Some time ago a frat brother asked me why I am not branded. In fact through the years as I meet people who find out I am an Omega ask me where is my brand or tattoo. While I respect people to choose to modify their body as a form of self expression I choose not to express myself in that fashion.
Why - for some it is no big deal however for me there is something that hearkens back to the days of slavery. Slave owners would mark their property to make it clear this belonged to me. The very thought of marking myself in any form makes me think of that and would be a constant reminder that there were people (some of whom were related by blood) who had this done to them involuntarily - they had no say or choice so how can I respect their memory and the sacrifices they made that allow me to be here and do to myself voluntarily what they would have wished not be done to them?
I understand in different cultures various forms of body modification are part of a ritual that involved the rite of passage from childhood to adult and even in some you are considered unattractive without - however this is my personal choice and is my way of paying respect to the people who are responsible for my being here today. Sure, I could mark my skin or modify myself to show my commitment - yet for me a better testament is how I choose to live my life and the people whose lives I have touched along the way - something that I hope will leave a more meaningful mark and it of benefit to others that lives long past my time on this earth!
What are your thoughts - why do you choose to or not to modify your body?
Imagine the colleges and universities that would exist now?
If the Indians were never persecuted and forced onto reservations?
If the Japanese were never forced to live in internment camps?
Starting to get the idea
This is not another discussion about the stereotypical rights and wrongs of slavery and this is not about perpetuating the myths but examining the institution of an economic standpoint.
What made the controls used to perpetuate slavery so effective?
Combining people from various tribes who did not speak same languages or share common traditions
Identifying a group of people with a visible difference and creating a culture where arbitrary and often false characteristics ranging from intelligence to hygiene were assigned
Deconstructing the identity of the ethnic group using many of the same processes used on many prostitutes today as well as physiological conditioning
Through these a cheap labor class was created. What they do not talk about in the history books is that slavery was not a southern issue is was a country wide issue and its sole purpose and driving factor was economics – cheap labor. In the southern states you had a hand full of people who owned large amounts of slave but the average slave owner across the country north and south owned 1-2. They typically lived in the house with the family and were the skilled labor. The brick mason, field hands, construction workers, black smiths, laundry workers, seamstresses, etc.
When the emancipation proclamation was passed the freed slaved who had the skills and actually did the work and operations were the skilled labor able to generate income and the former owners whose ability primarily was that of administrator lost their revenue base and further was put in a position to have to compete against their former labor. As overhead with little to no hands on experience and not a great amount of work ethic am imbalance was created and it was deemed a truly level playing field was not advantageous to the people used to being in control. Since it was impossible to restore slavery something had to be done to retard things to allow the former masters time to catch up hence jim crow laws. Allow me to interject a little logic – if freed former slaves were simply a southern problem then why did the laws exist in almost every state except Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico?
During theReconstructionperiod of 1865–1877 in the defeated South (the Confederacy), federal law protected the civil rights of "freedmen" — the liberated African slaves. In the 1870s, white Democrats gradually returned to power in southern states, sometimes as a result of elections in which paramilitary groups intimidated opponents, attacking blacks or preventing them from voting. Gubernatorial elections were close and disputed in Louisiana for years, with extreme violence unleashed during the campaign. In 1877 a nationalcompromiseto gain southern support in the presidential election resulted in the last of the federal troops being withdrawn from the South. White Democrats had taken back power in every Southern state.[4]The white, Democratic PartyRedeemergovernment that followed the troop withdrawal legislated Jim Crow laws segregating black people from the state's white population.
Blacks were still elected to local offices in the 1880s, but the establishment Democrats were passing laws to make voter registration and elections more restrictive, with the result that participation by most blacks and many poor whites began to decrease. Starting with Mississippi in 1890, through 1910 the former Confederate states passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively disfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites through a combination of poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements.Grandfather clausestemporarily permitted some illiterate whites to vote. Voter turnout dropped drastically through the South as a result of such measures.
