National Parks Proposed to Honor Harriet Tubman

Efforts are underway in Congress to recognize Harriet Tubman with the designation of her home in Auburn, New York, and an area on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where she was born a slave, and helped numerous slaves escape bondage on the Underground Railroad.

Don’t think there is much chance of this getting through a Republican majority Congress, not only because of the usual hostility – but because of the extreme focus this term on cost cutting.

Two National Parks Eyed to Honor Legacy of Harriet Tubman

Steal Away

Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave who led others to freedom on the Underground Railroad, could be honored with two national parks promoting her life.

Senators from Maryland and New York introduced legislation on Tuesday — the start of Black History Month — to create parks in both states that would protect sites connected to her life as an abolitionist and later as an advocate for women’s suffrage.

Tubman — known as “the black Moses” for leading hundreds of slaves out of bondage in the South to freedom in the North — lived much of her adult life in Auburn, N.Y. in the state’s Finger Lakes region. If the bill becomes law, her home, the cemetery where she was buried in 1913 and the Home for the Aged, an early nursing home for African-Americans she created, would become part of the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park.

In the Eastern Shore of Maryland where Tubman was born in 1822, the bill would make a sweeping Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Historical Park, covering her presumed birthplace and the site of former plantations where she was enslaved until she ran away in 1849. Tubman returned to the area for 10 years as a famed conductor on the Underground Railroad, and the park would include the location of a former safe house along the route to the North.

“Harriet Tubman [was] a true American patriot for whom liberty and freedom were principles in which she believed and risked her life to achieve,” said U.S. Sen. Benjamin Cardin, D-Md., in a statement. “Her life was defined by determination, perseverance and hardship as she helped others on the road to freedom. These two parks will make it possible for Marylanders, New Yorkers and all Americans to trace her life’s work and remember her tremendous contribution to our nation’s history.”

Glenn Beck and the Innocence of Slavery in America

This is unbelievable!

Glenn Beck denies the history of slavery in America.

Let me paint you a picture here, Mr. Beck – here is a picture of two slave children for sale -

This picture came from an estate sale in Charlotte, North Carolina, and was accompanied by a document detailing the sale of  “John” for $1,150 in 1854. An estimated 12 million slaves died in the “Middle Passage” on the way to the Americas…

Hardly an innocent business.

Slavery existed in Europe and the Americas for nearly 200 years before the English Colonies which became the United States were founded. The English, the Spanish, the Dutch, the Portuguese, and virtually all seagoing European powers participated in that trade – starting in the 1400′s. Even Queen Elizabeth participaed and profited frm the trade:

English participation in the lucrative slave trade seems to have begun when John Hawkins hijacked a Portuguese ship carrying Africans to Brazil in 1562. Hawkins traded the slaves at Hispaniola for ginger, pearls and sugar, making a huge profit which could not be ignored by his countrymen. One year later, Hawking sold a cargo of Black slaves in Hispaniola and the floodgates were opened. Though Queen Elizabeth spoke out against the dark business, she later took shares in Hawkins” ventures, even lending him one of her ships in the enterprise that pitted her adventurous navigators against those of Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands (It was Hawkins who introduced tobacco into England in 1565).

Somebody needs to put Mr. Beck back on his anti-psychotic medication.

The New Jim Crow – Prisons as the New Slavery

Same as the old slavery, except there’s no cotton involved…

The prison industrial complex profits from high numbers of convictions and long prison sentences. Privatizing the jail system has led to widespread abuse – and the United States incarcerating a larger portion of their population than Communist countries ever did.

The prison industry in the United States: big business or a new form of slavery?

Human rights organizations, as well as political and social ones, are condemning what they are calling a new form of inhumane exploitation in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million – mostly Black and Hispanic – are working for various industries for a pittance. For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold. They don’t have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment insurance, vacations or comp time. All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they don’t like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells.

There are approximately 2 million inmates in state, federal and private prisons throughout the country. According to California Prison Focus, “no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens.” The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other country: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S. Statistics reveal that the United States holds 25% of the world’s prison population, but only 5% of the world’s people. From less than 300,000 inmates in 1972, the jail population grew to 2 million by the year 2000. In 1990 it was one million. Ten years ago there were only five private prisons in the country, with a population of 2,000 inmates; now, there are 100, with 62,000 inmates. It is expected that by the coming decade, the number will hit 360,000, according to reports.

