|
|
Post by the Scribe on Jun 20, 2023 6:20:58 GMT
IN DEPTH
MARCH 22, 200712:18 AMUPDATED 16 YEARS AGO
CHRONOLOGY-Who banned slavery when?
www.reuters.com/article/uk-slavery/chronology-who-banned-slavery-when-idUSL1561464920070322
By Reuters Staff
3 MIN READ
(Reuters) - Britain marks 200 years on March 25 since it enacted a law banning the trans-Atlantic slave trade, although full abolition of slavery did not follow for another generation.
Following are some key dates in the trans-atlantic trade in slaves from Africa and its abolition.
1444 - First public sale of African slaves in Lagos, Portugal
1482 - Portuguese start building first permanent slave trading post at Elmina, Gold Coast, now Ghana
1510 - First slaves arrive in the Spanish colonies of South America, having travelled via Spain
1518 - First direct shipment of slaves from Africa to the Americas
1777 - State of Vermont, an independent Republic after the American Revolution, becomes first sovereign state to abolish slavery
1780s - Trans-Atlantic slave trade reaches peak
1787 - The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade founded in Britain by Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson
1792 - Denmark bans import of slaves to its West Indies colonies, although the law only took effect from 1803.
1807 - Britain passes Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, outlawing British Atlantic slave trade.
- United States passes legislation banning the slave trade, effective from start of 1808.
1811 - Spain abolishes slavery, including in its colonies, though Cuba rejects ban and continues to deal in slaves.
1813 - Sweden bans slave trading
1814 - Netherlands bans slave trading
1817 - France bans slave trading, but ban not effective until 1826
1833 - Britain passes Abolition of Slavery Act, ordering gradual abolition of slavery in all British colonies. Plantation owners in the West Indies receive 20 million pounds in compensation
- Great Britain and Spain sign a treaty prohibiting the slave trade
1819 - Portugal abolishes slave trade north of the equator
- Britain places a naval squadron off the West African coast to enforce the ban on slave trading
1823 - Britain’s Anti-Slavery Society formed. Members include William Wilberforce
1846 - Danish governor proclaims emancipation of slaves in Danish West Indies, abolishing slavery
1848 - France abolishes slavery
1851 - Brazil abolishes slave trading
1858 - Portugal abolishes slavery in its colonies, although all slaves are subject to a 20-year apprenticeship
1861 - Netherlands abolishes slavery in Dutch Caribbean colonies
1862 - U.S. President Abraham Lincoln proclaims emancipation of slaves with effect from January 1, 1863; 13th Amendment of U.S. Constitution follows in 1865 banning slavery
1886 - Slavery is abolished in Cuba
1888 - Brazil abolishes slavery
1926 - League of Nations adopts Slavery Convention abolishing slavery
1948 - United Nations General Assembly adopts Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including article stating “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”
Sources: Durham University: here; Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights: here; Anti-Slavery Society: here
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
|
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Jun 20, 2023 6:29:35 GMT
Top 5 African Countries Where Slavery is Still Widespread
talkafricana.com/top-5-african-countries-where-slavery-is-still-widespread/
By
Uzonna Anele
May 6, 2017
It may be more than two centuries since the Trans-atlantic Slave Trade ended, but slavery is still very much alive in many African countries as well as much of the ancient world.
Other varied forms of slavery still exist across the continent, including but not limited to domestic service, debt bondage, military slavery, slaves of sacrifice, and local slave trade.
Here are the top five African countries where slavery is still rampant.
Modern Slavery in africa
1. Mauritania
In Mauritania, slavery has been practiced for thousands of years, particularly by the light-skinned Berbers, commonly referred to as “beydan” (Whites), and the mixed Berber-Arabs — all of whom are the descendants of slave owners locally referred to as “al-beydan.”
Black Mauritanians from the minority ethnic group, referred to as “Moors” or the “Haratin,” account for the largest number of slaves in the North African country.
Here, slaves and their descendants are considered the full property of their masters. Although this practice was banned in Mauritania in 1981, it is still rampant in some parts of the country.
top five African countries where slavery is still rampant.