Denied the ability to vote, blacks and poor whites could not serve on juries or in local office. They could not influence the state legislatures, and, predictably, their interests were overlooked. While public schools had been established by Reconstruction legislatures, those for black children were consistently underfunded, even within the strained finances of the South. The decreasing price of cotton kept the agricultural economy at a low.
In some cases Progressive measures to reduce election fraud acted against black and poor white voters who were illiterate. While the separation of African Americans from the general population was becoming legalized and formalized in theProgressive Era(1890s–1920s), it was also becoming customary. Even in cases in which Jim Crow laws did not expressly forbid black people to participate, for instance, in sports or recreation or church services, the laws shaped a segregated culture.[2]
In the Jim Crow context, thepresidential election of 1912was steeply slanted against the interests of Black Americans. Most blacks were still in the South, where they had been effectively disfranchised, so they could not vote at all.Poll taxesand literacy requirements banned many Americans from voting, yet, said requirements had loopholes exempting White Americans from paying the poll tax or knowing how to read. For example, inOklahoma, anyone qualified to vote before 1866, or who is related to someone qualified to vote before 1866, was exempted from the literacy requirement; the only Americans who could vote before 1866 were, of course, White Americans, so White Americans were exempted from the literacy requirement, while all Black Americans were segregated by law.[5]
Woodrow Wilson, a southern Democrat and the first southern-born president of the postwar period, appointed southerners to his cabinet. Some quickly began to press for segregated work places, although Washington, DC and federal offices had been integrated since after the Civil War. In 1913, for instance, the actingSecretary of the Treasury—an appointee of thePresident—was heard to express his consternation at black and white women working together in one government office: "I feel sure that this must go against the grain of the white women. Is there any reason why the white women should not have only white women working across from them on the machines?"[6]
PresidentWoodrow Wilson, introduced segregation in Federal offices, despite much protest.[7]Mr. Wilson appointed Southern politicians who were segregationists, because of his firm belief that racial segregation was in the best interest of Black Americans and White Americans alike.[7]AtGettysburgon4 July1913, the semi-centennial ofAbraham Lincoln's declaration that "all men are created equal", Wilson addressed the crowd:
How complete the union has become and how dear to all of us, how unquestioned, how benign and majestic, as state after state has been added to this, our great family of free men!
AWashington Beeeditorial wondered if the "reunion" of 1913 was a reunion of those who fought for "the extinction of slavery" or a reunion of those who fought to "perpetuate slavery and who are now employing every artifice and argument known to deceit" to present emancipation as a failed venture.[8]One historian notes that the "Peace Jubilee" at which Wilson presided at Gettysburg in 1913 "was a Jim Crow reunion, and white supremacy might be said to have been the silent, invisible master of ceremonies."[8]
Many people misquote or misunderstand what I am about to write next and that is that the former slaves had a strong work ethic. This is why there was a problem once they were freed. The slaves who lacked a work ethic were often left to die so you worked or else. When slavery ended that work ethic still existed it was required to survive so you had the former masters who were not used to actually having to do any hands on work nor compete in a fair environment and the former slaves who knew how to work hard but were not allowed to receive the fruits of their labor who now could as a result based solely on merit we all know what happens when someone consistently out performs the other.
Consider this simple question – especially in light of our current economic crisis – if we were truly a country that lived up to our own governing documents?
Greenwoodis aneighborhoodinTulsa,Oklahoma. As one of the most successful and wealthiestAfrican Americancommunities in the United Stated during the early 20th Century, it was popularly known as America's "Black Wall Street" until theTulsa Race Riotof 1921. The riot was one of the most devastating race riots in history and it destroyed the once thriving Greenwood community. Greenwood is still being rebuilt today because of the destruction over 80 years ag
Finding Florida’s Lost Settlement A six-member team is searching for evidence of a community of former African slaves and American Indians.
The sound waves bouncing back to the underwater sonar device revealed a massive object laying at the murky bottom of the ManateeRiver, near East Bradenton, Fla. While the indistinct image could have been nothing more than normal debris, the six-member team of marine archaeologists, divers and volunteers hoped they’d discovered physical evidence of a “maroon” community of former African slaves and Seminole Indians. The object, they thought, could be a wharf used by British ships bringing supplies to the community.
