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Slavery in America
Slaves did not have a good life they were not treated as human beings. Slaves were deprived of their liberty, their language, their heritage and their country. Slaves were not allowed to read or write, beaten sometimes until bloody and were often separated from family members. Slaves suffered physical abuse and the America government allowed it. Do not believe the lies Black people did not have a better life when they were slaves. Nobody wanted to be a slave, nor were slaves happy no matter what anyone tells you.
Byjay reeves, associated press

Alabama steamship owner Timothy Meaher financed the last slave vessel that brought African captives to the United States, and he came out of the Civil War a wealthy man. His descendants, with land worth millions, are still part of Mobile society's upper crust. The people whom Meaher enslaved, however, emerged from the war with freedom but little else. Census forms that documented Meaher's postwar riches list them as laborers, housewives and farmers with nothing of value. Many of their descendants today hold working-class jobs. Now, the history of Meaher and the slave ship Clotilda may offer one of the more clear-cut cases for slavery reparations, with identifiable perpetrators and victims. While no formal push for reparations has begun, the subject has been bubbling up quietly among community members since earlier this year, when experts said they found the wreckage of the Clotilda in muddy waters near Mobile.

Some say too many years have passed for reparations; others say the discovery of the ship makes the timing perfect. Many Clotilda descendants say reconciliation with the Meahers would suffice, perhaps a chance to discuss an intertwined history. Others hope the family helps with ambitious plans to transform a downtrodden community into a tourist attraction. Some want cash; some want nothing. Reparations debates usually involve redress for the multitude of descendants from about 4 million black people who were enslaved in the United States. But with Congress considering whether to create a reparations study commission, what might a single instance of reparations look like in the city where this nation's Atlantic slave trade finally ended? Pat Frazier, a descendant of Meaher slave James Dennison, isn't sure. But she's unhappy about the lack of justice and what many consider the deafening silence of the Meaher family. "I've never known them to just own up to what happened," said Frazier, 68.

In Mobile, like many Southern communities, descendants of slave owners and enslaved people are often neighbors, though in vastly different circumstances. Originally from Maine, Meaher moved South and got rich off steamboats and a sawmill. He purchased the schooner Clotilda for a reported $35,000 and financed a slave expedition to West Africa the year before the war began. The international slave trade was already outlawed, but Meaher wagered he could import slaves in defiance of the ban. Arrested after the ship carrying about 110 captives arrived and was scuttled in Mobile in 1860, he was cleared of charges by a judge, according to "Dreams of Africa in Alabama," a book by Sylviane A. Diouf. Historical accounts say Meaher refused to provide land after the war to the freed Africans, who then scraped together money to purchase property.

They founded a community called "Africatown USA," where some of the west-African ways of the once-enslaved people were preserved. Its remnants still exist. Meaher listed assets including $20,000 in land and personal property in the 1870 Census. A newspaper article said his son Augustine was a multi-millionaire in 1905. Court records from 2012 say the Meaher family real estate company held $35 million in assets including 22,000 acres of land, timber plus rental income and cash. Tax records show Meaher relatives remain large landowners, with $20 million in property through the corporation.
A Facebook meme accurately describes some of Columbus's most brutal practices in the Caribbean.
By Dan MacGuill

Christopher Columbus sold sex slaves — some as young as nine years old. As time passes, a greater and greater number of people have been exposed to the often uncomfortable historical details of Christopher Columbus’s voyages to the Americas at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries. The murder, enslavement and mistreatment of the native peoples of the Caribbean islands which Columbus and his crews conquered, can provoke shock and even disbelief, more than 500 years on. In May 2018, readers asked about the veracity of a meme which claimed that Columbus had been involved in procuring and distributing women and even children as sex slaves: Columbus Provided Native Sex Slaves to His Men:  In addition to putting the natives to work as slaves in his gold mines, Columbus also sold sex slaves to his men — some as young as 9. Columbus and his men also raided villages for sex and sport. In the year 1500, Columbus wrote: “A hundred castellanoes are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand.”
Education during the Slave Period
During the era of slavery in the United States, the education of African Americans, enslaved and free, was often discouraged, except for religious instruction, and eventually made illegal in many of the Southern states. It was believed that literacy was a threat to the institution of slavery. First, literacy facilitated knowledge about the successful slave revolution in Haiti of 1791–1804, the end of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, and the writings of abolitionists. Secondly, literacy allowed or potentially allowed slaves better access to information about the Underground Railroad and other routes to freedom.
By Amir Vera, CNN

(CNN) As protesters across the United States continue calling for an end to police brutality and racial injustice, organizations are coming to terms with their racist histories. Throughout the South, monuments and flags celebrating the Confederacy are being taken down. Companies like Mars and Quaker Oats are planning to change or retire racist brand characters like Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima. And popular music groups such as Lady Antebellum and The Dixie Chicks -- now Lady A and The Chicks -- have changed their names. But in a country where enslaved Black people were so essential in its rise to global power, it's impossible to stamp out every link to its painful history. Slavery has marked everything from the US Capitol to the alcohol Americans consume. Here are seven institutions that many people may not know are linked to slavery:
Enslaved people could not legally marry in any American colony or state. Colonial and state laws considered them property and commodities, not legal persons who could enter into contracts, and marriage was, and is, very much a legal contract. This means that until 1865 when slavery ended in this country, the vast majority of African Americans could not legally marry.
Once in the Americas, slaves were sold, by auction, to the person that bid the most money for them. It was here that family members would find themselves split up, as a bidder may not want to buy the whole family, only the strongest, healthiest member.
Story by Zahara Hill