What has happened over the last 10 years? Why are there so many prisoners?

“The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself,” says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being “an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps.”

The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. “This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors.”

According to the Left Business Observer, the federal prison industry produces 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens. Along with war supplies, prison workers supply 98% of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93% of paints and paintbrushes; 92% of stove assembly; 46% of body armor; 36% of home appliances; 30% of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21% of office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies, and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people.

CRIME GOES DOWN, JAIL POPULATION GOES UP

According to reports by human rights organizations, these are the factors that increase the profit potential for those who invest in the prison industry complex:

. Jailing persons convicted of non-violent crimes, and long prison sentences for possession of microscopic quantities of illegal drugs. Federal law stipulates five years’ imprisonment without possibility of parole for possession of 5 grams of crack or 3.5 ounces of heroin, and 10 years for possession of less than 2 ounces of rock-cocaine or crack. A sentence of 5 years for cocaine powder requires possession of 500 grams – 100 times more than the quantity of rock cocaine for the same sentence. Most of those who use cocaine powder are white, middle-class or rich people, while mostly Blacks and Latinos use rock cocaine. In Texas, a person may be sentenced for up to two years’ imprisonment for possessing 4 ounces of marijuana. Here in New York, the 1973 Nelson Rockefeller anti-drug law provides for a mandatory prison sentence of 15 years to life for possession of 4 ounces of any illegal drug.

. The passage in 13 states of the “three strikes” laws (life in prison after being convicted of three felonies), made it necessary to build 20 new federal prisons. One of the most disturbing cases resulting from this measure was that of a prisoner who for stealing a car and two bicycles received three 25-year sentences.

. Longer sentences.

. The passage of laws that require minimum sentencing, without regard for circumstances.

. A large expansion of work by prisoners creating profits that motivate the incarceration of more people for longer periods of time.

. More punishment of prisoners, so as to lengthen their sentences.

HISTORY OF PRISON LABOR IN THE UNITED STATES

Prison labor has its roots in slavery. After the 1861-1865 Civil War, a system of “hiring out prisoners” was introduced in order to continue the slavery tradition. Freed slaves were charged with not carrying out their sharecropping commitments (cultivating someone else’s land in exchange for part of the harvest) or petty thievery – which were almost never proven – and were then “hired out” for cotton picking, working in mines and building railroads. From 1870 until 1910 in the state of Georgia, 88% of hired-out convicts were Black. In Alabama, 93% of “hired-out” miners were Black. In Mississippi, a huge prison farm similar to the old slave plantations replaced the system of hiring out convicts. The notorious Parchman plantation existed until 1972… (more)

Republicans Try to Bring Back Slavery

Republican conservatives Yearn for the Good Ol' Days

Dissatisfied with efforts to repeal the Civil Rights Act, some Republicans are trying to bring back slavery. The 14th Amendment guaranteed citizenship rights to the newly freed slaves and reversed the Dred Scott Decision by a conservative Supreme Court.

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

GOP leader McConnell: Fourteenth Amendment is in need of review

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told The Hill on Monday that Congress “ought to take a look at” changing the 14th Amendment, which gives the children of illegal immigrants a right to U.S. citizenship.

McConnell’s statement signals growing support within the GOP for the controversial idea, which has also recently been touted by Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

In an interview, McConnell said the 14th Amendment provision should be reconsidered in light of the country’s immigration problem.

McConnell stopped short of echoing Graham’s call for repeal of the amendment.

“I think we ought to take a look at it — hold hearings, listen to the experts on it,” McConnell said. “I haven’t made a final decision about it, but that’s something that we clearly need to look at. Regardless of how you feel about the various aspects of immigration reform, I don’t think anybody thinks that’s something they’re comfortable with.”

During an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Kyl said, “There is a constitutional provision in the 14th Amendment that has been interpreted to provide that, if you are born in the United States, you are a citizen no matter what. … And so the question is, if both parents are here illegally, should there be a reward for their illegal behavior?”