2. Sudan
Slavery in Sudan dates back to medieval times. It has recently had a resurgence during the second Sudanese Civil War that lasted between 1983 and 2005. During the war, human rights campaigners reported a rise in contemporary forms of slavery and accused the Sudanese government of supporting and arming various slave-taking militias in the country.
In response to these claims, the Sudanese government argued that slavery was a product of inter-tribal warfare over which it had no control.
Sadly, the shameful practice still continues in some parts of the country more than a decade after the war ended.
The majority of those enslaved in Sudan belong to the Dinka, Nuer, and Nuba tribes, which are predominantly Black in appearance.
Their masters are primarily Arabs from the Baggara ethnic group.
3. Libya
Even though the slave trade was abolished in Libya in 1853, it still continues unabated particularly since the fall of President Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Black Africans from neighboring countries seeking to cross over to Europe through the Libyan coast are usually captured by Libyan rebels and sold off as slaves to local masters.
The practice is so widespread that human rights organizations are now calling for the immediate intervention of the international community.
What’s worse, the majority of these slaves are unaccompanied children fleeing war and persecution in their home countries.
There have also been claims of women refugees being captured and held as sex slaves in the North African nation.
4. Egypt
According to the U.S. State Department, Egypt is a source, transit, and destination country for women and children trafficked for purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation.
The department further reveals that about 1 million street children in the North African country – both boys and girls – are exploited with prostitution and forced begging.
In 2014, the world was shocked by tales of widespread slavery and torture in Sinai Peninsula, where tens of thousands of slaves from neighboring African countries were reportedly held for trafficking.
These slaves are alleged to have been chained up and kept in water tankers for up to six months, among them were women held as sex slaves.
The Sinai Peninsula is now said to be a haven for Al-Qaeda operatives and Bedouin smugglers and extortionists who have a free hand in the modern-day slave trade. It is estimated that there are more than 50 human trafficking gangs currently operating in the Sinai region.
5. South Africa
South Africa is one of the many African countries that suffered immensely during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Unfortunately, things haven’t changed much in terms of ending slavery in this rainbow nation: Last year, the Global Slavery Index estimated that close to 250,000 modern slaves exist in South Africa today.
About 103,461 victims of this practice were identified to have been subjected to commercial sexual exploitation. It has also been widely alleged that the majority of wine production companies in South Africa still practice slavery.
Among the most common forms of slavery in SA include forced labor, human trafficking, debt bondage, child exploitation, and forced marriage.
This article first appeared on face2faceafrica.com
|
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Jun 20, 2023 6:37:05 GMT
No region is 'immune' as the number of people in 'modern slavery' climbs to 50 million
www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/09/13/1122714064/modern-slavery-global-estimate-increase
September 13, 20224:56 PM ET
Juliana Kim headshot
Juliana Kim
A child fetches water at a textile factory in Gaziantep, Turkey. Many children who work at this factory are migrants who escaped Syria with their families. They typically work 8 to 12 hour shifts, 6 or 7 days a week for just $15 a day. In 2021, 28 million people were estimated to be working under forced labor conditions — an eighth of them children.
Valerio Muscella for NPR
The number of people currently enslaved in the world has grown by 10 million in the last five years, researchers from Geneva reported Monday.
The U.N.'s International Organization for Migration partnered with the International Labor Organization and the Walk Free Foundation, a human rights group, to produce the latest estimates of modern slavery.
That term refers to a spectrum of exploitative practices like forced labor, forced marriage and human trafficking. As of 2021, 50 million people were estimated to endure such conditions. Some form of modern slavery exists in nearly every country in the world, the report found.
Although modern versions of enslavement appear slightly different from historical examples, the two are interconnected, authors of the report said.
"In a number of ways, slavery has adapted and changed and shape shifted, but exploitation is still occurring on an unprecedented scale," Grace Forrest, the founder of Walk Free Foundation, told NPR.
"There is no region of the world that is immune to modern slavery."
The global estimates were the result of surveying tens of thousands of survivors of modern slavery over 68 countries along with research.
