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Slavery

US Racism’s $13 Trillion Legacy Is Just The Start

June 20, 2020 Anna Szymanski, Reuters. , , ,
New York - Around the time the United States formally abolished slavery in 1865, African Americans owned 0.5% of the United States’ wealth. Today they own under 3%, even though around 13% of the population is defined by the U.S. census as “black or African American.” This isn’t an accident of history – it’s a result of government policies and institutional bias. The interest keeps compounding. The value of income lost during slavery is staggering. The U.S. practice lasted for nearly 250 years – almost equivalent to the time from the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 until today. University of Connecticut Professor Thomas Craemer estimates the present value of unpaid wages for just the 89 years after independence to be nearly $20 trillion using a 3% interest rate.

The Black New Yorker Who Led The Charge Against Police Violence In The 1830s

June 19, 2020 By Jonathan Daniel Wells, TIME. , , ,
At the apex of the kidnapping club were two members of the New York police force, Tobias Boudinot and Daniel D. Nash. Both had grown up in or near Manhattan and they shared a deep disdain for Black people. Like all members of the police force, Boudinot and Nash were poorly paid, inadequately trained, and largely uneducated. Boudinot in particular was constantly in debt, sued by creditors and desperate for the extra money he could make by capturing runaway enslaved people who had managed, against tremendous odds, to escape southern bondage and forge new lives in New York. The nation’s founding document, the Constitution, required free states to return runaways to southern masters, and Boudinot and Nash were all too willing to comply. The police with the explicit approval of Wall Street financiers and merchants dependent on slave-grown cotton, terrorized the 15,000 or so Black residents who called New York City home in the decades before the Civil War. Seizing Black men, women and children off the streets and arresting them as fugitive slaves who needed to be returned to southern masters.

Black Lives Extinguished, Black Ancestors’ Bodies Desecrated

June 7, 2020 Marsha Coleman Adebayo, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
This week, the progressive community is deeply traumatized over the slaughter of innocent Black people and the determination of ruling elites in politics, media and civil societies to patch up a deprived, debased and white supremacist system. One prime example is Minneapolis officials charging Officer Derek Chauvin with 3rd degree murder and manslaughter.  Is this charge a revisiting of the idea that Africans are 3/5th human?  White supremacy fault lines have intentionally deepened and the murder and incarceration of young, primarily black men, is the norm -- in fact, it is expected. Black leadership, usually channeled through corporate sponsorship called the Democratic Party, has completely failed. 

Capitalism Is Responsible For The Deaths Of Millions Of People

March 8, 2020 Solomon Comissiong, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
The United States' corporate media is a well-oiled machine, engineered to effectively distribute misinformation to masses of politically domesticated Americans. Like apex predators, they feast upon the minds of those who are gullible enough to believe anything their pundits spew from their duplicitous mouths. Many of the corporate media talking heads are highly skilled in the art of deception. They regularly champion convenient narratives given to them from various departments within the United States' government. This is routine regardless of the cable network. If the greatest trick the devil ever played was to convince humankind that he didn't exist, then the corporate media's greatest trick may have been convincing Americans that there was a huge difference between the likes of Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, ABC News, and the like.

A Community Fights The County To Show Black Ancestor’s Lives Matter

January 22, 2020 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Popular Resistance. , , ,
Clearing the FOG co-hosts Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese interviewed Dr. Marsha Coleman Adebayo of the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition about the struggle in her community to reclaim an African cemetery currently buried under a parking lot. Since discovering the cemetery, residents of Bethesda have uncovered the brutal treatment of Africans who lived there starting with being worked to death on a tobacco plantation that later turned to forced sexual exploitation and breeding for profit. Once they were freed, African residents set up a thriving community that was then taken over through gentrification. It is an amazing story of fortitude for those who lived through it and for the community that is now fighting the county to honor the memory of what happened.

How An African Cemetery Under A Parking Lot Galvanized A Community To Fight White Supremacy

January 20, 2020 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Clearing the FOG. , , ,
The United States still has a long way to go to come to terms with its history of being founded on genocide and slavery. In recent years, we have heard about efforts to take down monuments to those who perpetrated these crimes. What we rarely hear are the stories of how that genocide and slavery have been covered up and how even today there are barriers to those who seek to expose them. One such effort is taking place right now in one of the wealthiest counties in the United States. Dr. Marsha Coleman Adebayo tells us the riveting story of her discovery of an African Cemetery under a parking lot. She has led a community effort to stop a building from being erected on the site, which has unearthed a horrific past experienced by former residents of that land and has become a struggle against gentrification and white supremacy.

