to pinpoint the precise birthplace of the holiday, it is fair to say that ceremonies like the following are largely erased from the American narrative of Memorial Day.
During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand.
After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”
The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”
The procession was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing the Union marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Several hundred black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantrymen. Within the cemetery enclosure a black children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner” and spirituals before a series of black ministers read from the Bible.
After the dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantrymen participating were the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite.
This story of Memorial Day, also reported by Victoria M. Massie of Vox, was not merely excluded from the history books but appears to have been actively suppressed. The park where the race course prison camp once stood was eventually named Hampton Park after the Confederate General Wade Hampton who became South Carolina’s governor following the civil war.
In 1966, former President Lyndon B. Johnson declared Waterloo, New York to be the official birthplace of Memorial Day. Then, in 1971, Congress established “Memorial Day” as an official federal holiday to honor all Americans who have fallen in U.S. Wars. In an article published in 2013 on Snopes.com, writer David Mikkelson used these official declarations, as well as the decree issued by Logan, to bolster his argument that African-Americans in Charleston probably should not be credited for establishing the holiday. He further noted that numerous other towns and cities claim to have created the first ceremonies. Yet, Mikkelson's reasoning fails to account for the systematic and proven appropriation, erasure and distortion of African-American history by presidents, lawmakers, generals and scholars alike. The fact that the role of African-Americans is missing from the official record is precisely the problem. At the very least, the contribution of Black people in Charleston has been erased from the public narrative of Memorial Day and deserves to be recognized.
World War II veteran Howard Zinn argued in 1976 that the holiday has since become an uncritical celebration of war-making. “Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees,” he wrote. “Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.”
Yet Memorial Day has other troubling modern-day manifestations. Today, while confederate symbols across the United States are increasingly rejected as racist, civil war reenactors still gather in Charleston for a public ceremony, held shortly after Memorial Day, to honor the confederacy on the anniversary of General Stonewall Jackson’s death in 1863. The ceremony is slated to take place next weekend, even after last summer’s white supremacist massacre at Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in nine African-Americans were slaughtered.
Charleston officials have taken some small steps towards recognizing the city's African-American history. Following a community campaign, the city of Charleston finally held its first formal commemoration of the African-American roots of Memorial Day in 2010, and the following year it established a plaque. Yet, the history of former slaves’ efforts to give the union dead a proper burial is missing from the park’s official history, made available online by the Parks Conservancy.
Dot Scott, president of the Charleston branch of the NAACP, told AlterNet, “Many of the issues we have around race are based on the fact that these stories have not been told. It sends the message that the contributions of African-Americans are not valued and respected."
Today, cities across the North and South claim credit for establishing the first Decoration Day—from Macon, Georgia to Richmond, Virginia to Carbondale, Illinois. Yet, a key story of the holiday has been nearly erased from public memory and most official accounts, including that offered by the the Department of Veterans Affairs.
During the spring of 1865, African-Americans in Charleston, South Carolina—most of them former slaves—held a series of memorials and rituals to honor unnamed fallen Union soldiers and boldly celebrate the struggle against slavery. One of the largest such events took place on May first of that year but had been largely forgotten until David Blight, a history professor at Yale University, found records at a Harvard archive. In a New York Times article published in 2011, Blight described the scene. While it is difficult to pinpoint the precise birthplace of the holiday, it is fair to say that ceremonies like the following are largely erased from the American narrative of Memorial Day.
During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand.
After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”
The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”
The procession was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing the Union marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Several hundred black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantrymen. Within the cemetery enclosure a black children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner” and spirituals before a series of black ministers read from the Bible.
After the dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantrymen participating were the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite.
This story of Memorial Day, also reported by Victoria M. Massie of Vox, was not merely excluded from the history books but appears to have been actively suppressed. The park where the race course prison camp once stood was eventually named Hampton Park after the Confederate General Wade Hampton who became South Carolina’s governor following the civil war.
In 1966, former President Lyndon B. Johnson declared Waterloo, New York to be the official birthplace of Memorial Day. Then, in 1971, Congress established “Memorial Day” as an official federal holiday to honor all Americans who have fallen in U.S. Wars. In an article published in 2013 on Snopes.com, writer David Mikkelson used these official declarations, as well as the decree issued by Logan, to bolster his argument that African-Americans in Charleston probably should not be credited for establishing the holiday. He further noted that numerous other towns and cities claim to have created the first ceremonies. Yet, Mikkelson's reasoning fails to account for the systematic and proven appropriation, erasure and distortion of African-American history by presidents, lawmakers, generals and scholars alike. The fact that the role of African-Americans is missing from the official record is precisely the problem. At the very least, the contribution of Black people in Charleston has been erased from the public narrative of Memorial Day and deserves to be recognized.
World War II veteran Howard Zinn argued in 1976 that the holiday has since become an uncritical celebration of war-making. “Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees,” he wrote. “Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.”
Yet Memorial Day has other troubling modern-day manifestations. Today, while confederate symbols across the United States are increasingly rejected as racist, civil war reenactors still gather in Charleston for a public ceremony, held shortly after Memorial Day, to honor the confederacy on the anniversary of General Stonewall Jackson’s death in 1863. The ceremony is slated to take place next weekend, even after last summer’s white supremacist massacre at Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in nine African-Americans were slaughtered.
Charleston officials have taken some small steps towards recognizing the city's African-American history. Following a community campaign, the city of Charleston finally held its first formal commemoration of the African-American roots of Memorial Day in 2010, and the following year it established a plaque. Yet, the history of former slaves’ efforts to give the union dead a proper burial is missing from the park’s official history, made available online by the Parks Conservancy.
Dot Scott, president of the Charleston branch of the NAACP, told AlterNet, “Many of the issues we have around race are based on the fact that these stories have not been told. It sends the message that the contributions of African-Americans are not valued and respected."
African American Civil War Memorial, Spirit of Freedom statue by Ed Hamilton in Washington, D.C.
The Easter Sunday massacre in Colfax, Louisiana, and the awful Supreme Court decision that followed
By Denise Oliver Velez
Sunday Apr 16, 2017 · 6:00 AM PDT
From Daily Kos: When Christians think of the meaning of Easter Sunday, it symbolizes resurrection and hope. When I think of Easter Sunday in the black community, I think of all the ladies in their wonderful hats heading off to church. However, I don’t ever forget that Easter Sunday also marked one of the most horrible massacres of black citizens in U.S. history. It’s hard to erase the images in my mind of black bodies riddled with bullets, blown apart by cannon fire. They died at the hands of white supremacists who lost the Civil War but who won the years ahead, because they were able to destroy Reconstruction. I take a moment of silence and say a prayer for the dead, many of whose names we will never know.
This story from The Root on the Colfax Massacre, written by Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., gives the details. It’s worth reading in its entirety.
In Colfax, La., on Easter Sunday 1873, a mob of white insurgents, including ex-Confederate and Union soldiers, led an assault on the Grant Parish Courthouse, the center of civic life in the community, which was occupied and surrounded — and defended — by black citizens determined to safeguard the results of the state's most recent election. They, too, were armed, but they did not have the ammunition to outlast their foes, who, outflanking them, proceeded to mow down dozens of the courthouse's black defenders, even when they surrendered their weapons. The legal ramifications were as horrifying as the violence — and certainly more enduring; in an altogether different kind of massacre, United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the U.S. Supreme Court tossed prosecutors' charges against the killers in favor of severely limiting the federal government's role in protecting the emancipated from racial targeting, especially at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan.
Historians know this tragedy as the Colfax Massacre, though in the aftermath, even today, some whites refer to it as the Colfax Riot in order to lay blame at the feet of those who, lifeless, could not tell their tale. In his canonical history of the period, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, Eric Foner has called the Colfax Massacre "[t]he bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era."
Listening to the testimony of now Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch (heaven help us all) in which he harped on “judicial precedent” over and over again brought to mind Supreme Court precedents like Dred Scott v. Sanford, Plessy v. Ferguson, and the aforementioned United States v. Cruikshank—all of which have the dubious distinction of residing on lists of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time. ...
...For the detailed story of the massacre and the heinous Supreme Court decision that ensued, read The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction, by Charles Lane.
This story from The Root on the Colfax Massacre, written by Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., gives the details. It’s worth reading in its entirety.
In Colfax, La., on Easter Sunday 1873, a mob of white insurgents, including ex-Confederate and Union soldiers, led an assault on the Grant Parish Courthouse, the center of civic life in the community, which was occupied and surrounded — and defended — by black citizens determined to safeguard the results of the state's most recent election. They, too, were armed, but they did not have the ammunition to outlast their foes, who, outflanking them, proceeded to mow down dozens of the courthouse's black defenders, even when they surrendered their weapons. The legal ramifications were as horrifying as the violence — and certainly more enduring; in an altogether different kind of massacre, United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the U.S. Supreme Court tossed prosecutors' charges against the killers in favor of severely limiting the federal government's role in protecting the emancipated from racial targeting, especially at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan.
Historians know this tragedy as the Colfax Massacre, though in the aftermath, even today, some whites refer to it as the Colfax Riot in order to lay blame at the feet of those who, lifeless, could not tell their tale. In his canonical history of the period, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, Eric Foner has called the Colfax Massacre "[t]he bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era."
Listening to the testimony of now Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch (heaven help us all) in which he harped on “judicial precedent” over and over again brought to mind Supreme Court precedents like Dred Scott v. Sanford, Plessy v. Ferguson, and the aforementioned United States v. Cruikshank—all of which have the dubious distinction of residing on lists of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time. ...
...For the detailed story of the massacre and the heinous Supreme Court decision that ensued, read The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction, by Charles Lane.