In the everlasting faceoff between Black history and America’s self-conception, it’s worth revisiting one of the fight’s earliest and most valiant weapons of war: the slave memoir. Narratives by formerly enslaved writers like Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northup were critical to shedding light on the otherwise unthinkable realities of enslavement. Whatever idea of civility and morality America wanted to project to the world, slave memoirs were gutting proof to the contrary. “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” — one of the foremost examples of the literary genre — offered a firsthand glimpse into the depravities that constituted chattel slavery. In it, Douglass recounts being emotionally and physically brutalized by Edward Covey, who had a reputation as a “slave-breaker,” and watching slaveholders cite Bible verses as they whipped the enslaved, among other atrocities.

The scholar says he was first introduced to the cruelties of enslavement when he saw his Aunt Hester stripped and beaten by her slaveholder, Captain Anthony. Douglass writes that his aunt was being punished for going against Anthony’s demands. But the author also suspected the slaveholder had a sexual interest in his aunt and that his attack was retaliatory because she’d recently spent time with a male slave. (Harriet Jacobs’ 1861 “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” also provides further insight into the deplorably complex experiences of enslaved women.)
Facts, information and articles about Slavery In America, one of the causes of the civil war. Slavery in America began in the early 17th Century and continued to be practiced for the next 250 years by the colonies and states. Slaves, mostly from Africa, worked in the production of tobacco crops and later, cotton. With the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 along with the growing demand for the product in Europe, the use of slaves in the South became a foundation of their economy.
In 1619, the Dutch introduced the first captured Africans to America, planting the seeds of a slavery system that evolved into a nightmare of abuse and cruelty that would ultimately divide the nation. Throughout the 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to African slaves as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than indentured servants, who were mostly poor Europeans. Though it is impossible to give accurate figures, some historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million black slaves were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone, depriving the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women. In the 17th and 18th centuries, black slaves worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia.
Within several decades of being brought to the American colonies, Africans were stripped of human rights and enslaved as chattel, an enslavement that lasted more than two centuries. Slavers whipped slaves who displeased them. Clergy preached that slavery was the will of God. Scientists "proved" that blacks were less evolved-a subspecies of the human race. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 solidified the importance of slavery to the South's economy. By the mid-19th century, America's westward expansion, along with a growing anti-slavery movement in the North, provoked a national debate over slavery that helped precipitate the American Civil War (1861-65). Though the Union victory freed the nation's four million slaves, the legacy of slavery influenced American history, from the chaotic years of Reconstruction (1865-77) to the civil rights movement that emerged in the 1950s.
The complicated past and the paradoxical relationship between slavery and freedom in the nation's capital.
Was the legal institution of human chattel enslavement, primarily of Africans and African Americans, that existed in the United States of America in the 18th and 19th centuries. Slavery had been practiced in British America from early colonial days, and was legal in all Thirteen Colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It lasted in about half the states until 1865, when it was prohibited nationally by the Thirteenth Amendment. As an economic system, slavery was largely replaced by sharecropping.
The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.
Slavery has occurred in many forms throughout the world, but the Atlantic slave trade -- which forcibly brought more than 10 million Africans to the Americas -- stands out for both its global scale and its lasting legacy. Anthony Hazard discusses the historical, economic and personal impact of this massive historical injustice.
The Associated Press

HAMPTON, Va. (AP) — Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced Saturday a new state commission to review educational standards for teaching black history in the state, as officials observed the arrival of enslaved Africans to what is now Virginia 400 years ago. Northam, who noted “we are a state that for too long has told a false story of ourselves,” spoke at the 2019 African Landing Commemorative Ceremony in Hampton. The event was part of a weekend of ceremonies that are unfolding in the backdrop of rising white nationalism across the country and a lingering scandal surrounding Northam and a blackface photo. Northam said he signed a directive to create the commission to review instructional practices, content, and resources currently used to teach African American history in the state. “We often fail to draw the connecting lines from those past events to our present day, but to move forward, that is what we must do,” Northam, a Democrat, said. “We know that racism and discrimination aren’t locked in the past.

They weren’t solved with the Civil Rights Act. They didn’t disappear. They merely evolved.” In February, Northam faced intense pressure to resign after a racist picture surfaced from his 1984 medical school yearbook page. He denied being in the picture but admitted to wearing blackface as a young man while portraying Michael Jackson at a dance party in the 1980s. On Saturday, Northam said he has met with people around the state over the past several months to listen to views about inequities that still exist, prompting him to confront “some painful truths.” “Among those truths was my own incomplete understanding regarding race and equity,” Northam said. “I have learned a great deal from those discussions, and I have more to learn, but I also learned that the more I know, the more I can do.”
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