Forced labor is the biggest component of modern slavery
Many of the people characterized as modern slaves endure conditions considered "forced labor" — employed but unable to quit because their employer withholds their earnings, they owe debt to their employer or, for migrants, their employer threatens deportation.
In 2021, 28 million people were estimated to be working under forced labor conditions — an eighth of whom were children. According to the report, the majority of cases were found in the private sector, while in about 14% of cases governments imposed work requirements as a form of punishment, among other reasons. The greatest prevalence of forced labor was in Arab countries, followed by Europe and Central Asia.
This 14-Year-Old Family Breadwinner Is Part Of The Rise In Child Labor
GOATS AND SODA
www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/06/17/1007559419/this-14-year-old-family-breadwinner-is-part-of-the-rise-in-child-labor
The report also estimated roughly 22 million people were living in forced marriages in 2021. The number of people involuntarily wedded grew by 6.6 million compared to 2016. Nearly two-thirds of all forced marriages were found to be in Asia and the Pacific, followed by Africa, the survey found.
One of the drivers of forced and child marriages is poverty — oftentimes financially desperate families see marriage as a means to secure a stable future for their children, according to the report.
But once married, women in forced relationships are at higher risk of sexual exploitation, violence and domestic servitude, the report concluded.
A majority of all forced labor cases are in wealthy countries, report found
Researchers suggest that forced labor is as much of an issue in rich countries as in poor ones.
One reason is because wealthier countries participate in and benefit from global supply chains — multinational business operations where forced labor tends to be harder to inspect, Forrest said. Those companies account for 80 percent of forced labor cases, she added.
Richer countries are also more likely to have the demand and resources to enable coercive labor practices, Angela Me, the chief researcher at the U.N.'s office on drugs and crime, told NPR.
Emotional Scars Of Modern Slavery Run 'Deeper Than Any Visible Wound'
GOATS AND SODA
www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/02/24/387838996/emotional-scars-of-modern-slavery-run-deeper-than-any-visible-wound
"Take for example of a domestic worker," she said. "In richer countries, you have more people that can afford to have a person come from abroad to work in the domestic area."
Me said forced labor in domestic work remains elusive because many work in isolation. That's partly why estimates on forced labor are likely to be an undercount, Me added.
"It is important for people to understand the trafficking of human beings is not something that is only happening in remote areas or countries where there is war," she said. "It happens there too but it can also happen next door."
The pandemic exacerbated modern slavery
The pandemic compounded underlying drivers of forced labor: the economic crisis led more people into debt to an employer while the virus put workers under greater health risks, Forrest said.
At the same time, there was a more urgent demand for COVID protective gear like face masks and gloves, which led some companies to adopt coercive labor practices to rush manufacturing.
www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/world/asia/china-mask-forced-labor.html
"When you have a crisis, the first thing to go is the rights of the people who are most vulnerable in parts of the world where there is the least visibility," Forrest said.
For these reasons, the pandemic stymied some of the progress made in the fight against modern slavery, the report concluded. Forrest added that solutions are "far and few between" but they do exist.
In June, for example, the U.S. passed legislation that will force companies to prove that goods from China's Xinjiang region are not made with forced labor.
ASIA
New Forced Labor Prevention act goes into effect June 21
www.npr.org/2022/06/20/1106198717/new-forced-labor-prevention-act-goes-into-effect-june-21
"It's shocking that any one person lives in modern slavery in 2022," she said. "It's completely unacceptable because we have every tool in our toolkit to be able to tackle this."
|
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Jun 20, 2023 6:54:27 GMT
9 'Facts' About Slavery 'They Don't Want You to Know'
www.snopes.com/fact-check/facts-about-slavery/
A widely circulated list of historical "facts" about slavery dwells on the participation of non-whites as owners and traders of slaves in America.
David Emery
Published Aug 16, 2016
Claim:
A circulating list of nine historical "facts" about slavery accurately details the participation of non-whites in slave ownership and trade in America.