The role of slavery and the slave trade in building northern wealth
By Denise Oliver Velez
Sunday Feb 12, 2017
From Daily Kos: On my way to work, I drive past a statue and memorial park dedicated to Sojourner Truth in Port Ewan, Esopus, New York. It depicts young Isabella Baumfree, who was enslaved in that village. When I get to the campus where I teach at SUNY New Paltz, I frequently use the resources of the library — which is named after Sojourner Truth and has documented her time here in Ulster County.
I was pleased to see local news coverage recently about her and the park.
Not many people outside Ulster County know where the abolitionist Sojourner Truth is from. In the 1840s and 1850s, she traveled through New England and Western states teaching about the horrors of slavery. Her message will forever live on through history. “Trying to convert the common people to understand that what was happening was not only a crime but a sin,” said former Ulster County Historian Anne Gordon.
Sojourner Truth was born in the town of Esopus and was sold many times in the county. A statue in Esopus shows the brutality she endured as a slave. Trina Greene made the Sojourner Truth Sculpture, which depicts marks from where her master whipped her. “He whipped her because she spoke only Dutch,” said Greene.
She spent much of her life in Ulster County, but it was on a road in West Park where she escaped slavery and found freedom in Rifton. “She decides she’s in control here and she’s going to decide what happens in her life,” said Gordon. That determination took her to Ulster County Court in Kingston where she sued the man who sold her son into slavery. With that act, she became the first black woman to successfully sue a white man in court...
...It never ceases to amaze that even students who use our school library on an everyday basis, when asked for their thoughts about slavery, immediately mention the South and the Civil War. Those who are not bIack see no connection between their present and our past. If they mention the North at all, it is as the destination point for escape from the South via the Underground Railroad. They cite Harriet Tubman or the place from which former slaves waged mighty abolitionist battles, like those spearheaded by Frederick Douglass (don’t get me started on current White House occupant’s ignorance on Douglass). A few mention ancestors who fought in the Civil War—for the Union. This lopsided view of American history colors current day discussions of race and racism with too much finger-pointing only at the South and white southerners. It is rare to hear discourse on northern culpability. This oversight encourages a disassociation with white privilege benefits reaped by northerners who can say, “but … but … my family came here after slavery was over,” or “my ancestors didn’t own slaves.”
Racism is not regional and the enslavement legacy inherited from the time of the founding of our country affects all of us in the U.S., no matter our color, location, or date of immigration...
...Sylvester Manor was not the only enslavement site on Long Island, as detailed in “Confronting Slavery at Long Island’s Oldest Estates.”
New York City’s slave market was second in size only to Charleston’s. Even after the Revolution, New York was the most significant slaveholding state north of the Mason-Dixon line. In 1790, nearly 40 percent of households in the area immediately around New York City owned slaves — a greater percentage than in any Southern state as a whole, according to one study.
In contrast to the image of large gangs working in cotton fields before retiring to a row of cabins, slaveholdings in New York State were small, with the enslaved often living singly or in small groups, working alongside and sleeping in the same houses as their owners. Privacy was scant, and in contrast to any notion of a less severe Northern slavery, the historical record is full of accounts of harsh punishments for misbehavior. “Slavery in the North was different, but I don’t think it was any easier,” Mr. McGill said. “The enslaved were a lot more scrutinized in those places, a lot more restricted. That would have been very tough to endure.”
Slavery in Southampton, the oldest English settlement in New York, dates almost to its founding in the 1640s. A slave and Indian uprising burned many buildings in the 1650s. Census records show that by 1686, roughly 10 percent of the village’s nearly 800 inhabitants were slaves, many of whom helped work the rich agricultural land. But this is not a part of its history that the town, better known for its spectacular beach and staggeringly expensive real estate, has been eager to embrace. “I think for a while a lot of people didn’t know or didn’t want to acknowledge there were slaves out here,” said Brenda Simmons, executive director of the Southampton African-American Museum, which plans to open in an old barbershop — the village’s first designated African-American landmark — on North Sea Road. Mr. McGill’s visit, she said, “will help confirm the truth of the matter.”...
...
The website for the film includes a wealth of instructional materials. One I use frequently is “Myths About Slavery.” Here’s the PDF:
Contrary to popular belief:
I was pleased to see local news coverage recently about her and the park.
Not many people outside Ulster County know where the abolitionist Sojourner Truth is from. In the 1840s and 1850s, she traveled through New England and Western states teaching about the horrors of slavery. Her message will forever live on through history. “Trying to convert the common people to understand that what was happening was not only a crime but a sin,” said former Ulster County Historian Anne Gordon.
Sojourner Truth was born in the town of Esopus and was sold many times in the county. A statue in Esopus shows the brutality she endured as a slave. Trina Greene made the Sojourner Truth Sculpture, which depicts marks from where her master whipped her. “He whipped her because she spoke only Dutch,” said Greene.
She spent much of her life in Ulster County, but it was on a road in West Park where she escaped slavery and found freedom in Rifton. “She decides she’s in control here and she’s going to decide what happens in her life,” said Gordon. That determination took her to Ulster County Court in Kingston where she sued the man who sold her son into slavery. With that act, she became the first black woman to successfully sue a white man in court...
...It never ceases to amaze that even students who use our school library on an everyday basis, when asked for their thoughts about slavery, immediately mention the South and the Civil War. Those who are not bIack see no connection between their present and our past. If they mention the North at all, it is as the destination point for escape from the South via the Underground Railroad. They cite Harriet Tubman or the place from which former slaves waged mighty abolitionist battles, like those spearheaded by Frederick Douglass (don’t get me started on current White House occupant’s ignorance on Douglass). A few mention ancestors who fought in the Civil War—for the Union. This lopsided view of American history colors current day discussions of race and racism with too much finger-pointing only at the South and white southerners. It is rare to hear discourse on northern culpability. This oversight encourages a disassociation with white privilege benefits reaped by northerners who can say, “but … but … my family came here after slavery was over,” or “my ancestors didn’t own slaves.”
Racism is not regional and the enslavement legacy inherited from the time of the founding of our country affects all of us in the U.S., no matter our color, location, or date of immigration...
...Sylvester Manor was not the only enslavement site on Long Island, as detailed in “Confronting Slavery at Long Island’s Oldest Estates.”
New York City’s slave market was second in size only to Charleston’s. Even after the Revolution, New York was the most significant slaveholding state north of the Mason-Dixon line. In 1790, nearly 40 percent of households in the area immediately around New York City owned slaves — a greater percentage than in any Southern state as a whole, according to one study.
In contrast to the image of large gangs working in cotton fields before retiring to a row of cabins, slaveholdings in New York State were small, with the enslaved often living singly or in small groups, working alongside and sleeping in the same houses as their owners. Privacy was scant, and in contrast to any notion of a less severe Northern slavery, the historical record is full of accounts of harsh punishments for misbehavior. “Slavery in the North was different, but I don’t think it was any easier,” Mr. McGill said. “The enslaved were a lot more scrutinized in those places, a lot more restricted. That would have been very tough to endure.”
Slavery in Southampton, the oldest English settlement in New York, dates almost to its founding in the 1640s. A slave and Indian uprising burned many buildings in the 1650s. Census records show that by 1686, roughly 10 percent of the village’s nearly 800 inhabitants were slaves, many of whom helped work the rich agricultural land. But this is not a part of its history that the town, better known for its spectacular beach and staggeringly expensive real estate, has been eager to embrace. “I think for a while a lot of people didn’t know or didn’t want to acknowledge there were slaves out here,” said Brenda Simmons, executive director of the Southampton African-American Museum, which plans to open in an old barbershop — the village’s first designated African-American landmark — on North Sea Road. Mr. McGill’s visit, she said, “will help confirm the truth of the matter.”...
...
The website for the film includes a wealth of instructional materials. One I use frequently is “Myths About Slavery.” Here’s the PDF:
Contrary to popular belief:
- Slavery was a northern institution
- The North held slaves for over two centuries
- The North abolished slavery only just before the Civil War
- The North dominated the slave trade
- The North built its economy around slavery
- The North industrialized with slave-picked cotton and the profits from slavery
- Slavery was a national institution
- Slavery was practiced by all thirteen colonies
- Slavery was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and practiced by all thirteen original states
- The slave trade was permitted by the federal government until 1808
- Federal laws protected slavery and assisted slave owners in retrieving runaway slaves
- The Union was deeply divided over slavery until the end of the Civil War
- Slavery benefited middle-class families
- Slavery dominated the northern and southern economies during the colonial era and up to the Civil War
- Ordinary people built ships, produced trade goods, and invested in shares of slave voyages
- Workers in all regions benefited economically from slavery and slavery-related businesses
- Consumers bought and benefited from lower prices on goods like coffee, sugar, tobacco, and cotton
- Slavery benefited immigrant families
- Immigrants who arrived after the Civil War still benefited from slavery and its aftermath
- Immigrants flocked to the “land of opportunity” made possible by the unpaid labor of enslaved people
- Immigrants found routes to prosperity which were closed to the families of former slaves
- Federal programs in the 20th century provided white families with aid for education, home ownership, and small businesses
How the Slave Trade Helped Finance Columbia University
By Tanasia Kenney - January 27, 2017
From Atlanta Black Star: New York’s Columbia University is the latest to come forward and publicly address its ties to slavery, joining a number of America’s most esteemed learning institutions in acknowledging their roles in the sale and enslavement of Black bodies.
In a recently published report, Columbia history professor Eric Foner detailed how the school, formerly known as King’s College, profited from the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. A large chunk of the money accrued from the transport and sale of enslaved Africans ultimately helped fund the university’s humble beginnings.
“From the outset, slavery was intertwined with the life of the college,” Foner said. “Of the 10 men who served as presidents of King’s and Columbia between 1754 and the end of the Civil War, at least half owned slaves at one point in their lives. So did the first four treasurers.”