Kyl added that he suggested to Graham that “we should hold some hearings and hear first from the constitutional experts to at least tell us what the state of the law on that proposition is.”

It is unclear when such hearings would occur. Democrats, who control the Senate, set the chamber’s hearing schedule.

Proponents of comprehensive immigration reform strongly oppose the Republican-led effort, which could play a major role in firing up both the left and right this election year.

The escalating debate on the 14th Amendment comes in the wake of the legal battle between Arizona and the federal government over the state’s immigration law.

The idea of repealing the 14th Amendment has picked up steam among conservatives in recent weeks. Rep. Lamar Smith (Texas), the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, has introduced legislation to deny citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants. The legislation, previously introduced by retired Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.), has 93 co-sponsors.

Rep. Mike Pence (Ind.) is the highest-ranking House Republican to formally co-sponsor the measure.

Graham, who had considered working with Democrats on immigration reform earlier this year, told Fox News last week that “birthright citizenship is a mistake.”

“We should change our Constitution and say if you come illegally and you have a child, that child is automatically not a citizen,” Graham said.

McConnell said the Obama administration needs to improve its ability to secure the country’s borders before tackling an amendment repeal.

“That’s how you get the credibility to deal with other aspects of the problem,” he said.

While President Obama’s push for immigration reform is considered dead in the 111th Congress, some Democrats on Capitol Hill are pushing for a scaled-back bill to move this fall.

One such option is Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin’s (D-Ill.) Dream Act, which would give undocumented students the right to apply for permanent residence in the U.S. Durbin’s bill has attracted praise from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), but Durbin has publicly noted that some Democrats are not on board.

Wonder what would happen to Rethuglys if they enforced this part?

Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

Oldest Black School in America Found?

The Dudley Digges House, c. 1928 (Image courtesy of Williamsburg Postcards)

Professor finds oldest black school — in Virginia

A College of William and Mary professor thinks he may have found the nation’s oldest surviving schoolhouse for African-American children.

English professor Terry Meyers believes the college – at Benjamin Franklin’s urging – was instrumental inopening the Williamsburg Bray School in 1760 to educate both free and enslaved blacks.

The find would be remarkable not only for its historical significance, but for its location in the political and ideological epicenter of slavery. The college itself was funded by taxes on tobacco harvested by slaves. The college, its faculty and even some students owned slaves, and slave labor built core campus buildings, maintained the grounds and fed the residents.

It also runs counter to later sentiments in Virginia and other Southern states, which explicitly forbade teaching slaves to read or write. An 1819 Virginia law made doing so punishable by 20 lashes.

Slavery, Today… In Washington, DC

If you belive slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclamation and 13th Amendment in the United States…

You are wrong.

Slavery exists today in the United States… Right in the shadow of the Capital Dome.

Foreign Diplomats are protected from prosecution, under Diplomatic Immunity protocols. Occasionally, this has resulted in severe abuses of American laws.

Embassy Row is Located on Massachusetts Avenue In DC, and is the location of over a dozen foreign Embassies located either directly on Mass Ave or the adjacent side streets (above).

Trafficking Report: No Mention of Diplomats in D.C. with Slaves?

In Washington on Monday morning, June 14, Hillary Clinton unveiled the State Department’s 10th annualreport on modern-day slavery, which evaluates the efforts of every nation to combat the crime. For the first time, State ranked the antislavery efforts of the U.S. alongside those of 174 other countries. The U.S. rated itself as being in full compliance with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA). But the report appears to have ignored a new congressional mandate to identify specific cases of countries whose diplomats allegedly harbored slaves within a few miles of Clinton’s remarks – even though it indicates that such cases exist.

The congressional mandate was prompted in part by the abuses of a Tanzanian diplomat named Alan Mzengi, who was minister of consular affairs at his country’s embassy in Washington. In a January 2008 ruling, a U.S. district court judge found that Mzengi and his wife forced a 20-year-old woman named Zipora Mazengo into domestic slavery in their six-bedroom Bethesda, Md., home. In her April 2007 lawsuit against the couple, Mazengo, by then 27, said that as soon as she arrived from Tanzania in June 2000, the diplomat confiscated her passport and her employment contract. For the next four years, Mazengo said, the Mzengis forced her to perform domestic work 112 hours per week for no pay. At night she shared a room with the Mzengis’ infant, one of three children under her responsibility. (See a summary of the 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report.)