Rating:
Mixture
Mixture
About this rating
www.snopes.com/fact-check/rating/mixture
One of the less well known aspects of the history of slavery is how many and how often non-whites owned and traded slaves in early America. Free black slave holders could be found at one time or another "in each of the thirteen original states and later in every state that countenanced slavery," historian R. Halliburton Jr. observed. That black people bought and sold other black people raises "vexing questions" for 21st-century Americans like African-American writer Henry Louis Gates Jr., who writes that it betrays class divisions that have always existed within the black community. For others, it's an excuse to deflect the shared blame for the institution of slavery in America away from white people.
www.theroot.com/articles/history/2013/03/black_slave_owners_did_they_exist/
In the latter vein, a "9 Facts About Slavery They Don't Want You to Know" meme lays out a mixture of true, false and misleading historical claims. We'll address each one in turn below:
The first legal slave owner in American history was a black tobacco farmer named Anthony Johnson.
Possibly true. The wording of the statement is important. Anthony Johnson was not the first slave owner in American history, but he was, according to historians, among the first to have his lifetime ownership of a servant legally sanctioned by a court.
www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Court_Ruling_on_Anthony_Johnson_and_His_Servant_1655
A former indentured servant himself, Anthony Johnson was a "free negro" who owned a 250-acre farm in Virginia during the 1650s, with five indentured servants under contract to him. One of them, a black man named John Casor, claimed that his term of service had expired years earlier and Johnson was holding him illegally. In 1654, a civil court found that Johnson in fact owned Casor's services for life, an outcome historian R Halliburton Jr. calls "one of the first known legal sanctions of slavery — other than as a punishment for crime."
books.google.com/books?id=QzB2AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA32&lpg=PA32#v=onepage&q&f=false
North Carolina's largest slave holder in 1860 was a black plantation owner named William Ellison.
False. William Ellison was a very wealthy black plantation owner and cotton gin manufacturer who lived in South Carolina (not North Carolina). According to the 1860 census (in which his surname was listed as "Ellerson"), he owned 63 black slaves, making him the largest of the 171 black slaveholders in South Carolina, but far from the largest overall slave holder in the state.
www.latinamericanstudies.org/african-americans/William-Ellison-bio.htm
freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ajac/nchalifax.htm
American Indians owned thousands of black slaves.
True. Historian Tiya Miles provided this snapshot of the Native American ownership of black slaves at the turn of the 19th century for Slate magazine in January 2016:
www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/01/native_american_slavery_historians_uncover_a_chilling_chapter_in_u_s_history.html
In 1830 there were 3,775 free black people who owned 12,740 black slaves.
Approximately true, according to historian R. Halliburton Jr.:
Many black slaves were allowed to hold jobs, own businesses, and own real estate.
Somewhat true. There were exceptions, but generally speaking — especially after 1750, by which time slave codes had been entered into the law books in most of the American colonies — black slaves were not legally permitted to own property or businesses. From the Oxford Companion to American Law (2002):
Brutal black-on-black slavery was common in Africa for thousands of years.
True, in the sense that the phenomenon of human beings enslaving other human beings goes back thousands of years, but not just among blacks, and not just in Africa.
Most slaves brought to America from Africa were purchased from black slave owners.
Sort of true. Historian Steven Mintz describes the situation more accurately in the introduction to his book African-American Voices: A Documentary Reader, 1619-1877:
Slavery was common for thousands of years.
True, as noted above — though how "common" slavery has been and what the specific nature of that slavery was has varied according to time and place.
White people ended legal chattel slavery.
It's rather self-serving to claim that "white people" ended legal chattel slavery in the United States (much less ended chattel slavery, period), given that the overwhelming majority of blacks in the U.S. could not vote, could not run for political office, and, in every other way conceivable, were excluded from institutional power. Moreover, even as some white people were laboring to put an end to slavery, many others were fighting to preserve it.
Slavery was eliminated in America via the efforts of people of various ethnicities, including Caucasians, who took up the banner of the abolitionist movement. The names of the white leaders of that movement tend to be better known than those of the black leaders, among whom were David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Dred Scott, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner, and many others. When Congress passed (and the states ratified) the 13th Amendment in 1865, it was the culmination of many years of work by that multi-racial movement.
books.google.com/books?id=q9W9CgAAQBAJ&pg=PA95#v=onepage&q&f=false
abolition.e2bn.org/people.html
www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/13thamendment.html
www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/african-americans-and-emancipation/essays/allies-for-emancipation-black-abolitionists
Sources
Davis, J.B. "Slavery in the Cherokee Nation." Chronicles of Oklahoma, Vol. 11, No. 4. December 1993.