Two divers from the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium, an independent marine laboratory in Sarasota, Fla., recently took to the water to find out.
TheRosewood massacrewas an incident of racially motivated violence that took place during the first week of January 1923 in ruralLevy County, Florida. Six blacks and two whites were killed, and the town ofRosewoodwas abandoned and destroyed during what was characterized as arace riot. Racial disturbances were common during the early 20th century in the United States, reflecting the nation's rapid social changes. Florida had an especially high number oflynchingsin the years before the massacre, including a well-publicized incident in December 1922.
Mr. Morris is a historian at the University of Texas at Arlington, and the author of books and articles on the history of the South. He is completing a book on the environmental and social history of the LowerMississippiValley, including New Orleans.
Once again the entire country is confronted with the legacy of Reconstruction.
It is too simple to chalk the tragedy that continues to unfold in New Orleans to the force of nature, or to an unfathomable God. Hurricanes, like earthquakes, tornadoes, eruptions, and tsunamis, do come, but who or what sends them is only half the story. Such disasters whatever their origin smash into worlds of our making. What they do when they make landfall, what they meet when they reach the coast, is largely up to us. In the case of New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina hit a city of intractable poverty, in which the most desperately poor are African American. It also hit a city that was largely defenseless precisely because it is black and poor. And because its once powerful white citizenry has largely vanished.
North Carolina's African American heritage is rich and diverse. In slavery and in freedom, black residents shaped state politics and institutions, literary traditions, religious practice, and the lives of their fellow North Carolinians. The African American struggle for civil rights and equality touched all regions of the state, and the following is a listing, grouped by region, of some important dates for African American history in North Carolina.
1849 London R. Ferebee was born to enslaved parents in CurrituckCounty. His master, Edwin Cowles, took Ferebee away from his family to work with his boating crew, and in 1861, Ferebee was living with his master's family in StillTown, a village outside of ElizabethCity. In August of that year, Ferebee ran away to Shiloh, North Carolina, to seek protection with the Northern army. He records these events and other adventures in his 1882 narrativeA Brief History of the Slave Life of Rev. L. R. Ferebee, and the Battles of Life, and Four Years of His Ministerial Life. Written from Memory.
1898 The Wilmington race riots erupted. On November 10 and 11 a white militia headed by local Democratic leaders terrorized the black community, killing and wounding dozens, banishing much of the city's black leadership, and burning the offices of several black businesses, including Wilmington's black newspaper, theRecord. David Bryant Fulton'sHanover(1900) and Charles Chesnutt'sThe Marrow of Tradition(1901) are both thinly fictionalized accounts of the massacre. J. Allen Kirk, a black minister in Wilmington, details his experience inA Statement of Facts Concerning the Bloody Riot in Wilmington, N.C. Of Interest to Every Citizen of the United States(1898).
The Coastal Plain
1790 Henry Evans, a Virginia-born shoemaker, organized Evans Chapel (now The Evans Metropolitan AME Zion Church) in Fayetteville. Evans was headed for Charleston when he stopped in Fayetteville and felt called by God to stay and help reform the residents there. Rosser H. Taylor'sThe Free Negro in North Carolina(1920) and Carter Godwin Woodson'sThe History of the Negro Church(1921) both refer to Evans' work.
1813Harriet Jacobs, America's most famous female slave narrator, was born in Edenton. Jacobs escaped from her cruel master Dr. James Norcom and hid in a tiny attic room for seven years before fleeing to the North. Her 1861 narrative,Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, records her experiences in both slavery and freedom.
1823 Joseph Baysmore, elder of the First Colored Baptist Church of Weldon, was born in BertieCounty. Baysmore become an ordained minister in 1866, and in 1887, upon leaving Weldon to minister in HalifaxCounty, he published abrief autobiographical sketch accompanied by four of his sermons.
1880 The first patient was admitted to the North Carolina Asylum for the Colored Insane (now CherryHospital) in Goldsboro. The state officially established the hospital in 1877, more than two decades after opening the first white asylum. By 1884, the hospital was serving more than 150 patients according to itsannual report from that year.