She claimed that the diplomat taunted her, his wife beat her, and both forbade her from leaving the home unaccompanied – even when her sister was dying in Tanzania. Mazengo’s ingrown toenails festered to the point where she could no longer wear shoes, yet the Mzengis denied her medical treatment for two years and forced her to shovel snow barefoot. When they finally allowed her emergency surgery, they ignored her doctor’s orders and put her back to work the same day. Finally, in August 2004, Mazengo escaped with help from a customer of the Mzengis’ side business, a catering service. (See South Africa’s struggle to address a new slave trade.)

Mzengi’s abuses outraged the late Congressman Tom Lantos, a California Democrat who himself was a survivor of forced labor as a young man. In 2007 he demanded that the Tanzanian diplomat “be kicked out of the country” by the State Department. Shortly thereafter, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) faulted State’s insufficient response to some 42 domestic workers who between 2000 and 2008 had accused foreign diplomats of abuse on U.S. soil. The number of unknown cases, the GAO found, was likely much higher. The 1961 Vienna Convention shields diplomats and their families from many types of prosecution by their host countries, and some diplomats have used that status to intimidate their servants into silence about abuses.

Rare Slave Photograph Found

The Civil War occurred right about the time photography became commercially available in the United States. While there a few pictures by intrepid experimenters going back to the late 1840′s, principally Daguerreotypes in Europe. The craze hit the US in the 1850′s, with the development of two other technologies to make prints, the Calotype, and the more commercially successful albumen based technology, initially the Collodion process which led to Ambrotypes and Tintypes by the time of the War. As such, it is possible to roughly date a surviving photograph by the process used. I have one Daguerreotype in my personal collection, of two men, one of which is reputed to be an ggg-uncle, and the other is my ggg-grandfather taken in the 1850′s. I don’t know which is which, nor the circumstances of why the photograph was taken – since at that time a photograph would have cost well over a weeks wages for your average worker. The other oddity is that both men are carrying rifles.

Photographs were still fairly expensive, so the subject matter tended to be people with means. Until the 1870′s when the process became common, and photographers wandered America taking pictures of everything from babies to bad guys. So it is exceedingly rare to find photographs of slaves. Apparently, in this case a slave merchant hit upon the idea of photographing slaves as a methodology to keep records…

Hat Tip – NewsOne!

Rare Slave Photograph Found In North Carolina Attic

RALEIGH, N.C. – A haunting 150-year-old photo found in a North Carolina attic shows a young black child named John, barefoot and wearing ragged clothes, perched on a barrel next to another unidentified young boy.

Art historians believe it’s an extremely rare Civil War-era photograph of children who were either slaves at the time or recently emancipated.

The photo, which may have been taken in the early 1860s, was a testament to a dark part of American history, said Will Stapp, a photographic historian and founding curator of the National Portrait Gallery’s photographs department at the Smithsonian Institution.

White Privilege Boot Camp – Patriotism

Questioning patriotism has become a right wing game in America, claiming somehow – sans any empirical evidence – simply being on the right grants them a lofty position from which to judge and parse the patriotism of others.

Plastic patriotism is also a white privilege. When white conservative opine about “this country”, it is a country and perception curiously devoid of people of color. White privilege expressed in terms of conservatives is the capability to oppose Health Care Reform on the basis of “socialism” and abortion is wrong, even though the current system results in the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Minority babies, children, and adults each year…

Hat Tip to NewsOne for this one as well as BlackVoices.