America’s Last Slave Ship Could Offer A Case For Reparations

October 10, 2019 Jay Reeves, Apnews.com , , ,
MOBILE, Ala. (AP) — Alabama steamship owner Timothy Meaher financed the last slave vessel that brought African captives to the United States, and he came out of the Civil War a wealthy man. His descendants, with land worth millions, are still part of Mobile society’s upper crust. The people whom Meaher enslaved, however, emerged from the war with freedom but little else. Census forms that documented Meaher’s postwar riches list them as laborers, housewives and farmers with nothing of value. Many of their descendants today hold working-class jobs.

400 Years After Slavery’s Start, No More Band-Aids

September 10, 2019 By Jessicah Pierre, Inequality.org , , ,
Four hundred years ago this month, the first enslaved people from Africa arrived in Virginia. Slavery is often reduced to a crime of America’s long-ago past. But enslaved labor created the backbone for America’s capitalistic economy, allowing it to grow into — and remain — the world’s leading economy today. The effects of this reliance on unpaid African slave labor is still felt in America’s current racial wealth divide. Today the racial wealth divide is greater than it was nearly four decades ago, and trends point to its continued widening.

400 Years After Slavery’s Start, No More Band-Aids

August 24, 2019 By Jessicah Pierre, Otherwords.org , ,
Four hundred years ago this month, the first enslaved people from Africa arrived in Virginia. Slavery is often reduced to a crime of America’s long-ago past. But enslaved labor created the backbone for America’s capitalistic economy, allowing it to grow into — and remain — the world’s leading economy today. The effects of this reliance on unpaid African slave labor is still felt in America’s current racial wealth divide. Today the racial wealth divide is greater than it was nearly four decades ago, and trends point to its continued widening.

Starbucks Has A Slave Labor Problem

June 25, 2019 Anna Canning, Fairworldproject.org , , , ,
Once again, Brazilian labor inspectors have found slave labor1 on plantations where Starbucks buys coffee. And not just any plantations, but ones that have been “certified” to Starbucks’ C.A.F.E. Practices standards. This marks the second time in nine months that this has happened, pointing to a huge systemic problem with the way Starbucks is meeting their commitment to “99% ethical coffee.” It’s time for that to change.

On Reparations, The Question Isn’t If, But When And How

June 25, 2019 Zenobia Jeffries Warfield, Yesmagazine.org , , ,
For nearly 250 years, enslaved Africans and their descendants toiled on the land and in the homes of White enslavers in the United States. They planted, fed, weeded, mowed, and harvested crops that were not theirs; cared for and fed children they did not birth; and cleaned homes and tended lands they did not own. We’re all familiar with this uncomfortable but sanitized image of U.S. slavery. The harsh reality is that too many of the more than 300,000 African men, women, and children who were brought to this land for the sole purpose of providing free labor...

Celebrating Juneteenth With Bold New Ideas

June 19, 2019 By Jessicah Pierre, Otherwords.org , ,
One day in late June, 1865, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas. They carried some historic news: Legal slavery had ended some two and a half years ago with President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. And so some of the last enslaved people left in America were freed. The day became known as “Juneteenth,” a holiday still celebrated today in black communities across the United States. Yet more than 150 years after slavery, black wealth still lags centuries behind white wealth.

The Racist Roots Of American Policing: From Slave Patrols To Traffic Stops

June 11, 2019 Connie Hassett-Walker, Theconversation.com , , ,
Outrage over racial profiling and the killing of African Americans by police officers and vigilantes in recent years helped give rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. But tensions between the police and black communities are nothing new. There are many precedents to the Ferguson, Missouri protests that ushered in the Black Lives Matter movement. Those protests erupted in 2014 after a police officer shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown; the officer was subsequently not indicted. The precedents include the Los Angeles riots that broke out after the 1992 acquittal of police officers for beating Rodney King.

Unearthing The Black Newspaper That Sold The California Dream To Freed Slaves

May 29, 2019 Shaya Tayefe Mohajer, Cjr.org , , ,
STANDING ON SLAUSON AVENUE last month, Arianne Edmonds joined Angelenos who gathered along the 25-mile route of rapper Nipsey Hussle’s funeral procession. Thousands of fans thronged sidewalks to raise a fist or a camera toward his hearse as it passed through mostly Black and Latino neighborhoods in South Los Angeles. Even in mourning, they celebrated a local son whose murder only magnified the odds he defied to succeed. Edmonds is a fifth-generation Los Angeles native. Her family history in the city stretches back to the turn of the 20th century...

Federal Workers: Shutdown And Out

January 21, 2019 Saurav Sarkar, Labornotes.org , , , , ,
What would you do if management could force you to work without pay, lock you out with no consequences, and fire you for going on strike? That’s the situation facing 800,000 federal workers—and their unions—during the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. Forty percent of the government’s civilian workforce besides postal workers are being deprived of money to pay for rent, gas, groceries, and car and student loan payments. They include 420,000 workers who are being forced to work without pay and 380,000 who are locked out. The shutdown is the result of President Trump’s demand that Congress fund an anti-immigrant wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Democrats in Congress are refusing to go along with the idea.
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