Slavery

Descendants Of Freed Slaves Fight For Their Land In The Amazon

August 9, 2017 Nick Barrickman and Alex González, www.wsws.org Resist! Amazon, Land, Slavery, Virginia

By Nick Barrickman and Alex González for WSWS - Local residents inform the International Amazon Workers Voice that Amazon is attempting to seize 50 acres of land owned by elderly working class descendants of slaves in Northern Virginia, pave over the residents’ homes, and build power lines. The soil that Amazon plans to cover with asphalt contains the sweat of slaves and the blood of Civil War soldiers. The residents’ ancestors, who worked the land as slaves, took possession of these plots after being freed by the Emancipation Proclamation and liberated by the Union Army during the American Civil War. American capitalism has come full-circle: the government is stealing land from the descendants of slaves and giving it to one of the world’s most powerful corporations. A representative of a community group called the Alliance to Save Carver Road (ASCR) told the IAWV, “The homeowners have been there for generations. Many of the properties were purchased by freed slaves. After emancipation, the slaves that worked that area were allowed to purchase property. A number of the property owners are descendants of those freed slaves.” Last month, Amazon subsidiary VAData, working in collusion with local government agencies and utility company Dominion Virginia Power, announced plans to construct 230,000 volt power lines running through the semi-rural community of Carver Road just outside of Gainesville, in order to power nearby internet data centers.

Elon Musk Subsidiary Using Prison Labor

July 19, 2017 Aura Bogado, www.grist.org Educate! Prison Labor, Slavery

By Aura Bogado for Grist - SolarCity is probably the best-known name in the U.S. for residential solar installations — it’s top in the market. The company was founded by Elon Musk, along with two of his cousins, and has set the popular standard for cleantech. But SolarCity has one thing it doesn’t want to be known for: For a huge solar-panel project launched in 2012 at two university campuses in Oregon, it relied on a vendor that used cheap prison labor to produce the panels, under a “buy American/buy local” banner. The story is a good reminder that we need to watch the renewables industry closely to make sure it doesn’t throw human rights and labor ethics out the window in its push toward a clean energy economy. Here’s how the SolarCity prison saga came about. Oregon State University and the Oregon Institute of Technology teamed up a few years ago to install solar panels on their campuses, in what would become one of the largest solar installations in the state. Since the vendor, ultimately SolarCity, would own and maintain the panels, the two schools wouldn’t need to spend a penny on the project. For SolarCity, the contract also looked like a win. Under a lucrative state program, the Oregon Department of Energy doled out $11.8 million in tax credits for the $27 million project. (SolarCity would not confirm the amount of the tax breaks despite repeated requests.)

The Invisible Threads Of Gender, Race, And Slavery

April 14, 2017 Sasha Turner, www.aaihs.org Educate! Gender, Race, Slavery

By Sasha Turner for Black Perspectives - On March 24, 2017 the United Nations commemorated its ten-year anniversary for the International Day of Remembrance honoring the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. This year, the theme chosen for the commemoration is “Remember Slavery: Recognizing the Legacy and Contributions of People of African Descent.” In the keynote address, delivered by Lonnie Bunch, the founding director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture urgently called on us to be vigilant in recognizing the ways in which the legacy of slavery continues today. Cloaking the history of slavery in silence, Bunch argues, permits the violence of slavery to live on, dishonoring the struggles, losses, and strength experienced by our ancestors. It is fitting that the UN-designated International Day of Remembrance falls on March 25, coinciding with Women’s History Month. Indeed, any attempt to remember the enslavement of African peoples is incomplete without considering women’s experiences in slavery and the transatlantic slave trade.

Expanding The Slaveocracy

March 28, 2017 Matt Karp & Eric Foner, www.jacobinmag.com Educate! Racism, Slavery, US history

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 Educate! Black History, Immigration, Sanctuary Cities, Slavery, US history

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 Educate! Black History, Slavery, US history

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 Resist! Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous Resistance, Slave Revolt, Slavery

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 Create! Capitalism, Reparations, Slavery

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 Educate! Labor, Prisons, Slavery, Strikes

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 Educate! Racial Justice, Slavery, United Nations

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 Educate! African-Americans, Barack Obama, Racism, Slavery

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 Resist! Prisons, Racism, Slavery, Strikes

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 Educate! Lynching, Mass Incarceration, Racism, Slavery

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 Educate! Europe, Finance and the Economy, Free Trade, Slavery

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 Newsletter Austerity, Colonialism, Declaration of Independence, Democracy, Finance and the Economy, Fourth of July, Independence, Indigenous People, Neo-Liberalism, Nonviolence, Slavery, Wars and Militarism

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.

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