White Privilege is not understanding the visceral reaction from black folks when Faux News and the right wing attacked Michelle Obama’s patriotism. This young lady gets unloaded on by the guy with the microphone – which I agree is over the top …

Dr. Boyce Watkins view:

VIDEO: Woman Cries In White Privilege Boot Camp

I am not sure if the “White Privilege Boot Camp” is real or not, but I am also not sure if I mind the idea. This is not to say that it should be as harsh as the boot camp the brother puts the white woman through in the below video, but the truth is that many of us in America are ignorant about racial history, primarily because our country wants to forget it. We don’t mention many of the horrors and evils of slavery, because we would rather presume that a holocaust can only occur in another country.I watched the video below with as much shock as the woman who was being lectured by the brother with the microphone. The brother is loud, and he dominates the woman, leading most of us to feel some degree of empathy toward her. She even cries toward the end, so the tendency is to argue that perhaps he was too harsh. Yes, he was too harsh, and I would not have approached the issue in the same way. But……..

When it comes to how we process our racial history in America, there is the question of truth vs. lies. Was the woman crying because she was confronted with the truth about white privilege? Are most white Americans even aware of the benefits of being white? If that is or is not the case, then who should be held accountable for the clear and lasting damage of slavery? While some expect us to presume that history remains disconnected from the present, the truth is that they are inextricably linked. You can’t have the present without the past, since actions of the past create the world that lies all around us. Here are some quick examples:

Elena Kagan, the most recent Supreme Court nominee, can hire 29 people, with none of them being black, and no one blinks an eye. Why? Because there is a privilege to whiteness, which implies that black people should be happy with whatever we can get. She’d never consider allowing white men or women to be excluded in an equally egregious way.

The Supreme Court has had over 111 justices, and not a single black woman has had a chance to serve on the court. That’s not the result of black women being inferior to anyone else. It’s the result of white privilege, sexism and the racially divisive constructs on which our nation has been built.

The average black family wealth level is roughly 1/10 that of white Americans. That didn’t happen because black people decided that we don’t like money. It happened because for hundreds of years, slavery and Jim Crow eliminated our ability to pass wealth on to our children. This wealth imbalance wasn’t created overnight.

Those are the facts, folks, whether we like them or not. Some respond to these realities with anger. Some people forgive and forget. Some people live in denial. My personal opinion, though, is that we are going to have to deal with white privilege and the impact of slavery if our country is going to ever move forward. At the very least, we should honestly educate one another on the past… Again, I can’t condone the aggressive approach, but it is certainly thought-provoking.

more about “Woman Cries In White Pivilege Boot Ca…“, posted with vodpod

The Forgotten in Kentucky

Steal away
Steal away
Steal away to Jesus
Steal away
Steal away home
I ain’t got long to stay here

Free Kentucky’s Forgotten 44

Most people in Kentucky are unaware that “seducing or enticing slaves to leave their lawful owners” was once such a grievous crime that scores of abolitionists suffered long years behind bars for their common-sense daring. One of them was forgotten in his cell until five years beyond the end of slavery and the Civil War. Others emerged to tell of bleeding under the warder’s lash in a “jaws of hell” torment delivered by the state as the appropriate penalty for urging blacks to find freedom.

Modern Kentucky is blessed that some citizens — including an archivist and a public defender — are roiled enough to be campaigning for a just postscript to that horrendous era: an official pardon for 44 abolitionists long dead and gone. The campaign is a welcome contrast to thoughtless proclamations that embarrass Old South statehouses with salutes to a Confederate history often omitting the towering facts of slavery.

“To be totally forgotten — where nobody today even remembers their names — it seems an incredible injustice,” James Prichard, a retired state archivist, told The Lexington Herald-Leader about his research on the 44, 24 of them whites. Mr. Prichard’s work inspired Rodney Barnes, the public defender in Frankfort, and Jared Schultze, a Kentucky-born college intern determined to set his state’s history right.

Distracted though he is by current criminality, Mr. Barnes presses for the pardons as time-defying challenges for the halls of justice. “These people are heroes — they did the right thing,” said Mr. Barnes, laboring for this chance for Kentucky to stand tall. The office of Gov. Steve Beshear admits to being “intrigued” and is reviewing the pardon request.