It is no surprise that slavery played a significant role in the establishment of King’s College, as New York, a British colony in the early 1700s, had become a popular hub for trading enslaved bodies in the New World, according to the report. There was no social stigma attached to the purchase of enslaved peoples, and it was customary for major merchants to import entire shipments of Africans in bondage. In fact, it was these merchants who provided significant funding to found what would later become Columbia University.
But the preliminary report also highlighted an aspect of U.S. slavery that’s often overlooked: Enslaved Africans were traded in the North just as they were in the South. While plantation slavery drove the economy of the South, the profits from the Trans-Atlantic slave trade also helped fund the establishment of America’s most prestigious learning institutions in the Northeast, including Harvard, Yale and Brown University.
Just last year, Georgetown University revealed that it auctioned off a whopping 272 enslaved workers in 1838 in order to keep the institution afloat during hard financial times. The sale earned the school nearly $3.3 million in today’s dollars to satisfy its debts. The school then announced in September that it would extend preferential legacy admission privileges to the descendants of the enslaved Africans as a way to atone for its past transgression(s).
“The most appropriate ways for us to redress the participation of our predecessors in the institution of slavery is to address the manifestations of the legacy of slavery in our time,” Georgetown University President John J. DeGioia said in a statement.
Other historic universities also moved to publicly disclose their history with slavery, especially as demands for colleges to be more transparent about their role in the enslavement of Black bodies intensified across campuses nationwide. For instance, Harvard issued a public apology for its failure to address its racist past and recently moved to retire the university seal, which was tied to a notorious slave owner named Isaac Royall. Clemson University broke ground on commemorative markers to honor the lives of its former enslaved workers, while Yale moved to drop the title of “master of residential colleges” from one of its buildings.
“I think it’s critical universities do this,” Craig Steven Wilder, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology history professor specializing in American institutions, told ATTN:. “We are institutions that are founded to produce knowledge and pursue truth and we can’t be cowardly when those truths are uncomfortable for us.”
Now, Columbia University is trying to follow suit.
In an interview with The Atlantic, Foner explained how the project to uncover the institution’s ties to slavery came about. He said the idea for the report was ultimately sparked by Wilder’s book “Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities,” which details the relationship between America’s higher-ed institutions and the enslavement of African-Americans.
“We knew Yale, Harvard and Brown had done something. Princeton is doing something [to address slavery], Foner said. “It seemed like the time had come.”
The history professor went on to point out that King’s College wasn’t like Georgetown, which had a plantation and owned 200 some odd enslaved Africans. School leaders instead owned just a few enslaved workers, but profits made from the trade of said enslaved workers were still significant to the establishment of the college.
“There was an interlocking elite, big merchants, lawyers and so on,” Foner explained. “The Livingstons, the Delanceys, the Watts. All of them had some connection to slavery.”
“King’s College was rather small, but nonetheless, faculty had to be paid and the president, and so on,” he continued. “They didn’t have a campus, they just had a building that cost a lot. So, a lot of the fundraising went into that expense. The colony gave them some money, but they couldn’t live off of it, so the money was mostly from these donations from trustees.”
After the Revolutionary War (when King’s College changed its name to Columbia), slavery was gradually abolished in New York, creating a moderate anti-slavery sentiment. However, Foner said that although New Yorkers wanted to get rid of slavery, they also wanted to get rid of all the Black people and send them back to Africa.
The preliminary report concluded with the Civil War, when many Columbia students rallied for the Union cause. Moving forward, the report, compiled with the help of students in Foner’s research seminar, will continue to fill in the historical gaps all the way into the 20th century.
Foner said he’s not exactly sure of the response his report will garner but said that it’s a part of American history that needs to be acknowledged.
Slavery has “been really ignored in the official histories of Columbia,” he said. “We’re doing what universities are supposed to do, produce knowledge and disseminate it, uncovering a neglected piece of our history. It illuminates the history of not only the school, but of New York, too.”
In a recently published report, Columbia history professor Eric Foner detailed how the school, formerly known as King’s College, profited from the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. A large chunk of the money accrued from the transport and sale of enslaved Africans ultimately helped fund the university’s humble beginnings.
“From the outset, slavery was intertwined with the life of the college,” Foner said. “Of the 10 men who served as presidents of King’s and Columbia between 1754 and the end of the Civil War, at least half owned slaves at one point in their lives. So did the first four treasurers.”
It is no surprise that slavery played a significant role in the establishment of King’s College, as New York, a British colony in the early 1700s, had become a popular hub for trading enslaved bodies in the New World, according to the report. There was no social stigma attached to the purchase of enslaved peoples, and it was customary for major merchants to import entire shipments of Africans in bondage. In fact, it was these merchants who provided significant funding to found what would later become Columbia University.
But the preliminary report also highlighted an aspect of U.S. slavery that’s often overlooked: Enslaved Africans were traded in the North just as they were in the South. While plantation slavery drove the economy of the South, the profits from the Trans-Atlantic slave trade also helped fund the establishment of America’s most prestigious learning institutions in the Northeast, including Harvard, Yale and Brown University.
Just last year, Georgetown University revealed that it auctioned off a whopping 272 enslaved workers in 1838 in order to keep the institution afloat during hard financial times. The sale earned the school nearly $3.3 million in today’s dollars to satisfy its debts. The school then announced in September that it would extend preferential legacy admission privileges to the descendants of the enslaved Africans as a way to atone for its past transgression(s).
“The most appropriate ways for us to redress the participation of our predecessors in the institution of slavery is to address the manifestations of the legacy of slavery in our time,” Georgetown University President John J. DeGioia said in a statement.
Other historic universities also moved to publicly disclose their history with slavery, especially as demands for colleges to be more transparent about their role in the enslavement of Black bodies intensified across campuses nationwide. For instance, Harvard issued a public apology for its failure to address its racist past and recently moved to retire the university seal, which was tied to a notorious slave owner named Isaac Royall. Clemson University broke ground on commemorative markers to honor the lives of its former enslaved workers, while Yale moved to drop the title of “master of residential colleges” from one of its buildings.
“I think it’s critical universities do this,” Craig Steven Wilder, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology history professor specializing in American institutions, told ATTN:. “We are institutions that are founded to produce knowledge and pursue truth and we can’t be cowardly when those truths are uncomfortable for us.”
Now, Columbia University is trying to follow suit.
In an interview with The Atlantic, Foner explained how the project to uncover the institution’s ties to slavery came about. He said the idea for the report was ultimately sparked by Wilder’s book “Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities,” which details the relationship between America’s higher-ed institutions and the enslavement of African-Americans.
“We knew Yale, Harvard and Brown had done something. Princeton is doing something [to address slavery], Foner said. “It seemed like the time had come.”
The history professor went on to point out that King’s College wasn’t like Georgetown, which had a plantation and owned 200 some odd enslaved Africans. School leaders instead owned just a few enslaved workers, but profits made from the trade of said enslaved workers were still significant to the establishment of the college.
“There was an interlocking elite, big merchants, lawyers and so on,” Foner explained. “The Livingstons, the Delanceys, the Watts. All of them had some connection to slavery.”
“King’s College was rather small, but nonetheless, faculty had to be paid and the president, and so on,” he continued. “They didn’t have a campus, they just had a building that cost a lot. So, a lot of the fundraising went into that expense. The colony gave them some money, but they couldn’t live off of it, so the money was mostly from these donations from trustees.”
After the Revolutionary War (when King’s College changed its name to Columbia), slavery was gradually abolished in New York, creating a moderate anti-slavery sentiment. However, Foner said that although New Yorkers wanted to get rid of slavery, they also wanted to get rid of all the Black people and send them back to Africa.
The preliminary report concluded with the Civil War, when many Columbia students rallied for the Union cause. Moving forward, the report, compiled with the help of students in Foner’s research seminar, will continue to fill in the historical gaps all the way into the 20th century.
Foner said he’s not exactly sure of the response his report will garner but said that it’s a part of American history that needs to be acknowledged.
Slavery has “been really ignored in the official histories of Columbia,” he said. “We’re doing what universities are supposed to do, produce knowledge and disseminate it, uncovering a neglected piece of our history. It illuminates the history of not only the school, but of New York, too.”
Devil’s Punchbowl — An American Concentration Camp So Horrific It was Erased from History
Claire Bernish
From Free Thought Project: Say the words concentration camps, and most will surmise the topic surrounds World War II and the Nazis; but the hard labor, constant threat of death, and barbarism these microcosmic hells presented weren’t unique to Adolf Hitler — in just one year, around 20,000 freed slaves perished in the Devil’s Punchbowl — in Natchez, Mississippi, U.S.A.
After the Civil War, a massive exodus of former slaves from Southern plantations trekked northward in hopes of reaching a location of true freedom; but embittered soldiers, resentful the people considered property were now free, had other plans.
One tiny town’s population mushroomed twelvefold from the influx, as researcher Paula Westbrook, who has extensively studied Devil’s Punchbowl, noted,
“When the slaves were released from the plantations during the occupation they overran Natchez. And the population went from about 10,000 to 120,000 overnight.”
Unable to grapple with an instant population swell, the city turned to Union troops still lingering after the war to devise a merciless, impenitent solution.
“So they decided to build an encampment for ’em at Devil’s Punchbowl which they walled off and wouldn’t let ’em out,” former director of the Natchez City Cemetery, Don Estes, explained.
Devil’s Punchbowl is so named for a cavernous, bowl-shaped gulch walled off by tree-topped cliffs — an area unintentionally made perfect for a hellacious prison by nature, herself.
A tangle of lush green now tops bluffs near the Mississippi River in Natchez, hiding past atrocities that took place when Union Army soldiers corralled and captured those freed slaves — in worse conditions than they’d endured previously as slaves on sprawling plantations.
In the unrelenting heat and humidity of the deep South, African American men toiled at hard labor clearing thickets of brush, while women and children — not seen as a viable workforce for the task — languished without food or water behind the locked concrete walls of the camp to die of starvation.