The Piedmont
1832 John Chavis, a Revolutionary War veteran and prominent Presbyterian minister in Orange County and the surrounding areas, was forced to cease his public sermons when the General Assembly forbade African American preaching after Nat Turner's 1831 slave insurrection. Steven B. Weeks celebrates Chavis's accomplishments in a 1914 profile published inThe Southern Workman.
1868 The Colored Orphanage of North Carolina was mandated by the revised state constitution. However, the facility was not established until the 1880s, over a decade after the state created its first white orphanage. Though it was a non-profit private institution, the orphanage was required to make an annual report(such as this one from 1940)to the people of North Carolina since the children at the home were wards of state sent to the facility by county welfare departments.
1883 Gaston County Commissioners suggested a vote on a proposition that would tax black and white citizens at different rates for each race's segregated schools. The court later ruled this proposition, and all race-based taxation for public schools, unconstitutional, and Superintendent of Public Instruction Charles Harden reprinted the court's opinions in hisbiennial report for 1898-1900.
1890 The General Assembly approved plans to create North Carolina Agricultural and MechanicalCollege for Negroes (now North Carolina Agricultural and TechnicalStateUniversity) in Greensboro. In the early 1900s, the college held farmers' institutes, through which the university sought to aid North Carolina's agricultural development by educating African American farmers on more efficient practices and other pertinent issues. For more on the college's status in the early 20th century, see its1903 and 1904 annual reports.
1893 African American craftsmen working on Biltmore Estate gathered at the Asheville Young Man's Institute, an organization commissioned by Biltmore owner George Vanderbilt. Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted also worked on the Biltmore mansion and had traveled throughout the South. Among other observations from his journey, Olmsted recorded his impressions of race relations and the black community inA Journey in the Seaboard Slave States; With Remarks on Their Economy(1856).
On February 25, 1870, visitors in the Senate galleries burst into applause as Mississippi senator-elect Hiram Revels of Mississippi entered the chamber to take his oath of office. Those present knew that they were witnessing an event of great historical significance. Revels was about to become the first African American to serve in the Senate.
Born 42 years earlier to free black parents in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Revels became an educator and minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. During the Civil War, he helped form regiments of African American soldiers and established schools for freed slaves. After the war, Revels moved to Mississippi, where he won election to the state senate. In recognition of his hard work and leadership skills, his legislative colleagues elected him to one of Mississippi's vacant U.S. Senate seats as that state prepared to rejoin the Union.
Revels' credentials arrived in the Senate on February 23, 1870, and were immediately blocked by a few members who had no desire to see a black man serve in Congress. Masking their racist views, they argued that Revels had not been a U.S. citizen for the nine years required of all senators. In their distorted interpretation, black Americans had only become citizens with the passage of the 1866 Civil Rights Act, just four years earlier. Revels' supporters dismissed that statement, pointing out that he had been a voter many years earlier in Ohio and was therefore certainly a citizen.
Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner brought the debate to an end with a stirring speech. "The time has passed for argument. Nothing more need be said. For a long time it has been clear that colored persons must be senators." Then, by an overwhelming margin, the Senate voted 48 to 8 to seat Revels.
Three weeks later, the Senate galleries again filled to capacity as Hiram Revels rose to make his first formal speech. Seeing himself as a representative of African American interests throughout the nation, he spoke—unsuccessfully as it turned out—against a provision included in legislation readmitting Georgia to the Union. He correctly predicted that the provision would be used to prohibit blacks from holding office in that state.
When Hiram Revels' brief term ended on March 3, 1871, he returned to Mississippi, where he later became president of AlcornCollege.
An extensive list of black inventors holding patents listed by name, patent number, and date - hundreds of black inventors listed, however, without the biographical information of the listings above.
A group of enslaved Africans changed Jamestown and the future of a nation
By Tim Hashaw
Posted 1/21/07
Everyone knows the tales of America's founding: John Smith, Pocahontas, and Jamestown. Yet buried by almost four centuries of history is the tale of the first African-Americans.