Cold cases from slavery days truly come alive in the details Mr. Prichard has gathered. Tales of Tom Johnson, “a free man of color” who fell in love with Amanda, the property of F. B. Merriman of Marion County. The freed slave was imprisoned for wooing Amanda into elopement. And the black matriarch Julett Miles, who doubled back from freedom in Ohio when she heard her enslaved family was up for resale in Kentucky. She did three years for the crime of “stealing” some of her own children. She was buried with her history, until now.

One Ghanaian African View of the Gates “Blame” Article

Because we are having a really good discussion here (and I thank James for his contributions to the discussion) – I thought I would throw this one in as indicative of what Africans think of the Gates article. This one is from Modern Ghana by Paul I. Adujie. I haven’t been able to pull up reactions from Nigeria yet.

Ending The Slavery Blame-Game By Henry Louis Gates, A Rejoinder

Nigerian-American Designer Lola Faturoti's New Obama Inspired Attire

It is with considerable agitation, and extreme irritation, with which I read Henry Louis Gates’ pedestrian essay on slave trade and reparations, published in The New York Times, titled Ending The Slavery Blame-Game.

Louis Gates is obviously seeking relevance and redemption after his arrogant altercations with a Cambridge police officer in 2009. Louis Gates it will be recalled, engaged in a shouting match in belligerent, intransigent and cantankerous manner, as he prevented a police officer from carrying out legitimate police work. At that time, it was pointed out by some, that Louis Gates was merely engaged in racial racketeering, as he accused the police officer of racism without basis. An accusation and serious charge of racism against a fine police officer, which was not based on the facts and the evidences.

Perhaps it is Henry Louis Gates’ calling card and nature, to make sundry conclusions while shirking away from the intellectual dexterity required to sift through facts and evidences, and engage in empirical analysis, particularly so, for anyone with pretension to academic credentials, and with desire to be taken seriously. In the all important matter of slave trade, slavery and overdue reparations, Gates has come with a claptrap and a hack job to absolve, exculpate and exonerate his historical tormentors?

Louis Gates lazily, engaged in this silly pretensions to rewrite and revise the well settled history of the profound evil of slavery, the worst evil, in human history, and yet, Gates offered obfuscations and parroting of recycled garbage, and sought to cover all these with his happenstance of being a Harvard University employee!

Gates’ inane contribution to revisionists efforts at retelling of the horrors and brutalities of slave trade is shameful. Gates writes about the slave trade as some sorts of friendly business transactions between willing seller and equally willing buyer, as would seller and buyer of pork barrels or barrels of sweet crude or commodities at the New York or Chicago Stock Exchanges; in which merchants of equal statuses seal deals with warm and endearing handshakes, with scheduled caviar and cocktails to follow.

Gates’ flimsy portrayals of Africans as conspiring, conniving and colluding collaborators, with those who came from thousands of miles to far away Africa, to kidnap, snatch and bundles and brutalize Africans into slavery, is an effort, which is worse than useless on the part of Gates. Gates’ melodramatic lies failed to inform his readers of Oba Ovoramwen of Benin, a king of the Bini Kingdom who was dethroned and exiled outside of his domain, because he opposed Europeans horrors and brutalities and oppression in his kingdom. And there were many others like Oba Ovaramwen and the Mau Mau, during slavery and colonialism, who opposed Europeans, and paid with their lives or were jailed by Europeans! Gates obviously have not read a single page about Belgian Congo and King Leopold?

Dr, Boyce Watkins – Gates Full of It!

Watkins lights into Gates with this piece. I agree with Watkins that Gates has missed the key issues relative to slavery and Reparations, and fallen for the white supremacist line which is oft quoted as an excuse.

Henry Louis Gates lets US off the hook in ‘slavery blame game’

Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. recently wrote an interesting piece for the New York Times called, “Ending the Slavery Blame Game.” In the piece, Gates effectively argues that the fight for reparations is convoluted and somewhat mitigated by the fact that African elites participated in the slave trade. While describing complex business deals made between some African leadership and the Europeans who brought Africans to the New World, it almost appears as though Gates is saying that this disturbing relationship somehow undermines the right of African-Americans to hold our government accountable for its involvement in crimes committed against our people.

At very least, I am under the assumption that by “ending the slavery blame game,” Gates is arguing that we should stop blaming the United States government and white America for the rape, murder, castration, lynching and beating of our ancestors.