Barbarous treatment didn’t even end when someone died.
“The Union Army did not allow them to remove the bodies from the camp,” Westbrook explained. “They just gave ’em shovels and said bury ’em where they drop.”
Bleak conditions of being cramped inside locked walls and forced to work until exhaustion or death also led to the spread of disease and illness — a little-discussed but insidious issue for former slaves, killing up to one million individuals following the ostensive emancipation.
“Disease broke out among ’em, smallpox being the main one,” Estes said of the concentration camp prisoners. “And thousands and thousands died. They were begging to get out. ‘Turn me loose and I’ll go home back to the plantation! Anywhere but there.’”
However, a dearth of information about these mostly postbellum camps indeed leaves significant leeway for conjecture, and a smattering of conclusions say those detained preferred the slightly greater freedom compared to brutality found on the plantations. Additional critics dispute Westbrook and Estes, and the number who died in the Natchez camps, saying the number is likely closer to just 1,000 — but without methodical record-keeping, the figure is impossible to verify with certainty. Either way, this black eye on American history is still one of the largest and most brutal acts of state-sanctioned death this country has ever seen.
As the Civil War drew to a close and during the nascent stages of emancipation, those who had been thrust into slavery and putatively freed held a precarious place outside the society of their enslavement. Thus, ‘legitimately’ freed individuals and ‘escapees,’ alike, were captured and held in ‘contraband camps’ — so named because, as commodities, they were considered contraband by Union troops who had no qualms about perpetuating slavery for their own benefit. Three such camps existed in the Devil’s Punchbowl area of Natchez.
Historians’ descriptions of Devil’s Punchbowl have been loosely anecdotally backed by locals, who describe human skeletons occasionally washing free from the location in times of heavy rains and flooding.
Wild peach trees now dot the basin where human beings, who believed they’d finally won freedom from slavery, sweated through work for different captors until death granted the ultimate reprieve — but Mississippians know better than to taste the bitter fruit fertilized with the blood of atrocity.
Like so much about the history of the United States, sadistic acts perpetrated by officials acting on behalf of the government have been criminally downplayed to lessen shame and facilitate collective memory loss. But there can be no doubt — whether unintentionally or by design — thousands succumbed to inhumane conditions at these camps, under added duress of lacking the freedom so basic, it’s called the cornerstone of the nation.
Whatever the full truth about Devil’s Punchbowl, it’s a veritable guarantee no history book will be honest or thorough enough to shed light on the excruciating conditions akin to Nazi concentration camps — or even that forced, slave labor continued while America readjusted its crooked and tarnished halo after the Civil War.
After the Civil War, a massive exodus of former slaves from Southern plantations trekked northward in hopes of reaching a location of true freedom; but embittered soldiers, resentful the people considered property were now free, had other plans.
One tiny town’s population mushroomed twelvefold from the influx, as researcher Paula Westbrook, who has extensively studied Devil’s Punchbowl, noted,
“When the slaves were released from the plantations during the occupation they overran Natchez. And the population went from about 10,000 to 120,000 overnight.”
Unable to grapple with an instant population swell, the city turned to Union troops still lingering after the war to devise a merciless, impenitent solution.
“So they decided to build an encampment for ’em at Devil’s Punchbowl which they walled off and wouldn’t let ’em out,” former director of the Natchez City Cemetery, Don Estes, explained.
Devil’s Punchbowl is so named for a cavernous, bowl-shaped gulch walled off by tree-topped cliffs — an area unintentionally made perfect for a hellacious prison by nature, herself.
A tangle of lush green now tops bluffs near the Mississippi River in Natchez, hiding past atrocities that took place when Union Army soldiers corralled and captured those freed slaves — in worse conditions than they’d endured previously as slaves on sprawling plantations.
In the unrelenting heat and humidity of the deep South, African American men toiled at hard labor clearing thickets of brush, while women and children — not seen as a viable workforce for the task — languished without food or water behind the locked concrete walls of the camp to die of starvation.
Barbarous treatment didn’t even end when someone died.
“The Union Army did not allow them to remove the bodies from the camp,” Westbrook explained. “They just gave ’em shovels and said bury ’em where they drop.”
Bleak conditions of being cramped inside locked walls and forced to work until exhaustion or death also led to the spread of disease and illness — a little-discussed but insidious issue for former slaves, killing up to one million individuals following the ostensive emancipation.
“Disease broke out among ’em, smallpox being the main one,” Estes said of the concentration camp prisoners. “And thousands and thousands died. They were begging to get out. ‘Turn me loose and I’ll go home back to the plantation! Anywhere but there.’”
However, a dearth of information about these mostly postbellum camps indeed leaves significant leeway for conjecture, and a smattering of conclusions say those detained preferred the slightly greater freedom compared to brutality found on the plantations. Additional critics dispute Westbrook and Estes, and the number who died in the Natchez camps, saying the number is likely closer to just 1,000 — but without methodical record-keeping, the figure is impossible to verify with certainty. Either way, this black eye on American history is still one of the largest and most brutal acts of state-sanctioned death this country has ever seen.
As the Civil War drew to a close and during the nascent stages of emancipation, those who had been thrust into slavery and putatively freed held a precarious place outside the society of their enslavement. Thus, ‘legitimately’ freed individuals and ‘escapees,’ alike, were captured and held in ‘contraband camps’ — so named because, as commodities, they were considered contraband by Union troops who had no qualms about perpetuating slavery for their own benefit. Three such camps existed in the Devil’s Punchbowl area of Natchez.
Historians’ descriptions of Devil’s Punchbowl have been loosely anecdotally backed by locals, who describe human skeletons occasionally washing free from the location in times of heavy rains and flooding.
Wild peach trees now dot the basin where human beings, who believed they’d finally won freedom from slavery, sweated through work for different captors until death granted the ultimate reprieve — but Mississippians know better than to taste the bitter fruit fertilized with the blood of atrocity.
Like so much about the history of the United States, sadistic acts perpetrated by officials acting on behalf of the government have been criminally downplayed to lessen shame and facilitate collective memory loss. But there can be no doubt — whether unintentionally or by design — thousands succumbed to inhumane conditions at these camps, under added duress of lacking the freedom so basic, it’s called the cornerstone of the nation.
Whatever the full truth about Devil’s Punchbowl, it’s a veritable guarantee no history book will be honest or thorough enough to shed light on the excruciating conditions akin to Nazi concentration camps — or even that forced, slave labor continued while America readjusted its crooked and tarnished halo after the Civil War.
185th anniversary of Nat Turner's rebellion
From Philly Tribune: ...Of course they wouldn’t have. Instead, based on their character and history, they would have engaged in peaceful revolution by peacefully protesting, peacefully petitioning, and peacefully relying on the system to do the right thing. But, as JFK prophesied, America’s racist legal lynching system made their violence inevitable.
The same applies even much more clearly to Nat Turner and what he did in response to racist injustice exactly 185 years ago from August 21 through 23, 1831.
By the way, this man known as Nat Turner, born October 2, 1800 in Southampton County, Virginia, never accepted that name. Although history books refer to this intelligent and literate individual as “Nat Turner,” he, his family, and friends never referred to him that way because he refused to acknowledge ownership by Samuel Turner, the man who had purchased him as a child. He refused because he knew he was an African who could never be truly owned.
Nat’s enslaved father had escaped when Nat was young. And his father’s mother at age 13 had been captured in Ghana and was shipped to America. She was a member of the Akan ethnic group, in particular the Coromantee, which was notoriously rebellious against European and American enslavement- so much so that a proposed law was introduced in 1765 to ban their importation into the colonies because they were not “docile” enough. However, it never became law because their physical strength made them potentially excellent laborers.
Although he came from a bloodline that advocated warfare in self-defense, he was deeply religious. In fact, he wrote that he “studiously avoided mixing in society… (by) devoting (his) time to... praying.” His love for Christianity led him to become a pastor, later known as “The Prophet.” After his escape from slavery in 1821, he returned to the plantation a month afterward because, as he pointed out, the Holy Spirit in a vision told him to.
Four years later, he had another vision, this time while in the work field where, as he reported, he saw “drops of blood on the corn, as though it were dew from heaven, and I communicated it to many, both Black and white….”
In 1828, he had a third vision, and it was in this one in which, as he recalled, “the Spirit… said the Serpent was loosened and Christ… (stated) I should fight against the Serpent… (and) should… slay my enemies with their own weapons.” In 1830, he was transported to the home of Joseph Travis who was the new husband of the widow of Thomas Moore, the man who had purchased Nat after Samuel Turner’s death.
A year later, he received a fourth sign, and this was in the form of a solar eclipse that directed him to strike a serious blow against the Serpent’s slavery. As a result, he informed four compatriots, and together they planned the attack for July 4. But his illness caused it to be rescheduled.
His final sign came on August 13 in the form of another solar eclipse. It was then that the date of August 21, 1831 was set. And it was at 2 a.m. on that date that the five-foot-eight-inch, 160-pound, broad-shouldered, slightly goateed, large-eye Nat and his expanded cadre of six men began their mission, stopping first at the home of the slave-owning Travis family where each occupant was executed.
It was during the August 22 midday march toward Jerusalem, Virginia that a militia and then state and federal troops moved in on Nat and his soldiers. But Nat and some others escaped, with Nat evading capture for more than two months before being tracked down on October 30. Less than a week later, on November 5, he was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death. And on November 11, he was hanged, skinned, beheaded, and quartered, with body parts being dispensed as souvenirs.
Nat and his army- a group that had grown to approximately 70 Blacks, including about 40 enslaved and 30 free (with nearly 300 Blacks suspected of having provided direct or indirect assistance)- ultimately killed 55 whites but spared many others. Despite Nat’s death, he was victorious in putting the fear of God in slaveholders throughout the country.