Gates Jr., Henry Louis. "Did Black People Own Slaves?" The Root. 4 March 2013.
Gates Jr., Henry Louis. "How Many Slaves Landed in the U.S.?" The Root. 6 January 2014.
Hall, Kermit L. The Oxford Companion to American Law. New York: Oxford University Press USA, 2002. ISBN 0-195-08878-6.
Halliburton Jr., R. "Free Black Owners of Slaves: A Reappraisal of the Woodson Thesis." The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 76, No. 3. July 1975.
Johnson, Michael P. and Roark, James L. Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. ISBN 0-393-30314-4.
Mintz, Steven. African-American Voices: A Documentary Reader, 1619-1877. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2009. ISBN 1-444-31077-1.
Onion, Rebecca. "America's Other Original Sin." em>Slate. January 2016.
Rodriguez, Junius P. The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1997. ISBN 0-874-36885-5.
Russell, John Henderson. The Free Negro in Virginia, 1619-1865. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1913. ISBN 1-480-03049-X.
Walton, Hanes and Smith, Robert C. American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom. London: Routledge, 2015. ISBN 1-317-35045-6.
By David Emery
David Emery is a West Coast-based writer and editor with 25 years of experience fact-checking rumors, hoaxes, and contemporary legends.
www.snopes.com/author/david-emery/ |
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Jun 20, 2023 7:06:13 GMT
Overall, we rate American Renaissance Questionable based on Extreme Right-Wing Bias, promotion of propaganda and conspiracy theories, and being labeled a hate group by numerous sources.
Detailed Report
Reasoning: Hate Group, Propaganda, Pseudoscience
Bias Rating: EXTREME RIGHT
Factual Reporting: LOW
Country: USA
Press Freedom Rating: MOSTLY FREE
Media Type: Website
Traffic/Popularity: Medium Traffic
MBFC Credibility Rating: LOW CREDIBILITY
History
Founded in 1990 by Jared Taylor, American Renaissance (AR or AmRen) is a monthly online magazine published by the New Century Foundation. It describes itself as a “race-realist, white advocacy organization.” Several sources have described it as a white supremacist publication, including The Washington Post, Fortune, and the Anti-Defamation League.
Read our profile on the United States government and media.
mediabiasfactcheck.com/united-states-media-profile/
Funded by / Ownership
American Renaissance Magazine is owned and published by the New Century Foundation. This think tank promotes pseudo-scientific studies and research that purport to show the inferiority of blacks to whites. The website generates revenue through donations and advertising.
Analysis / Bias
In review, American Renaissance Magazine publishes news that is considered racist and supports white supremacy. A frequent topic on the website is the debunked notion that there is a connection between race and IQ and Multiculturalism and the War Against White America. Articles often contain loaded emotional language that portrays African Americans negatively, such as Race, Welfare, and Media Lies and this Race, Crime, and Loathing in Minnesota. They also are very fearful of whites becoming the minority in the USA through their promotion of the replacement conspiracy, The Great Replacement Is Not a Conspiracy, except it is a conspiracy.
mediabiasfactcheck.com/american-renaissance-magazine/
When the Slave Traders Were African
www.amren.com/news/2019/09/when-the-slave-traders-were-african/
Posted on September 24, 2019
Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, Wall Street Journal, September 21, 2019
{snip
{snip} Africans are now also reckoning with their own complicated legacy in the slave trade, and the infamous “Middle Passage” often looks different from across the Atlantic.
Records from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, directed by historian David Eltis at Emory University, show that the majority of captives brought to the U.S. came from Senegal, Gambia, Congo and eastern Nigeria. Europeans oversaw this brutal traffic in human cargo, but they had many local collaborators. “The organization of the slave trade was structured to have the Europeans stay along the coast lines, relying on African middlemen and merchants to bring the slaves to them,” said Toyin Falola, a Nigerian professor of African studies at the University of Texas at Austin. “The Europeans couldn’t have gone into the interior to get the slaves themselves.”
