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Slavery

Expanding The Slaveocracy

March 28, 2017 Matt Karp & Eric Foner, www.jacobinmag.com , ,
By Matt Karp & Eric Foner for Jacobin Magazine - One of the cottage industries in the historical profession right now is studying the relationship between capitalism and American slavery. This is an old discussion; it goes way, way back. Karl Marx said things about it. That’s not exactly the subject of your book, but I’m wondering how you think your study, which is a study of slaveowners and their vision of America as a great power in the world, fits into the ongoing debates about slavery and capitalism nowadays? The book joins a whole series of works that explore the slave South in a transnational sense. That’s another fashionable aspect: reemphasizing the dynamism and brutality of antebellum slavery.

Sanctuary Echoes Cities Opposing The Fugitive Slave Act

February 23, 2017 Tim Butterworth, www.otherwords.org , , , ,
By Tim Butterworth for Other Words - A century and a half before Trump's refugee ban, cities like Boston rebelled against the Fugitive Slave Act. Shortly after Donald Trump’s order to ban thousands of documented, vetted immigrants and refugees from our shores, crowds rushed to airports all over the country to protect those who’d just arrived. Soon after, crowds in Phoenix and other cities surrounded federal immigration enforcement vans during raids on immigrants, in an attempt to block deportations. In Boston, which was home to many of these actions, I was reminded of another time citizens rejected an odious federal law to protect refugees seeking shelter here. On May 24th, 1854, Anthony Burns — a 19-year-old man who’d escaped slavery in Virginia — was captured in the city and held under armed guard by federal marshals.

Even Before Sanctuary Cities, Here’s How Black Americans Protected Fugitive Slaves

February 13, 2017 Barbara Krauthamer, www.theconversation.com , ,
By Barbara Krauthamer for The Conversation - While the Constitution mainly called for the return of runaway slaves, the 1850 law vastly expanded the authority of federal law enforcement officials. The law criminalized helping or harboring a runaway slave and denied the accused person the right to offer testimony in her or his own defense. The 1850 law confirmed what generations of enslaved African-Americans knew too well: They existed as property, not persons, in the eyes of the law. Enslaved women and men could not enter legal marriages because slaveholders claimed their bodies, time, movement and even reproductive capacity.

Christmas And Resistance To Slavery In The Americas

December 25, 2016 Yesenia Barragan, www.aaihs.org , , ,
By Yesenia Barragan for African American Intellectual History Society. It was a humid Christmas day in 1820 when twenty-five-year-old Santiago Martínez presented himself before the army commander stationed in the frontier Colombian town of Quibdó for service in the republican army. Just the year prior, in 1819, the new republic of Gran Colombia, a nation encompassing the present-day countries of Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Ecuador, was created in the final throes of the Wars of Independence against Spain. Four feet and five inches tall, with a notable, long scar on his right cheek up to his eyebrow, Martínez sought to serve in the local army, perhaps heeding Independence leader Simón Bolívar’s call for voluntary conscription in the young Andean nation. According to army records, Martínez declared that he was a “liberto,” a free black or formerly enslaved person, and that he was a “worker” [labrador] by profession.

What Should Reparations For Slavery Entail?

December 17, 2016 Ama Biney, www.pambazuka.org , ,
By Ama Biney for Pambazuka News - Former British Prime Minister David Cameron’s insulting dismissal of trans-Atlantic slavery and his opinion that Africans and people of African descent should “move on from this painful legacy, and continue to build for the future,” would never be audaciously uttered to Jewish people by this arrogant warmonger who bombed Libya and sought to bomb Syria, but the British House of Commons voted against such action. As the African American actor Danny Glover said, the Jamaican government should tell Britain to "keep your prison, give us schools, give us infrastructure, not prisons."

Prison Labor Is Slavery By Another Name

October 13, 2016 Olivia Alperstein, www.otherwords.org , , ,
By Olivia Alperstein for Other Words - Across the country the largest prison strike is taking place, vowing to "finally end slavery in 2016." Right now there’s a national movement mobilizing to raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage of $15 an hour. But imagine if instead of earning even that much, you could only earn a few cents an hour. If that sounds like something from the developing world, think again. The reality is our prisons are perpetuating slave labor.

UN Report Highlights US History Of Slavery, Segregation & Racial Terror

September 29, 2016 Staff, www.ohchr.org , ,
By Staff for OCHR - The colonial history, the legacy of enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism, and racial inequality in the US remains a serious challenge as there has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent. Despite substantial changes since the end of the enforcement of Jim Crow and the fight for civil rights, ideology ensuring the domination of one group over another, continues to negatively impact the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of African Americans today

Triumph Of Truth: African American History Museum Opens

September 18, 2016 David Smith, www.theguardian.com , , ,
By David Smith for the Guardian. From Harriet Tubman’s hymn book to a slave cabin from South Carolina, from Muhammed Ali’s boxing gloves to Carl Lewis’s gold medals, from a metal bucket used to bathe the feet of Martin Luther King to tiny shoes worn by Sammy Davis Jr as a child dancer, the museum is a tour de force of more than 3,000 artifacts with a mission statement to “tell the unvarnished truth”. Emotions run high in the slavery and freedom gallery, located underground, and there will be signs advising parents on whether the material is suitable for children. “What’s been the important thing to me, or one of the most moving things, is seeing the journalists walk through and on their personal level you can see their faces go, ‘OK, wow!’,” said Elliott. “That’s been really exciting to see. To remove that veil and see the person who actually is looking at it.” For Elliott, one of the most powerful objects is an auction block, “a site of fear, humiliation and uncertainty” where slaves were bought and sold and separated from their loved ones for life. In a nearby display case is a whip used to punish slaves.