Those who say Nat overreacted must ask what was the alternative. He couldn’t sue for freedom because Blacks had no legal standing in court. He couldn’t go on strike because state legislatures enacted laws across the country, like the 1705 Virginia law, proclaiming that “if any slave resists his master… (and is beaten by his master) and shall happen to be killed…, the master shall be free of all punishment….” Court decisions were just as bad. In North Carolina v. Mann, for example, the state Supreme Court in 1830 ruled “slave masters have absolute authority over slaves” and cannot be found guilty of any crime committed against them.
More than 150 years of scattered racist legislation and court decisions were made uniform in 1857 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Blacks have “no rights which the white man was bound to respect….” That old legal system sounds kinda like today’s legal system in terms of Blacks getting no courthouse justice, doesn’t it? If Brother Nat could have engaged in peaceful revolution by peacefully protesting, peacefully petitioning, and peacefully relying on the system to do the right thing, he- as a Christian minister- would have. But America’s brutal slave system, which was created by its racist legal system, wouldn’t allow that. Therefore, his actions were not only inevitable but necessary. And because of him, I’m “free” today.
The same applies even much more clearly to Nat Turner and what he did in response to racist injustice exactly 185 years ago from August 21 through 23, 1831.
By the way, this man known as Nat Turner, born October 2, 1800 in Southampton County, Virginia, never accepted that name. Although history books refer to this intelligent and literate individual as “Nat Turner,” he, his family, and friends never referred to him that way because he refused to acknowledge ownership by Samuel Turner, the man who had purchased him as a child. He refused because he knew he was an African who could never be truly owned.
Nat’s enslaved father had escaped when Nat was young. And his father’s mother at age 13 had been captured in Ghana and was shipped to America. She was a member of the Akan ethnic group, in particular the Coromantee, which was notoriously rebellious against European and American enslavement- so much so that a proposed law was introduced in 1765 to ban their importation into the colonies because they were not “docile” enough. However, it never became law because their physical strength made them potentially excellent laborers.
Although he came from a bloodline that advocated warfare in self-defense, he was deeply religious. In fact, he wrote that he “studiously avoided mixing in society… (by) devoting (his) time to... praying.” His love for Christianity led him to become a pastor, later known as “The Prophet.” After his escape from slavery in 1821, he returned to the plantation a month afterward because, as he pointed out, the Holy Spirit in a vision told him to.
Four years later, he had another vision, this time while in the work field where, as he reported, he saw “drops of blood on the corn, as though it were dew from heaven, and I communicated it to many, both Black and white….”
In 1828, he had a third vision, and it was in this one in which, as he recalled, “the Spirit… said the Serpent was loosened and Christ… (stated) I should fight against the Serpent… (and) should… slay my enemies with their own weapons.” In 1830, he was transported to the home of Joseph Travis who was the new husband of the widow of Thomas Moore, the man who had purchased Nat after Samuel Turner’s death.
A year later, he received a fourth sign, and this was in the form of a solar eclipse that directed him to strike a serious blow against the Serpent’s slavery. As a result, he informed four compatriots, and together they planned the attack for July 4. But his illness caused it to be rescheduled.
His final sign came on August 13 in the form of another solar eclipse. It was then that the date of August 21, 1831 was set. And it was at 2 a.m. on that date that the five-foot-eight-inch, 160-pound, broad-shouldered, slightly goateed, large-eye Nat and his expanded cadre of six men began their mission, stopping first at the home of the slave-owning Travis family where each occupant was executed.
It was during the August 22 midday march toward Jerusalem, Virginia that a militia and then state and federal troops moved in on Nat and his soldiers. But Nat and some others escaped, with Nat evading capture for more than two months before being tracked down on October 30. Less than a week later, on November 5, he was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death. And on November 11, he was hanged, skinned, beheaded, and quartered, with body parts being dispensed as souvenirs.
Nat and his army- a group that had grown to approximately 70 Blacks, including about 40 enslaved and 30 free (with nearly 300 Blacks suspected of having provided direct or indirect assistance)- ultimately killed 55 whites but spared many others. Despite Nat’s death, he was victorious in putting the fear of God in slaveholders throughout the country.
Those who say Nat overreacted must ask what was the alternative. He couldn’t sue for freedom because Blacks had no legal standing in court. He couldn’t go on strike because state legislatures enacted laws across the country, like the 1705 Virginia law, proclaiming that “if any slave resists his master… (and is beaten by his master) and shall happen to be killed…, the master shall be free of all punishment….” Court decisions were just as bad. In North Carolina v. Mann, for example, the state Supreme Court in 1830 ruled “slave masters have absolute authority over slaves” and cannot be found guilty of any crime committed against them.
More than 150 years of scattered racist legislation and court decisions were made uniform in 1857 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Blacks have “no rights which the white man was bound to respect….” That old legal system sounds kinda like today’s legal system in terms of Blacks getting no courthouse justice, doesn’t it? If Brother Nat could have engaged in peaceful revolution by peacefully protesting, peacefully petitioning, and peacefully relying on the system to do the right thing, he- as a Christian minister- would have. But America’s brutal slave system, which was created by its racist legal system, wouldn’t allow that. Therefore, his actions were not only inevitable but necessary. And because of him, I’m “free” today.
PAUL ROBESON, a brief biography
Paul Robeson was a famous African-American athlete, singer, actor, and advocate for the civil rights of people around the world. He rose to prominence in a time when segregation was legal in the United States, and Black people were being lynched by racist mobs, especially in the South.
Born on April 9, 1898 in Princeton, New Jersey, Paul Robeson was the youngest of five children. His father was a runaway slave who went on to graduate from Lincoln University, and his mother came from an abolitionist Quaker family. Robeson's family knew both hardship and the determination to rise above it. His own life was no less challenging.
In 1915, Paul Robeson won a four-year academic scholarship to Rutgers University. Despite violence and racism from teammates, he won 15 varsity letters in sports (baseball, basketball, track) and was twice named to the All-American Football Team. He received the Phi Beta Kappa key in his junior year, belonged to the Cap & Skull Honor Society, and graduated as Valedictorian. However, it wasn't until 1995, 19 years after his death, that Paul Robeson was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.
At Columbia Law School (1919-1923), Robeson met and married Eslanda Cordoza Goode, who was to become the first Black woman to head a pathology laboratory. He took a job with a law firm, but left when a white secretary refused to take dictation from him. He left the practice of law to use his artistic talents in theater and music to promote African and African-American history and culture.
In London, Robeson earned international acclaim for his lead role in Othello, for which he won the Donaldson Award for Best Acting Performance (1944), and performed in Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones and All God's Chillun Got Wings. He is known for changing the lines of the Showboat song "Old Man River" from the meek "...I'm tired of livin' and 'feared of dyin'....," to a declaration of resistance, "... I must keep fightin' until I'm dying....". His 11 films included Body and Soul (1924), Jericho (1937), and Proud Valley (1939). Robeson's travels taught him that racism was not as virulent in Europe as in the U.S. At home, it was difficult to find restaurants that would serve him, theaters in New York would only seat Blacks in the upper balconies, and his performances were often surrounded with threats or outright harassment. In London, on the other hand, Robeson's opening night performance of Emperor Jones brought the audience to its feet with cheers for twelve encores.
Paul Robeson used his deep baritone voice to promote Black spirituals, to share the cultures of other countries, and to benefit the labor and social movements of his time. He sang for peace and justice in 25 languages throughout the U.S., Europe, the Soviet Union, and Africa. Robeson became known as a citizen of the world, equally comfortable with the people of Moscow, Nairobi, and Harlem. Among his friends were future African leader Jomo Kenyatta, India's Nehru, historian Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, anarchist Emma Goldman, and writers James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. In 1933, Robeson donated the proceeds of All God's Chillun to Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler's Germany. At a 1937 rally for the anti-fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War, he declared, "The artist must elect to fight for Freedom or for Slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative." In New York in 1939, he premiered in Earl Robinson's Ballad for Americans, a cantata celebrating the multi-ethnic, multi-racial face of America. It was greeted with the largest audience response since Orson Welles' famous "War of the Worlds."
During the 1940s, Robeson continued to perform and to speak out against racism, in support of labor, and for peace. He was a champion of working people and organized labor. He spoke and performed at strike rallies, conferences, and labor festivals worldwide. As a passionate believer in international cooperation, Robeson protested the growing Cold War and worked tirelessly for friendship and respect between the U.S. and the USSR. In 1945, he headed an organization that challenged President Truman to support an anti-lynching law. In the late 1940s, when dissent was scarcely tolerated in the U.S., Robeson openly questioned why African Americans should fight in the army of a government that tolerated racism. Because of his outspokenness, he was accused by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) of being a Communist. Robeson saw this as an attack on the democratic rights of everyone who worked for international friendship and for equality. The accusation nearly ended his career. Eighty of his concerts were canceled, and in 1949 two interracial outdoor concerts in Peekskill, N.Y. were attacked by racist mobs while state police stood by. Robeson responded, "I'm going to sing wherever the people want me to sing...and I won't be frightened by crosses burning in Peekskill or anywhere else."
In 1950, the U.S. revoked Robeson's passport, leading to an eight-year battle to resecure it and to travel again. During those years, Robeson studied Chinese, met with Albert Einstein to discuss the prospects for world peace, published his autobiography, Here I Stand, and sang at Carnegie Hall. Two major labor-related events took place during this time. In 1952 and 1953, he held two concerts at Peace Arch Park on the U.S.-Canadian border, singing to 30-40,000 people in both countries. In 1957, he made a transatlantic radiophone broadcast from New York to coal miners in Wales. In 1960, Robeson made his last concert tour to New Zealand and Australia. In ill health, Paul Robeson retired from public life in 1963. He died on January 23, 1976, at age 77, in Philadelphia.