{snip} From nursery school through university in Nigeria, I was taught about great African cultures and conquerors of times past but not about African involvement in the slave trade. In an attempt to reclaim some of the dignity that we lost during colonialism, Africans have tended to magnify stories of a glorious past of rich traditions and brave achievement.
But there are other, less discussed chapters of our history. When I was growing up, my father Chukwuma Nwaubani spoke glowingly of my great-grandfather, Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku, a chief among our Igbo ethnic group who sold slaves in the 19th century. “He was respected by everyone around,” he said. “Even the white people respected him.” From the 16th to the 19th centuries, an estimated 1.4 million Igbo people were transported across the Atlantic as slaves.
Some families have chosen to hide similar histories. “We speak of it in whispers,” said Yunus Mohammed Rafiq, a 44-year-old professor of anthropology from Tanzania who now teaches at New York University’s center in Shanghai. In the 19th century, Mr. Rafiq’s great-great-great-grandfather, Mwarukere, from the Segeju ethnic group, raided villages in Tanzania’s hinterland, sold the majority of his captives to the Arab merchants who supplied Europeans and kept the rest as laborers on his own coconut plantations. Although Mr. Rafiq’s relatives speak of Mwarukere with pride, they expunged his name from family documents sometime in the 1960s, shortly after Tanzania gained independence from British colonial rule, when it was especially sensitive to remind Africans of their role in enslaving one another.
The need to keep his family’s history secret intensified after Mr. Rafiq left home in his 20s to study at Indiana University and then at Yale and Brown for graduate work. “Truthfully, with my African-American colleagues, I never revealed this aspect,” he said. “Because of the crimes, the pain, the humiliation that I saw them suffer in the United States, I thought talking about this legacy of Africans selling themselves is just piling another wound in a body that is already very shot through, fractured, broken down by other things.” {snip}
{snip}
Some families feel no qualms about publicizing their own history. “I’m not ashamed of it because I personally wasn’t directly involved,” said 58-year-old Donald Duke, a lawyer who ran for president in Nigeria’s 2019 elections. He is from the port town of Calabar, home to the Efik ethnic group of Nigeria’s Cross River state. In the 18th century, some 1.2 million slaves were sold through Calabar, according to the Tulane University historian Randy J. Sparks. The Efik were mostly stevedores and middlemen. They negotiated prices between the white traders and their African partners from the hinterlands, then collected royalties. “Families like mine benefited from that process,” Mr. Duke told me.
{snip}
The Zambian pastor Saidi Francis Chishimba also feels the need to go public with his family’s history. “In Zambia, in a sense, it is a forgotten history,” said the 45-year-old. “But it is a reality to which history still holds us accountable.” Mr. Chishimba’s grandfather, Ali Saidi Muluwe Wansimba, was from a tribe of slave traders of the Bemba kingdom, who moved from Zanzibar to establish slave markets in Zambia. He grew up hearing this history narrated with great pride by his relatives.
In 2011, he decided to see the place of his ancestor’s origin and traveled with his wife to Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania. As they toured a memorial in what used to be one of the world’s largest slave markets, the photos of limbs amputated from runaway slaves and the airless chambers that once held dozens of slaves at a time shocked him into silence. “It brought a saddening in my heart that my own family lines were involved in this treatment,” he said. “It was so painful to think about.”
Mr. Chishimba decided that this gruesome history should be openly acknowledged and has since become popular in Zambia for his sermons, radio talks and articles on the impact of the slave trade. {snip}
{snip}
Still, my father does not believe that the descendants of those who took part in the slave trade should now pay for those wrongs. As he points out, buying and selling human beings had been part of many African cultures, as a form of serfdom, long before the first white people landed on our shores. And though many families still retain the respect and influence accrued by their slave-trading ancestors, the direct material gains have petered out over time. “If anyone asks me for reparations,” he said sarcastically, “I will tell them to follow me to my backyard so that I can pluck some money from the tree there and give it to them.”
