Slavery

Activists Disrupt For-Profit Prison Corporation Meeting

April 30, 2015 Nadia Prupis, www.commondreams.org Resist! Mass Incarceration, Privatization, Slavery

As the for-profit prison corporation GEO Group held its annual shareholder meeting in Boca Raton, Florida on Wednesday, human rights organizations calling for an end to incarceration converged on the company's headquarters to demand accountability and divestment from the prison industry. The prison-industrial complex "not only profits off the imprisonment of of America's most vulnerable, but also corrupts our system through draconian legislation and our education system," said one activist, Joshua McConnel, who joined the march organized by Dream Defenders, Prison Legal News, Grassroots Leadership, SEIU Florida, and other groups. Taking up the call for other institutions to divest from the prison industry, McConnel continued, "My own university, the University of Central Florida... takes my tuition dollars and so many others and invests in companies just like GEO Group and CCA [Corrections Corporation of America]."

Black Women’s Resistance To The Legacy Of The Arab Slave Trade

April 12, 2015 Staff, www.telesurtv.net Educate! Africa, Arab, Slavery, Woman

Blackness and the Islamic Empire slave trade For the past fourteen centuries Arab, Turkish, Persian and some African nations and empires have conducted the Arab slave trade, also known as the “Islamic Empire slave trade” or “Eastern slave trade.” This slave trade was practiced primarily in North Africa, the Horn of Africa and in what is today known as the Middle East, as well as in southern Europe. People were captured from the interior of Africa and then sold in slave markets in the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. Even though what the true numbers, a conservative estimate from some historians say that from the 8th century till present day, around 20 million people were taken from southern and central Africa and through the Red Sea, Indian Ocean and the Sahara desert. Black refugee women face further issues in Egyptian society. Single women and Black refugee mothers find it difficult to find housing because Egyptian landlords only want to rent to two-parent households. Furthermore, the common job for refugee in the informal economy is as a domestic workers, in which they often are subjected to psychological, physical and sexual abuse from their employers.

Banking On Slavery

March 24, 2015 Gilda Haas, www.drpop.org Educate! Finance and the Economy, History, Reparations, Slavery

The biggest “aha” for me after reading Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism is the extent to which financial speculation is baked into the American economy. From Baptist I learned that 185 years ago, the acquisition of slaves, like any other property, could be financed by mortgages; that bonds were sold to investors based on the value of those mortgages; and, that securities based on enslaved human beings produced a “slave asset bubble” not unlike that produced by the rampant speculation in home mortgage derivatives that helped cause the financial crisis of 2008. In his elegant Atlantic magazine article, The Case for Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates works backwards from recent experiences in Chicago to the history that Baptist describes. I cannot recommend this article highly enough, because, as Coates and many others are deeply aware, it is impossible to make a case for reparations without bearing witness to our own shared history.

The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten “White” Slaves

March 17, 2015 John Martin, www.globalresearch.ca Educate! Education, History, Ireland, Slavery

They came as slaves; vast human cargo transported on tall British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children. Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. They were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives. We don’t really need to go through all of the gory details, do we? We know all too well the atrocities of the African slave trade.

The Slaves That Time Forgot

March 17, 2015 gjohnsit, www.dailykos.com Educate! History, Ireland, Slavery

For some reason, history likes to call these Irish slaves as 'indentured servants'. As if they were somehow considered better than African slaves. This can be considered an attempt at whitewashing the history of the Irish slave trade. There does exist indentured servitude where two parties sign a contract for a limited amount of time. This is not what happened to the Irish from 1625 onward. They were sold as slaves, pure and simple. In reality, they were considered by some to be even lower than the blacks. African slaves were still relatively new, and were expensive to transport such a long distance (50 sterling in the late 1600's). Irish slaves on the other hand, were relatively cheap in comparison (5 sterling).

President’s Day: The Nation’s Founders & Slaves

February 16, 2015 Staff, www.PopularResistance.org Educate! George Washington, Racism, Slavery

When he was 11 years old, Washington inherited 10 slaves from his father’s estate. He continued to acquire slaves — some through the death of family members and others through direct purchase. Washington’s cache of enslaved people peaked in 1759 when he married the wealthy widow Martha Dandridge Custis. His new wife brought more than 80 slaves to the estate at Mount Vernon. On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly 150 souls were counted as part of the property there. In 1789, Washington became the first president of the United States, a planter president who used and sanctioned black slavery. Washington needed slave labor to maintain his wealth, his lifestyle and his reputation. As he aged, Washington flirted with attempts to extricate himself from the murderous institution — “to get quit of Negroes,” as he famously wrote in 1778. But he never did.

Slavery In America Fueled By Need For Cheap Labor

December 12, 2014 Frederick Reese, www.facebook.com Educate! Immigration, Labor, Slavery

The 13th Amendment explicitly prohibits slavery in all forms, except as criminal punishment, yet as many as 60,000 native-born Americans and both lawfully-admitted and undocumented immigrants are forced into bonded labor, sex trafficking, or forced, unpaid servitude. A broken immigration system and a failure to effectively respond to a call for reforms reflect on some hard truths about immigrant life in America — including the fact that slavery still exists in the United States and is as pervasive as it has ever been. The media and the public, however, generally tend to focus on sex trafficking, creating a situation in which the realities of labor trafficking are overlooked or ignored wholesale.