Under a mid-July sky in 1619, two pirate ships sailing between Cuba and the YucatánPeninsula sighted a slow-moving Spanish frigate named the San Juan Bautista. Hoping the frigate carried gold and silver, the White Lion and the Treasurer gave chase, trapping the Spanish ship in the Bay of Campeche. After hours of cannon fire, the Spanish captain surrendered. The pirates boarded and discovered that instead of treasure, they had won a cargo of enslaved Africans being shipped from Luanda, Angola, to Vera Cruz, Mexico.
The Africans—350 men, women, and children—had been captured four months earlier when an army of Portuguese and African allies seeking silver mines invaded the Bantu-speaking kingdom of Ndongo on the Kwanza River in north central Angola. Ndongo at the time was one of several sophisticated Iron Age states in Angola—a bustling kingdom of settled farmers, craftsmen, and cattle-herders. Angolans had embraced Christianity and were trading with Europe. Among the captives on the Bautista were several second- and third-generation Christians with Latin names such as Antonio, Maria, Isabell, and Francisco.
The captains of the White Lion and the Treasurer divided 60 of the Bautista's healthiest men, women, and children between them and sailed for the new English colony of Jamestown—a struggling settlement in dire need of manpower. As recorded by John Rolfe, husband of Pocahontas, the pirates arrived in the Chesapeake at the end of August. Of the Bautista's captives, 32 (17 females and 15 males) were purchased by Jamestown settlers.
From Jamestown, both corsairs sailed for Bermuda, where they traded their remaining Bautista captives. Over the next four years, a half dozen of these Africans were sent back to Jamestown. Names of Bautista Africans first appear in the 1625 Jamestown census, and from the faceless anonymity of Rolfe's 1619 general description of "Negroes" emerge John Pedro, Anthony and Mary Johnson, and Antonio and Isabell Tucker and their young child, William, along with John Graweere, Margaret Cornish, and others.
Plantations.Having been taken from a flourishing country of a quarter-million inhabitants, the Africans were shocked by the appalling conditions of tiny, death-haunted Jamestown.
In the beginning, the first group of Africans was split up and sent to a handful of tobacco plantations along the James River. They were put to work mostly planting and harvesting tobacco, but records show they also raised cattle and acted as traders, selling produce to Indians and to European ships arriving in Jamestown.
During the next two decades, some were permitted to raise crops and cattle to purchase their freedom. They married, sometimes to their fellow Africans and sometimes to English settlers, and they raised families. By the 1640s and 1650s, a handful of families from the Bautista bought their own farms around Jamestown.
Slavery would not become fully institutionalized in Virginia until 1705, and, free to prosper, some of the Bautista captives in Virginia even acquired white servants to raise their tobacco in the 1650s. A few, like the Johnson family, became wealthy by colonial standards, even though others of their compatriots remained enslaved. Jamestown was the cradle of two African Americas—one free and one slave. In time, John Graweere became a respected officer of the Jamestown court. Margaret Cornish charmed the son of a Jamestown legislator. John Pedro became a member of the militia.
However, in 1691, Jamestown outlawed freeing slaves unless the slaveholder transported them out of the colony. In 1705, the legislature refused to let slaves raise crops and cattle to purchase their freedom. Free African-Americans who were descendants of the first founders from the Bautista were stripped of many of their rights. In less than one century, the promising dawn had faded from memory, and the long night of slavery had begun.
Tim Hashaw is the author ofThe Birth of Black America: The First African Americans and the Pursuit of Freedom at Jamestown.
This story appears in the January 29, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
“one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all” or “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Imagine if we truly lived up to and honored these simple words what our country would look like today?
As you can see I hope this is not a post about slavery but about dreams and imagination. It is inspired by so many of the efforts of late to dismantle affirmative action which to me is a carry over of Jim Crow. Why – Rhetoric aside Equal Employment = Affirmative action. Employing or contracting with the best people regardless.
I am sorry as long as I see things like what I am about to show below demonstrating albeit in a humorous way how ethnic minorities are perceived we still are not there
As with all of my posts – what do you think? Also research and ask the questions of yourself – do your own research and ask your own questions – make up your own mind but be h