{snip} Mr. Duke doesn’t believe that Africans should play much of a part in the American reparations conversation, because the injustices the descendants of slaves suffer stem primarily from their maltreatment and deprivation in the U.S. “The Africans didn’t see anything wrong with slavery,” he said. “Even if the white man wasn’t there, they would still use these people as their domestics. However, because the white man was now involved and fortunes were being made…that was when the criminality came in.”
{snip}
{snip} “Educated Africans need to rewrite their history, especially postcolonial history, which was a kind of restorative history that tended to marginalize issues like slavery,” [Mr. Rafiq] said. “Part of the compensation is telling the story of our part in what is happening to African-Americans today.”
Original Article www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-slave-traders-were-african-11568991595?tesla=y&mod=article_inline |
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Jun 20, 2023 7:51:05 GMT
Posted on September 24, 2019
The Long History of American Slavery Reparations
www.amren.com/news/2019/09/the-long-history-of-american-slavery-reparations/
Manisha Sinha, Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2019
During the colonial era, it was customary for masters to grant “freedom dues” to indentured servants who had completed their fixed term of service. They were given land at times but at the very least tools and livestock to help begin their new lives in freedom. When former slaves demanded land after the Civil War, they were harking back to this longtime custom, which the rest of the country (with the exception of the abolitionists) had long forgotten. Since the Reconstruction era, the reneged-upon promise of reparations — recompense to African-Americans for centuries of enslavement and racial oppression — has continued to fester like an open sore on the nation’s body politic.
{snip}
The earliest calls for reparations came from the enslaved and those who objected to the permanent and hereditary nature of racial slavery in the English colonies. George Fox, the founder of the Quaker faith, called for freeing slaves after a term of service and, as early as 1672, argued that they should be compensated for their labor and not sent off “empty handed.” In the 18th century, the Quakers became the first Christian denomination to ban slave-trading and slaveholding among its members, and they were overrepresented in the Revolutionary-era abolition movement. Many heeded Fox’s injunction and gave their freed slaves material support for their new lives.
In the New England colonies, which became the hotbed of abolitionism in the 19th century, slaves led the way in demanding redress from the government. An extraordinary 1774 petition by a group of black slaves addressed to the Massachusetts General Court (the state assembly) declared, “Give and grant to us some part of unimproved land, belonging to the province, for a settlement.”
In 1783, a formerly enslaved woman from Massachusetts, Belinda Sutton, became the first to win reparations for her years in bondage. A striking petition on her behalf to the Massachusetts General Court recounted her abduction from Africa and argued that “by the laws of the land” she had been “denied the enjoyment of that immense wealth, a part whereof has been accumulated by her own industry, and the whole augmented by her servitude.” The court granted her petition, in part because her enslaver, Isaac Royall Jr., was a Tory who had resisted American independence. In 1787, Sutton petitioned again and won a pension from his estate. {snip}
royallhouse.org/slavery/belinda-sutton-and-her-petitions/?mod=article_inline
Religious institutions have often taken the lead in reparations for slavery, seeing it as fundamentally a moral question as well as an economic one. {snip}
{snip}
In her important 2017 book “Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade,” the Howard University historian Ana Lucia Araujo shows that attempts to repair past harms have ranged from formal apologies to economic indemnification to compensatory programs. In the U.K., for instance, Glasgow University, a center of 19th-century abolitionist activism, recently created a reparations fund of 20 million pounds after acknowledging that the university had benefited from Scottish slave traders to the tune of more than $100 million (in the dollars of the day). In 2017, All Souls College, Oxford, instituted a fellowship for a student from the West Indies and paid 100,000 pounds to Codrington College in Barbados in partial redress for the 10,000 pounds (worth millions today) that All Souls received to build its library from Christopher Codrington, who had made his fortune in slavery.
www.asc.ox.ac.uk/library-history?mod=article_inline
{snip} In 2003, President Ruth Simmons of Brown University first commissioned a report on the school’s involvement in slavery and the slave trade, which led Brown to take several measures, including a $10 million endowment to educate disadvantaged children in Providence, R.I., rendering technical assistance to historically black colleges and universities, and funding research on slavery and racial justice. Since then, other universities — including Columbia, Emory, Harvard, Princeton and the University of Virginia — have explored their own institutional histories of benefiting from centuries of human misery, although none of them has offered reparations.