Prisoners Gear Up For Mass Strike To Protest State-Sponsored ‘Slavery,’ Racism

September 8, 2016 Emma Niles, www.truthdig.com , , ,
By Emma Niles for Truth Dig - On Sept. 9, 1971, prisoners staged a takeover of Attica State Penitentiary, New York state’s most notorious prison. On Friday, the 45th anniversary of the uprising, many prisoners and prison workers in the U.S. and around the world are set to hold what organizers call an unprecedented strike. The Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC), a standing committee of the Industrial Workers of the World, is joining with the Free Alabama Movement, Free Ohio Movement and a variety of other grass-roots coalitions to demand changes in the prison system.

Black History Museum & Lynching Memorial Being Built In Alabama

August 21, 2016 Staff, www.eji.org , , ,
By Staff of the Equal Justice Initiative. The Equal Justice Initiative plans to build a national memorial to victims of lynching and open a museum that explores African American history from enslavement to mass incarceration. Both the museum and memorial will open in Montgomery, Alabama, in 2017. From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration will be situated within 150 yards of one of the South's most prominent slave auction sites and the Alabama River dock and rail station where tens of thousands of enslaved black people were trafficked. The museum will contain high-tech exhibits, artifacts, recordings, and films, as well as comprehensive data and information on lynching and racial segregation. The museum will connect the history of racial inequality with contemporary issues of mass incarceration, excessive punishment, and police violence. The Memorial to Peace and Justice will sit on six acres of land in Montgomery and become the nation's first national memorial to victims of lynching.

Slavery As Free Trade

July 3, 2016 Blake Smith, www.aeon.co , , ,
By Blake Smith for Aeon. For nearly four centuries, the Atlantic slave trade brought millions of people into bondage. Scholars estimate that around 1.5 million people perished in the brutal middle passage across the Atlantic. The slave trade linked Africa, Europe and the Americas in a horrific enterprise of death and torture and profit. Yet, in the middle of the 18th century, as the slave trade boomed like never before, some notable European observers saw it as a model of free enterprise and indeed of ‘liberty’ itself. They were not slave traders or slave-ship captains but economic thinkers, and very influential ones. They were a pioneering group of economic thinkers committed to the principle oflaissez-faire: a term they themselves coined. United around the French official Vincent de Gournay (1712-1759), they were among the first European intellectuals to argue for limitations on government intervention in the economy. They organised campaigns for the deregulation of domestic and international trade, and they made the slave trade a key piece of evidence in their arguments.

Newsletter: Real History Of Revolution

July 2, 2016 Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, www.popularresistance.org , , , , , , , , , , ,
By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers. Official holidays in the United States tend to reinforce false historical narratives. The Fourth of July is one of those holidays and what the official story misses is the reality that must be told. During the decade before the Revolutionary War, colonists ran one of the most effective nonviolence resistance campaigns against corporate power in history. Rivera Sun describes this campaign of nonviolent actions by showing that many of the tactics people attribute to Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other modern activists were used in an effective campaign by the colonists including boycotts of British goods, replacing them with their own goods; refusing to cooperate with unjust laws, non-payment of taxes, the development of parallel governments and local assemblies as well as rallies, petitions, marches and protests.

What You Still Don’t Know About Abolitionists

June 20, 2016 Manisha Sinha, www.time.com ,
By Manisha Sinha for TIME. History is shaped by actors great and small. When most Americans hear about the destruction of slavery during the Civil War, they think of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. But on the anniversary of Juneteenth—the day former slaves in Texas celebrated emancipation, on June 19, 1865, when the Union Army reached them—it is important to recall the central place of the enslaved themselves in the movement to abolish slavery. Thousands of slaves ran away to Union Army lines from the very start of the war and helped initiate the process of emancipation. They were simply doing what runaway slaves had done before the war: voting with their feet for freedom. Fugitive slaves radicalized abolition by their tactics, contributing to the growth of the Underground Railroad. The abolition movement was an interracial radical social movement of disfranchised people, men and women, white and black, free and enslaved. Slave resistance lay at its heart. On this Juneteenth, it is important to recall that African Americans were not passive recipients of the gift of freedom but architects of their own liberation.

The Civil War Didn’t End Slavery After All

June 16, 2016 Lauren Karaffa, www.hotherwords.org ,
By Lauren Karaffa for Other Worlds - Slavery has been abolished in the United States since 1865, when the 13thAmendment was passed in the ashes of the Civil War. Well, almost abolished. Actually, the amendment included a caveat: “except as punishment for a crime.” Since then, prison and forced labor have always gone together. In fact, with over 2 million people behind bars in this country, the American prison system is a massive — albeit largely invisible — part of our economy and social fabric.

In 2016 About 45.8 Million People Are Slaves In 167 Countries

June 1, 2016 Staff, www.globalslaveryindex.org
By Staff of The Global Slavery Index - The 2016 Global Slavery Index estimates that 45.8 million people are subject to some form of modern slavery in the world today. The Index presents a ranking of 167 countries based on the proportion of the population that is estimated to be in modern slavery. The countries with the highest estimated prevalence of modern slavery by the proportion of their population are North Korea, Uzbekistan, Cambodia, India, and Qatar.
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