Debate: From Dred Scott To Michael Brown

August 19, 2014 Blair L.M. Kelley, www.theroot.com Educate! Civil Rights, History, Missouri, Slavery

News out of Ferguson, Mo., has been devastating. Since unarmed teenager Michael Brown was killed by an as-yet-unidentified police officer, local police have responded to the community’s demonstration of outrage with unprecedented force—using military-style weaponry to suppress peaceful protests, arrest black elected officials and detain journalists. And Brown’s death seems to have unearthed a history of disregard for the rights of black residents. There is outrage across the country because Ferguson officials have not behaved as though the black citizens of this majority-black town have the same rights as all other Americans. Reporters keep saying that these images do not look like America, but Ferguson is America. And in America, black citizens should enjoy equal protection under the law and the right of a free press to report on what is happening anywhere in the United States. And this moment in Ferguson, Mo., makes me think about the historic Dred Scott v. Sandford case, an 1857 Supreme Court decision which had its roots in this same part of the country.

300,000 Slaves Made German Corporations Rich

July 3, 2014 Alan Hall, www.dailymail.co.uk Educate! Germany, History, Nazis, Slavery

Revealed: How the Nazis helped German companies Bosch, Mercedes, Deutsche Bank and VW get VERY rich using 300,000 concentration camp slaves. The colossal extent of slave labour used by modern-day German blue-chip companies to get rich during the Third Reich has been laid bare by the nation's top business magazine. WirtschaftsWoche has published a league table illustrating the Nazi past of top German firms like Bosch, Mercedes, Deutsche Bank, VW and many others, which involved the use of almost 300,000 slaves. The league table follows revelations earlier thatAudi, which was known as Auto Union during the Nazi period, was a big exploiter of concentration camp supplied slave labor, using 20,000 concentration camp inmates in its factories.

Asian Slave Labour Producing Prawns For Supermarkets In US, UK

June 12, 2014 Kate Hodal, Chris Kelly, Felicity Lawrence, www.theguardian.com Educate! Immigration, Shrimp, Slavery, Thailand

Slaves forced to work for no pay for years at a time under threat of extreme violence are being used in Asia in the production of seafood sold by major US, British and other European retailers, the Guardian can reveal. A six-month investigation has established that large numbers of men bought and sold like animals and held against their will on fishing boats off Thailand are integral to the production of prawns (commonly called shrimp in the US) sold in leading supermarkets around the world, including the top four global retailers: Walmart, Carrefour, Costco and Tesco. The investigation found that the world's largest prawn farmer, the Thailand-based Charoen Pokphand (CP) Foods, buys fishmeal, which it feeds to its farmed prawns, from some suppliers that own, operate or buy from fishing boats manned with slaves. Men who have managed to escape from boats supplying CP Foods and other companies like it told the Guardian of horrific conditions, including 20-hour shifts, regular beatings, torture and execution-style killings. Some were at sea for years; some were regularly offered methamphetamines to keep them going. Some had seen fellow slaves murdered in front of them.

The Case For Reparations

June 6, 2014 Ta-Nehisi Coates, www.theatlantic.com Educate! Civil Rights, History, Reparations, Slavery

Clyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross’s parents owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the protection of the law. In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it the night before the election.”

Caribbean Reparations Initiative Inspires Revitalization In US

May 27, 2014 Don Rojas, www.truth-out.org Create! Caribbean, Reparations, Slavery

Picture this scene. It was almost surreal, improbable just a few years ago: a room filled with presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers from the 15-nation Caribbean Community (CARICOM), all listening with rapt attention, several nodding in agreement, as one of the region's most distinguished academics, and perhaps the Caribbean's most prominent public intellectual, gave a riveting report on the recent work of CARICOM's Reparations Commission. Yes, "reparations," as in compensation for the crimes of slavery and indigenous genocide at the hands of former European colonizers - reparations, as in reparatory justice for the horrific consequences of two of the greatest crimes against humanity in the history of this planet - the 400 years of the African Slave Trade and the systematic and calculated extermination of the indigenous peoples of the Americas - reparations, as in fundamental and comprehensive social, economic and political justice, indeed, historical justice for the descendants of African slaves and native American peoples. This scene played out in the conference room of the beautiful Buccament Resort on the Eastern Caribbean island of St. Vincent on March 10, 2014; the occasion - the 25th Inter-Sessional Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community.

Caribbean Nations Sue Europe Over Slavery

March 12, 2014 Alex Moore, www.deathandtaxes.com Resist! Caribbean, Slavery

The leaders of 15 Caribbean nations voted unanimously on Monday to sue England and European nations like France and the Netherlands over the scourge of slavery. The long-overdue lawsuit will seek a formal apology, debt cancellation and other reparations in a 10-part plan. The Caribbean nations, represented by British human rights law firm Leigh Day, will also seek a “repatriation” plan for Rastafarians who want to move to Africa. Associated Press notes, “Repatriation to Africa has long been a central belief of Rastafari, a melding of Old Testament teachings and Pan-Africanism whose followers have long pushed for reparations.”

The Future Needs Us

December 23, 2013 Rebecca Solnit, www.tomdispatch.com Educate! Gandhi, MLK, Slavery, Thoreau

I see the fabric of my country’s rights and justices fraying and I see climate change advancing. There are terrible things about this moment and it’s clear that the consequences of climate change will get worse (though how much worse still depends on us). I also see that we never actually know how things will play out in the end, that the most unlikely events often occur, that we are a very innovative and resilient species, and that far more of us are idealists than is good for business and the status quo to acknowledge. What I learned first in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was how calm, how resourceful, and how generous people could be in the worst times: the “Cajun Navy” that came in to rescue people by boat, the stranded themselves who formed communities of mutual aid, the hundreds of thousands of volunteers, from middle-aged Mennonites to young anarchists, who arrived afterward to help salvage a city that could have been left for dead. I don’t know what’s coming. I do know that, whatever it is, some of it will be terrible, but some of it will be miraculous, that term we reserve for the utterly unanticipated, the seeds we didn’t know the soil held. And I know that we don’t know what we do does. As Shane Bauer points out, the doing is the crucial thing.

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