Born on April 9, 1898 in Princeton, New Jersey, Paul Robeson was the youngest of five children. His father was a runaway slave who went on to graduate from Lincoln University, and his mother came from an abolitionist Quaker family. Robeson's family knew both hardship and the determination to rise above it. His own life was no less challenging.
In 1915, Paul Robeson won a four-year academic scholarship to Rutgers University. Despite violence and racism from teammates, he won 15 varsity letters in sports (baseball, basketball, track) and was twice named to the All-American Football Team. He received the Phi Beta Kappa key in his junior year, belonged to the Cap & Skull Honor Society, and graduated as Valedictorian. However, it wasn't until 1995, 19 years after his death, that Paul Robeson was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.
At Columbia Law School (1919-1923), Robeson met and married Eslanda Cordoza Goode, who was to become the first Black woman to head a pathology laboratory. He took a job with a law firm, but left when a white secretary refused to take dictation from him. He left the practice of law to use his artistic talents in theater and music to promote African and African-American history and culture.
In London, Robeson earned international acclaim for his lead role in Othello, for which he won the Donaldson Award for Best Acting Performance (1944), and performed in Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones and All God's Chillun Got Wings. He is known for changing the lines of the Showboat song "Old Man River" from the meek "...I'm tired of livin' and 'feared of dyin'....," to a declaration of resistance, "... I must keep fightin' until I'm dying....". His 11 films included Body and Soul (1924), Jericho (1937), and Proud Valley (1939). Robeson's travels taught him that racism was not as virulent in Europe as in the U.S. At home, it was difficult to find restaurants that would serve him, theaters in New York would only seat Blacks in the upper balconies, and his performances were often surrounded with threats or outright harassment. In London, on the other hand, Robeson's opening night performance of Emperor Jones brought the audience to its feet with cheers for twelve encores.
Paul Robeson used his deep baritone voice to promote Black spirituals, to share the cultures of other countries, and to benefit the labor and social movements of his time. He sang for peace and justice in 25 languages throughout the U.S., Europe, the Soviet Union, and Africa. Robeson became known as a citizen of the world, equally comfortable with the people of Moscow, Nairobi, and Harlem. Among his friends were future African leader Jomo Kenyatta, India's Nehru, historian Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, anarchist Emma Goldman, and writers James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. In 1933, Robeson donated the proceeds of All God's Chillun to Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler's Germany. At a 1937 rally for the anti-fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War, he declared, "The artist must elect to fight for Freedom or for Slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative." In New York in 1939, he premiered in Earl Robinson's Ballad for Americans, a cantata celebrating the multi-ethnic, multi-racial face of America. It was greeted with the largest audience response since Orson Welles' famous "War of the Worlds."
During the 1940s, Robeson continued to perform and to speak out against racism, in support of labor, and for peace. He was a champion of working people and organized labor. He spoke and performed at strike rallies, conferences, and labor festivals worldwide. As a passionate believer in international cooperation, Robeson protested the growing Cold War and worked tirelessly for friendship and respect between the U.S. and the USSR. In 1945, he headed an organization that challenged President Truman to support an anti-lynching law. In the late 1940s, when dissent was scarcely tolerated in the U.S., Robeson openly questioned why African Americans should fight in the army of a government that tolerated racism. Because of his outspokenness, he was accused by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) of being a Communist. Robeson saw this as an attack on the democratic rights of everyone who worked for international friendship and for equality. The accusation nearly ended his career. Eighty of his concerts were canceled, and in 1949 two interracial outdoor concerts in Peekskill, N.Y. were attacked by racist mobs while state police stood by. Robeson responded, "I'm going to sing wherever the people want me to sing...and I won't be frightened by crosses burning in Peekskill or anywhere else."
In 1950, the U.S. revoked Robeson's passport, leading to an eight-year battle to resecure it and to travel again. During those years, Robeson studied Chinese, met with Albert Einstein to discuss the prospects for world peace, published his autobiography, Here I Stand, and sang at Carnegie Hall. Two major labor-related events took place during this time. In 1952 and 1953, he held two concerts at Peace Arch Park on the U.S.-Canadian border, singing to 30-40,000 people in both countries. In 1957, he made a transatlantic radiophone broadcast from New York to coal miners in Wales. In 1960, Robeson made his last concert tour to New Zealand and Australia. In ill health, Paul Robeson retired from public life in 1963. He died on January 23, 1976, at age 77, in Philadelphia.
Slaves: The Capital that Made Capitalism
Julia Ott
From Public Seminar: Racialized chattel slaves were the capital that made capitalism. While most theories of capitalism set slavery apart, as something utterly distinct, because under slavery, workers do not labor for a wage, new historical research reveals that for centuries, a single economic system encompassed both the plantation and the factory.
At the dawn of the industrial age commentators like Rev. Thomas Malthus could not envision that capital — an asset that is used but not consumed in the production of goods and services — could compound and diversify its forms, increasing productivity and engendering economic growth. Yet, ironically, when Malthus penned his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, the economies of Western Europe already had crawled their way out of the so-called “Malthusian trap.” The New World yielded vast quantities of “drug foods” like tobacco, tea, coffee, chocolate, and sugar for world markets. Europeans worked a little bit harder to satiate their hunger for these “drug foods.” The luxury-commodities of the seventeenth century became integrated into the new middle-class rituals like tea-drinking in the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, these commodities became a caloric and stimulative necessity for the denizens of the dark satanic mills. The New World yielded food for proletarians and fiber for factories at reasonable (even falling) prices. The “industrious revolution” that began in the sixteenth century set the stage for the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
But the “demand-side” tells only part of the story. A new form of capital, racialized chattel slaves, proved essential for the industrious revolution — and for the industrial one that followed.
The systematic application of African slaves in staple export crop production began in the sixteenth century, with sugar in Brazil. The African slave trade populated the plantations of the Caribbean, landing on the shores of the Chesapeake at the end of the seventeenth century. African slaves held the legal status of chattel: moveable, alienable property. When owners hold living creatures as chattel, they gain additional property rights: the ownership of the offspring of any chattel, and the ownership of their offspring, and so on and so forth. Chattel becomes self-augmenting capital.
While slavery existed in human societies since prehistoric times, chattel status had never been applied so thoroughly to human beings as it would be to Africans and African-Americans beginning in the sixteenth century. But this was not done easily, especially in those New World regions where African slaves survived, worked alongside European indentured servants and landless “free” men and women, and bore offspring — as they did in Britain’s mainland colonies in North America.
In the seventeenth century, African slaves and European indentured servants worked together to build what Ira Berlin characterizes as a “society with slaves” along the Chesapeake Bay. These Africans were slaves, but before the end of the seventeenth century, these Africans were not chattel, not fully. Planters and overseers didn’t use them that differently than their indentured servants. Slaves and servants alike were subject to routine corporeal punishment. Slaves occupied the furthest point along a continuum of unequal and coercive labor relations. (Also, see here and here.) Even so, 20% of the Africans brought into the Chesapeake before 1675 became free, and some of those freed even received the head-right — a plot of land — promised to European indentures. Some of those free Africans would command white indentures and own African slaves.
To the British inhabitants of the Chesapeake, Africans looked different. They sounded different. They acted different. But that was true of the Irish, as well. Africans were pagans, but the kind of people who wound up indentured in the Chesapeake weren’t exactly model Christians. European and African laborers worked, fornicated, fought, wept, birthed, ate, died, drank, danced, traded with one another, and with the indigenous population. Neither laws nor customs set them apart.
And this would become a problem.
By the 1670s, large landowners — some local planters, some absentees — began to consolidate plantations. This pushed the head-rights out to the least-productive lands on the frontier. In 1676, poor whites joined forces with those of African descent under the leadership of Nathaniel Bacon. They torched Jamestown, the colony’s capital. It took British troops several years to bring the Chesapeake under control.
Ultimately, planter elites thwarted class conflict by writing laws and by modeling and encouraging social practices that persuaded those with white skin to imagine that tremendous social significance — inherent difference and inferiority — lay underneath black skin. (Also, see here and here.) New laws regulated social relations — sex, marriage, sociability, trade, assembly, religion — between the “races” that those very laws, in fact, helped to create.
The law of chattel applied to African and African-descended slaves to the fullest extent on eighteenth century plantations. Under racialized chattel slavery, master-enslavers possessed the right to torture and maim, the right to kill, the right to rape, the right to alienate, and the right to own offspring — specifically, the offspring of the female slave. The exploitation of enslaved women’s reproductive labor became a prerogative that masters shared with other white men. Any offspring resulting from rape increased the master’s stock of capital.
Global commerce in slaves and the commodities they produced gave rise to modern finance, to new industries, and to wage-labor in the eighteenth century. Anchored in London, complex trans-Atlantic networks of trading partnerships, insurers, and banks financed the trade in slaves and slave-produced commodities. (Also, see here.) Merchant-financiers located in the seaports all around the Atlantic world provided a form of international currency by discounting the bills of exchange generated in the “triangle trade.” These merchant-financiers connected British creditors to colonial planter-debtors. Some of the world’s first financial derivatives — cotton futures contracts — traded on the Cotton Exchange in Liverpool. British industry blossomed. According to Eric Williams, the capital accumulated from the transatlantic trade in slaves and slave-produced commodities financed British sugar refining, rum distillation, metal-working, gun-making, cotton manufacture, transportation infrastructure, and even James Watt’s steam engine.
After the American Revolution, racialized chattel slavery appeared — to some — as inconsistent with the natural rights and liberties of man. Northern states emancipated their few enslaved residents. But more often, racialized chattel slavery served as the negative referent that affirmed the freedom of white males. (Also, see here.) In Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Thomas Jefferson — who never freed his enslaved sister-in-law, the mother of his own children — postulated that skin color signaled immutable, inheritable inferiority:
It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction… blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind … This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.