Sorry Dr. Gates, but I must respectfully (or perhaps not so respectfully) disagree. If a young girl is sold into prostitution by her own parents, the pimp must still pay for the suffering he caused the young woman. He can’t simply say, “Her parents made a deal with me, so you should stop the blame game.”

In other words, the United States, as a broad and powerful industrial entity, benefited from slavery to the tune of several trillion dollars. Much of this wealth was passed down from one white man to another, and was always out of the grasp of the black men, women and children who gave their lives on American soil in order to earn it. As a result, the median net worth of the African-American family is roughly one-tenth that of white American families and we have consistently higher unemployment due to our inability to create jobs, since white Americans own most businesses.

Henry Louis Gates – On Slavery and Reparations

Think Professor Gates misses a half a dozen points here in this article, including the issues of generational slavery and Jim Crow being the actual driving issues behind much of the Reparations discussion…

So I believe Gates is wrong here on a number of points. After a snippet from the Gates piece, I will include a response by Boyce Watkins response, which isn’t very dissimilar to my reaction, except for the personal shot at Gates’ ego…

Ending the Slavery Blame-Game

THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics — the fact that he is African-American and president — Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage.

There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. Perhaps the most vexing is how to parcel out blame to those directly involved in the capture and sale of human beings for immense economic gain.

While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.

Former RNC Chair, Haley Barbour – “Slavery omission didn’t matter for diddly!”

Current Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, former RNC Chair, and regular favorite at the Mississippi Council of Conservative Citizen’s annual barbecue…

more about “Mississippi Gov. Barbour Thinks Slave…“, posted with vodpod

Miss. Governor Refers to Himself as ‘Fat Redneck’

First there’s national Republican Party chairman Michael Steele, who has come under criticism for his leadership. Steele says he thinks he’s being held to a higher standard because he’s black.

Then there’s a former GOP chairman, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour. He disagrees with Steele’s assessment. Barbour says that’s like saying, “I think I’m held to the higher standard because I’m a fat redneck with an accent like this.”

Barbour, a potential presidential candidate in 2012, says party chairmen have been and continue to be judged by results.

Barbour appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The Southern Myth and “Confederate History Month”

In this interview by Olbermann, Julian Bond gets into the background and structure of the Southern Myth which Southern Apologists have advanced for over a century.

Indeed, here is a variation of that “Southern Myth” by a Sons of Confederate Veterans PR Chair -

He claims that the Northern states all had slavery by the time of the “War Between the States”.

That’s not true. These states abolished slavery prior to the Civil War  -

• Vermont in 1777
• Pennsylvania in 1780
• Massachusetts in 1781
• New Hampshire in 1783
• Connecticut in 1784
• New York in 1799
• New Jersey in 1804

These new states never allowed slavery within their borders:

• Maine
• Michigan
• Wisconsin
• Ohio
• Indiana
• Kansas
• Oregon
• California
• Illinois

more about “RealClearPolitics – Video – Olbermann…“, posted with vodpod

Virginia Governor Discovers Link Between confederacy and Slavery

Long term Virginia resident and Professor at Virginia Tech Nikki Giovanni lays it out -

This “Proclamation” may well cost McDonnel any goodwill he had with black voters in the state. He was the first Republican politician to make inroads into getting black voters to support him – in no small part that he portrayed himself as a different style of Republican politician from courthouse steps racists like George “Macacca” Allen and Jim Gillmore.

I’m going to repeat and expand a bit on what I said earlier in a response to a comment -

In Virginia we celebrate Lee-Jackson day, where State Offices are closed. There are numerous roads, towns, and highways named after Robert E. Lee, or “Stonewall” Jackson. One of the largest military bases in the state is named after a confederate General – A.P. Hill. Others include Ft. Pickett and Ft. Lee. Monument Avenue in Richmond features statues and memorials to confederate leaders – there is even a Jewish confederate Monument… There are even confederate Monuments where there is scant evidence anyone felt important enough to shoot at each other over…

There are dozens of Battlefields, and in virtually every one of the older towns – a memorial to the confederate dead in the town square.