Ironically, in considering emancipation, governments were often preoccupied with compensating slaveholders for their loss of human property rather than the enslaved for their stolen labor, bodies and lives. British emancipation compensated slaveholders and reduced freed people to apprenticeship, a liminal state between slavery and freedom. In 1862, when slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia, slaveholders rather than slaves received compensation.
{snip}
Perhaps the most famous episode in the history of reparations came in 1865, when Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman ’s famous Field Orders No. 15 divided abandoned and confiscated plantations in low-country South Carolina and Georgia into 40-acre lots for newly freed people and gave each of them a mule. The news of “Forty Acres and a Mule” spread like wildfire among the formerly enslaved — only to be dashed within a few months when Andrew Johnson, who became president after Abraham Lincoln ’s assassination, returned the Sherman land grants and other lands distributed by the federal Freedmen’s Bureau to former slave-owning planters.
www.freedmen.umd.edu/sfo15.htm?mod=article_inline
The sense of betrayal lingered among African-Americans, especially after the overthrow of Reconstruction and the failure to rectify the cruelties of racism. Freed people in the post-bellum South were soon disenfranchised, segregated and subjected to racial terror, debt peonage and semi-servitude in the notorious system of “convict leasing,” all of which made a mockery of black freedom. {snip}
After Reconstruction, former slaves took the lead in demanding compensation. A significant step came in 1896, when Callie House and Isaiah Dickerson founded the first national organization for reparations, known as the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association. {snip}
In 1987, in the wake of the civil-rights movement, black groups and leaders including James Forman founded the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, or N’COBRA. Its current incarnations include grass roots organizations such as the Unpaid Labor Project and the Movement for Black Lives, which call for reparations not just for enslavement but also for its lingering legacies: racial “redlining” for insurance and financing, mass incarceration, racism in law enforcement, and the yawning gaps between blacks and whites in wealth, health, education and opportunity.
www.ncobraonline.org/?mod=article_inline
www.unpaidlabor.com/aboutul?mod=article_inline
policy.m4bl.org/about/?mod=article_inline
{snip}
In 2009, the U.S. Congress formally apologized for slavery, but public officials often dismiss the demand for reparations as utopian or a prescription for a legal quagmire. Nor has the U.S. seriously considered convening a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as South Africa did after the fall of apartheid, to grapple with the legacies of enslavement. {snip}
www.wsj.com/articles/SB909576904913183000?mod=article_inline
As historians of slavery continue to demonstrate the extent to which the economies of the Americas and Europe grew on the backs of black people, a “fully loaded cost accounting” of slavery, in the historian Nell Irvin Painter ’s words, might seem too immense. The scale of the challenge has certainly paralyzed any substantial redress for enslavement and its brutal aftermath. {snip}
In 2016, President Barack Obama showed himself highly attuned to the pragmatic difficulties of pursuing reparations in the face of strong opposition. As he told Mr. Coates, “The bottom line is that it’s hard to find a model in which you can practically administer and sustain political support for those kinds of efforts.” Critics of reparations usually look past the enduring deleterious effects of slavery and its brutal aftermath, focusing instead on slavery’s end in the 19th century. Last June, right before a House hearing on the issue, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rejected the idea of present-day compensation: “I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago, for whom none of us currently living are responsible, is a good idea.”
www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/ta-nehisi-coates-obama-transcript-ii/511133/?mod=article_inline
{snip} In Mr. Coates’s congressional testimony this June, he said that African-Americans were still suffering from the aftermath of slavery and urged lawmakers to “reject fair-weather patriotism, to say that this nation is both its credits and debits.” {snip}
www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/06/ta-nehisi-coates-testimony-house-reparations-hr-40/592042/?mod=article_inline
{snip}
Original Article www.wsj.com/articles/the-long-history-of-american-slavery-reparations-11568991623?mod=hp_lista_pos1 |
|