Even so, the former plantation colonies of the Upper South stood in a sorry state after Independence, beset by plummeting commodity prices and depleted soils. After the introduction of the cotton gin in 1791, these master-enslavers found a market for their surplus slave-capital.
The expanding cotton frontier needed capital and the Upper South provided it. Racialized chattel slavery proved itself the most efficient way to produce the world’s most important crop. The U.S. produced no cotton for export in 1790. In the antebellum period, the United States supplied most of the world’s most traded commodity, the key raw ingredient of the Industrial Revolution. Thanks to cotton, the United States ranked as the world’s largest economy on the eve of the Civil War.
From about 1790 until the Civil War, slave-traders and enslavers chained 1 million Americans of African descent into coffles and marched or shipped them down to southeast and southwest states and territories. They were sold at auction houses located in every city in the greater Mississippi Valley.
Capital and capitalist constituted one another at auction. At auction, slaves were stripped and assaulted to judge their strength and their capacity to produce more capital or to gratify the sexual appetites of masters. Perceived markers of docility or defiance informed the imaginative, deeply social practice of valuing slave-capital. In this capital market, Walter Johnson reveals, slaves shaped their sale and masters bought their own selves.
After auction, reconstituted coffles traveled ever deeper into the dark heart of the Cotton Kingdom (also, see here) and after 1836, into the new Republic of Texas. Five times more slaves lived in the United States in 1861 than in 1790, despite the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 and despite the high levels of infant mortality in the Cotton Kingdom. Slavery was no dying institution.
By 1820, the slave-labor camps that stretched west from South Carolina to Arkansas and south to the Gulf Coast allowed the United States to achieve dominance in the world market for cotton, the most crucial commodity of the Industrial Revolution. At that date, U.S. cotton was the world’s most widely traded commodity. Without those exports, the national economy as a whole could not acquire the goods and the credit it required from abroad.
And the Industrial Revolution that produced those goods depended absolutely on what Kenneth Pomeranz identifies as the “ghost acres” of the New World: those acres seeded, tended, and harvested by slaves of African descent. Pomeranz estimates that if, in 1830, Great Britain had to grow for itself, on its own soil the calories that its workers consumed as sugar, or if it had to raise enough sheep to replace the cotton it imported from the United States, this would have required no less than an additional 25 million acres of land.
In New England and (mostly) Manchester, waged-workers spun cotton thread which steam-powered mills spun into cloth. Once a luxury good, cotton cloth now radically transformed the way human beings across the globe outfitted themselves and their surroundings. Manchester and Lowell discovered an enormous market in the same African-American slaves that grew, tended and cleaned raw cotton, along with the same workers who operated the machines that spun and wove that cotton into cloth. According to Seth Rockman’s forthcoming book, Plantation Goods and the National Economy of Slavery, the ready-made clothing industry emerged in response to the demand from planters for cheap garments to clothe their slaves.
The explosion in cotton supply did not occur simply because more land came under cultivation. It came from increased productivity, as new work by Ed Baptist illustrates. The Cotton Kings combined the bullwhip with new methods of surveilling, measuring, and accounting for the productivity of the enslaved, radically reorganizing patterns of plantation labor. Planter-enslavers compelled their slave-capital to invent ways to increase their productivity — think of bidexterous Patsey in Solomon Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave. At the end of every day, the overseer weighed the pickings of each individual, chalking up the numbers on a slate. Results were compared to each individual’s quota. Shortfalls were “settled” in lashes. Later the master copied those picking totals into his ledger and erased the slate (both mass-produced by burgeoning new industries up North). Then he set new quotas. And the quotas always increased. Between 1800 and 1860, productivity increases on established plantations matched the productivity increases of the workers that tended to the spinning machines in Manchester in the same period, according to Ed Baptist.
Slavery proved crucial in the emergence of American finance. Profits from commerce, finance, and insurance related to cotton and to slaves flowed to merchant-financiers located in New Orleans and mid-Atlantic port cities, including New York City, where a global financial center grew up on Wall Street.
Cotton Kings themselves devised financial innovations that channeled the savings of investors across the nation and Western Europe to the Mississippi Valley. Cotton Kings, slave traders, and cotton merchants demanded vast amounts of credit to fund their ceaseless speculation and expansion. Planter-enslavers held valuable, liquid collateral: 2 million slaves worth $2 billion, a third of the wealth owned by all U.S. citizens, according to Ed Baptist. With the help of firms like Baring Brothers, Brown Brothers, and Rothschilds, the Cotton Kings sold bonds to capitalize new banks from which they secured loans (pledging their slaves and land for collateral). These bonds were secured by the full faith and credit of the state that chartered the bank. Even as northern states and European empires emancipated their own slaves, investors from these regions shared in the profits of the slave-labor camps in the Cotton Kingdom.
The Cotton Kings did something that neither Freddy, nor Fannie, nor any of “too big to fail” banks managed to do. They secured an explicit and total government guarantee for their banks, placing taxpayers on the hook for interest and principal.
It all ended in the Panic of 1837, when the bubble in southeastern land and slaves burst. Southern taxpayers refused to pay the debts of the planter-banks. Southern States defaulted on those bonds, hampering the South’s ability to raise money through the securities markets for more than a century. Cotton Kings would become dependent as individuals on financial intermediaries tied to Wall Street, firms like Lehman Brothers (founded in Alabama).
It didn’t take very long for the flow of credit to resume. By mid-century, racialized chattel slavery had built not only a wealthy and powerful South. It had also given rise to an industrializing and diversifying North. In New England, where sharp Yankees once amassed profits by plying the transatlantic slave trade — and continued to profit by transporting slave-produced commodities and insuring the enslaved — new industries rose up alongside the textile mills. High protective tariffs on foreign manufactures made the products of U.S. mills and factories competitive in domestic markets, especially in markets supplying plantations.
After the Erie Canal opened in 1824, the North slowly began to reorient towards timber and coal extraction, grain production, livestock, transportation construction, and the manufacture of a vast array of commodities for all manner of domestic and international markets. Chicago supplanted New Orleans. By the 1850s, industrial and agricultural capitalists above the Mason-Dixon line no longer needed cotton to the same extent that they once did. With the notable exception of Wall Street interests in New York City, Northerners began to resist the political power — and the territorial ambitions — of the Cotton Kings. Sectional animosity set the stage for the Civil War.
But up to that point, slave-capital proved indispensable to the emergence of industrial capitalism and to the ascent of the United States as a global economic power. Indeed, the violent dispossession of racialized chattel slaves from their labor, their bodies, and their families — not the enclosure of the commons identified by Karl Marx — set capitalism in motion and sustained capital accumulation for three centuries.
At the dawn of the industrial age commentators like Rev. Thomas Malthus could not envision that capital — an asset that is used but not consumed in the production of goods and services — could compound and diversify its forms, increasing productivity and engendering economic growth. Yet, ironically, when Malthus penned his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, the economies of Western Europe already had crawled their way out of the so-called “Malthusian trap.” The New World yielded vast quantities of “drug foods” like tobacco, tea, coffee, chocolate, and sugar for world markets. Europeans worked a little bit harder to satiate their hunger for these “drug foods.” The luxury-commodities of the seventeenth century became integrated into the new middle-class rituals like tea-drinking in the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, these commodities became a caloric and stimulative necessity for the denizens of the dark satanic mills. The New World yielded food for proletarians and fiber for factories at reasonable (even falling) prices. The “industrious revolution” that began in the sixteenth century set the stage for the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
But the “demand-side” tells only part of the story. A new form of capital, racialized chattel slaves, proved essential for the industrious revolution — and for the industrial one that followed.
The systematic application of African slaves in staple export crop production began in the sixteenth century, with sugar in Brazil. The African slave trade populated the plantations of the Caribbean, landing on the shores of the Chesapeake at the end of the seventeenth century. African slaves held the legal status of chattel: moveable, alienable property. When owners hold living creatures as chattel, they gain additional property rights: the ownership of the offspring of any chattel, and the ownership of their offspring, and so on and so forth. Chattel becomes self-augmenting capital.
While slavery existed in human societies since prehistoric times, chattel status had never been applied so thoroughly to human beings as it would be to Africans and African-Americans beginning in the sixteenth century. But this was not done easily, especially in those New World regions where African slaves survived, worked alongside European indentured servants and landless “free” men and women, and bore offspring — as they did in Britain’s mainland colonies in North America.
In the seventeenth century, African slaves and European indentured servants worked together to build what Ira Berlin characterizes as a “society with slaves” along the Chesapeake Bay. These Africans were slaves, but before the end of the seventeenth century, these Africans were not chattel, not fully. Planters and overseers didn’t use them that differently than their indentured servants. Slaves and servants alike were subject to routine corporeal punishment. Slaves occupied the furthest point along a continuum of unequal and coercive labor relations. (Also, see here and here.) Even so, 20% of the Africans brought into the Chesapeake before 1675 became free, and some of those freed even received the head-right — a plot of land — promised to European indentures. Some of those free Africans would command white indentures and own African slaves.
To the British inhabitants of the Chesapeake, Africans looked different. They sounded different. They acted different. But that was true of the Irish, as well. Africans were pagans, but the kind of people who wound up indentured in the Chesapeake weren’t exactly model Christians. European and African laborers worked, fornicated, fought, wept, birthed, ate, died, drank, danced, traded with one another, and with the indigenous population. Neither laws nor customs set them apart.
And this would become a problem.
By the 1670s, large landowners — some local planters, some absentees — began to consolidate plantations. This pushed the head-rights out to the least-productive lands on the frontier. In 1676, poor whites joined forces with those of African descent under the leadership of Nathaniel Bacon. They torched Jamestown, the colony’s capital. It took British troops several years to bring the Chesapeake under control.
Ultimately, planter elites thwarted class conflict by writing laws and by modeling and encouraging social practices that persuaded those with white skin to imagine that tremendous social significance — inherent difference and inferiority — lay underneath black skin. (Also, see here and here.) New laws regulated social relations — sex, marriage, sociability, trade, assembly, religion — between the “races” that those very laws, in fact, helped to create.
The law of chattel applied to African and African-descended slaves to the fullest extent on eighteenth century plantations. Under racialized chattel slavery, master-enslavers possessed the right to torture and maim, the right to kill, the right to rape, the right to alienate, and the right to own offspring — specifically, the offspring of the female slave. The exploitation of enslaved women’s reproductive labor became a prerogative that masters shared with other white men. Any offspring resulting from rape increased the master’s stock of capital.
Global commerce in slaves and the commodities they produced gave rise to modern finance, to new industries, and to wage-labor in the eighteenth century. Anchored in London, complex trans-Atlantic networks of trading partnerships, insurers, and banks financed the trade in slaves and slave-produced commodities. (Also, see here.) Merchant-financiers located in the seaports all around the Atlantic world provided a form of international currency by discounting the bills of exchange generated in the “triangle trade.” These merchant-financiers connected British creditors to colonial planter-debtors. Some of the world’s first financial derivatives — cotton futures contracts — traded on the Cotton Exchange in Liverpool. British industry blossomed. According to Eric Williams, the capital accumulated from the transatlantic trade in slaves and slave-produced commodities financed British sugar refining, rum distillation, metal-working, gun-making, cotton manufacture, transportation infrastructure, and even James Watt’s steam engine.
After the American Revolution, racialized chattel slavery appeared — to some — as inconsistent with the natural rights and liberties of man. Northern states emancipated their few enslaved residents. But more often, racialized chattel slavery served as the negative referent that affirmed the freedom of white males. (Also, see here.) In Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Thomas Jefferson — who never freed his enslaved sister-in-law, the mother of his own children — postulated that skin color signaled immutable, inheritable inferiority:
It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction… blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind … This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.
Even so, the former plantation colonies of the Upper South stood in a sorry state after Independence, beset by plummeting commodity prices and depleted soils. After the introduction of the cotton gin in 1791, these master-enslavers found a market for their surplus slave-capital.
The expanding cotton frontier needed capital and the Upper South provided it. Racialized chattel slavery proved itself the most efficient way to produce the world’s most important crop. The U.S. produced no cotton for export in 1790. In the antebellum period, the United States supplied most of the world’s most traded commodity, the key raw ingredient of the Industrial Revolution. Thanks to cotton, the United States ranked as the world’s largest economy on the eve of the Civil War.
From about 1790 until the Civil War, slave-traders and enslavers chained 1 million Americans of African descent into coffles and marched or shipped them down to southeast and southwest states and territories. They were sold at auction houses located in every city in the greater Mississippi Valley.
Capital and capitalist constituted one another at auction. At auction, slaves were stripped and assaulted to judge their strength and their capacity to produce more capital or to gratify the sexual appetites of masters. Perceived markers of docility or defiance informed the imaginative, deeply social practice of valuing slave-capital. In this capital market, Walter Johnson reveals, slaves shaped their sale and masters bought their own selves.
After auction, reconstituted coffles traveled ever deeper into the dark heart of the Cotton Kingdom (also, see here) and after 1836, into the new Republic of Texas. Five times more slaves lived in the United States in 1861 than in 1790, despite the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 and despite the high levels of infant mortality in the Cotton Kingdom. Slavery was no dying institution.
By 1820, the slave-labor camps that stretched west from South Carolina to Arkansas and south to the Gulf Coast allowed the United States to achieve dominance in the world market for cotton, the most crucial commodity of the Industrial Revolution. At that date, U.S. cotton was the world’s most widely traded commodity. Without those exports, the national economy as a whole could not acquire the goods and the credit it required from abroad.
And the Industrial Revolution that produced those goods depended absolutely on what Kenneth Pomeranz identifies as the “ghost acres” of the New World: those acres seeded, tended, and harvested by slaves of African descent. Pomeranz estimates that if, in 1830, Great Britain had to grow for itself, on its own soil the calories that its workers consumed as sugar, or if it had to raise enough sheep to replace the cotton it imported from the United States, this would have required no less than an additional 25 million acres of land.
In New England and (mostly) Manchester, waged-workers spun cotton thread which steam-powered mills spun into cloth. Once a luxury good, cotton cloth now radically transformed the way human beings across the globe outfitted themselves and their surroundings. Manchester and Lowell discovered an enormous market in the same African-American slaves that grew, tended and cleaned raw cotton, along with the same workers who operated the machines that spun and wove that cotton into cloth. According to Seth Rockman’s forthcoming book, Plantation Goods and the National Economy of Slavery, the ready-made clothing industry emerged in response to the demand from planters for cheap garments to clothe their slaves.
The explosion in cotton supply did not occur simply because more land came under cultivation. It came from increased productivity, as new work by Ed Baptist illustrates. The Cotton Kings combined the bullwhip with new methods of surveilling, measuring, and accounting for the productivity of the enslaved, radically reorganizing patterns of plantation labor. Planter-enslavers compelled their slave-capital to invent ways to increase their productivity — think of bidexterous Patsey in Solomon Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave. At the end of every day, the overseer weighed the pickings of each individual, chalking up the numbers on a slate. Results were compared to each individual’s quota. Shortfalls were “settled” in lashes. Later the master copied those picking totals into his ledger and erased the slate (both mass-produced by burgeoning new industries up North). Then he set new quotas. And the quotas always increased. Between 1800 and 1860, productivity increases on established plantations matched the productivity increases of the workers that tended to the spinning machines in Manchester in the same period, according to Ed Baptist.
Slavery proved crucial in the emergence of American finance. Profits from commerce, finance, and insurance related to cotton and to slaves flowed to merchant-financiers located in New Orleans and mid-Atlantic port cities, including New York City, where a global financial center grew up on Wall Street.
Cotton Kings themselves devised financial innovations that channeled the savings of investors across the nation and Western Europe to the Mississippi Valley. Cotton Kings, slave traders, and cotton merchants demanded vast amounts of credit to fund their ceaseless speculation and expansion. Planter-enslavers held valuable, liquid collateral: 2 million slaves worth $2 billion, a third of the wealth owned by all U.S. citizens, according to Ed Baptist. With the help of firms like Baring Brothers, Brown Brothers, and Rothschilds, the Cotton Kings sold bonds to capitalize new banks from which they secured loans (pledging their slaves and land for collateral). These bonds were secured by the full faith and credit of the state that chartered the bank. Even as northern states and European empires emancipated their own slaves, investors from these regions shared in the profits of the slave-labor camps in the Cotton Kingdom.
The Cotton Kings did something that neither Freddy, nor Fannie, nor any of “too big to fail” banks managed to do. They secured an explicit and total government guarantee for their banks, placing taxpayers on the hook for interest and principal.
It all ended in the Panic of 1837, when the bubble in southeastern land and slaves burst. Southern taxpayers refused to pay the debts of the planter-banks. Southern States defaulted on those bonds, hampering the South’s ability to raise money through the securities markets for more than a century. Cotton Kings would become dependent as individuals on financial intermediaries tied to Wall Street, firms like Lehman Brothers (founded in Alabama).
It didn’t take very long for the flow of credit to resume. By mid-century, racialized chattel slavery had built not only a wealthy and powerful South. It had also given rise to an industrializing and diversifying North. In New England, where sharp Yankees once amassed profits by plying the transatlantic slave trade — and continued to profit by transporting slave-produced commodities and insuring the enslaved — new industries rose up alongside the textile mills. High protective tariffs on foreign manufactures made the products of U.S. mills and factories competitive in domestic markets, especially in markets supplying plantations.
After the Erie Canal opened in 1824, the North slowly began to reorient towards timber and coal extraction, grain production, livestock, transportation construction, and the manufacture of a vast array of commodities for all manner of domestic and international markets. Chicago supplanted New Orleans. By the 1850s, industrial and agricultural capitalists above the Mason-Dixon line no longer needed cotton to the same extent that they once did. With the notable exception of Wall Street interests in New York City, Northerners began to resist the political power — and the territorial ambitions — of the Cotton Kings. Sectional animosity set the stage for the Civil War.
But up to that point, slave-capital proved indispensable to the emergence of industrial capitalism and to the ascent of the United States as a global economic power. Indeed, the violent dispossession of racialized chattel slaves from their labor, their bodies, and their families — not the enclosure of the commons identified by Karl Marx — set capitalism in motion and sustained capital accumulation for three centuries.
...Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!" To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America.is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery Ñ the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate; I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.
But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, "It is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, an denounce less; would you persuade more, and rebuke less; your cause would be much more likely to succeed." But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then will I argue with you that the slave is a man!
For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and ciphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian's God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!
Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Amercans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.
What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their mastcrs? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.
What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is passed.
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation's ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival....
...Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. "The arm of the Lord is not shortened," and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from "the Declaration of Independence," the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. -- Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are distinctly heard on the other. [...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-165-year-old-reminder-of-the-promise-of-july-4/2017/07/03/1afda388-5dc5-11e7-9b7d-14576dc0f39d_story.html
But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, "It is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, an denounce less; would you persuade more, and rebuke less; your cause would be much more likely to succeed." But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then will I argue with you that the slave is a man!
For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and ciphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian's God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!
Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Amercans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.
What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their mastcrs? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.
What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is passed.
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation's ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival....
...Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. "The arm of the Lord is not shortened," and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from "the Declaration of Independence," the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. -- Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are distinctly heard on the other. [...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-165-year-old-reminder-of-the-promise-of-july-4/2017/07/03/1afda388-5dc5-11e7-9b7d-14576dc0f39d_story.html