MetaFilter posts tagged with slavery and race

Deadly Symbiosis

lunit — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 11:59:14 -0800

Deadly Symbiosis: Rethinking race and imprisonment in twenty-first-century America.

The Dream is Alive

caddis — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 18:40:30 -0800

Happy Birthday Dr. King. Today is Martin Luther King Day. He was born 80 years ago, on January 15th, 1929. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was just thirty-nine years old. Tomorrow, more than four decades after Dr. King’s death, Barack Obama will take his oath of office to become the 44th president of the United States and the first African American president in US history. The Reverend Joseph Lowery, a civil rights icon who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr, King, will deliver the benediction at the inauguration ceremony. Obama accepted the Democratic party nomination on the 45th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, arguably his most famous address. While Dr. King is primarily remembered as a civil rights leader, he also championed the cause of the poor and organized the Poor People"s Campaign to address issues of economic justice. Dr. King was also a fierce critic US foreign policy and the Vietnam War. Amy Goodman had a fantastic show today commemorating Dr. King. It is perhaps some stuff that we have heard before, but here now, some 40 odd years later when he predicted a black president, and it has come true, it takes on a bit more poignancy. (I am re-posting this for Huplescat who perhaps did not word the same stuff well.)

What Happened to My Forty Acres and a Mule, Fool?

jonp72 — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 10:26:25 -0800

40 acres and a mule has been a slogan of African-American economic aspirations ever since the legislation creating the Freedman's Bureau promised ex-slaves parcels not exceeding forty acres each, to the loyal refugees and freedmen. General William Tecumseh Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15 decreed that the land on slave plantations be seized and distributed to freed slaves, but Andrew Johnson rescinded the order and vetoed expansion of the Freedman's Bureau. Both Henry Louis Gates and Dalton Conley have associated the failure to grant freed slaves their "40 acres and a mule" with the wealth gap between black and white Americans, but now an economics grad student, Melinda Miller, has brought important quantitative data to the debate in a new research paper. Using census data from the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, which was forced to distribute land to freed slaves of the Cherokee tribe shortly after the Civil War, Miller has found a natural experiment that makes it possible to quantify how much the failed dreams of "40 acres of a mule" are at the root of interracial disparities of wealth. According to a fine summary by econo-blogger Tyler Cowen, Miller argues that the failure to distribute land to slaves may account for as little as 20% or as much as 75% of the black/white wealth gap.

The Slow Death of American Slavery

jonp72 — Fri, 05 Dec 2003 23:37:45 -0800

Slavery Ended in the 1960s, not the 1860s The Civil War made slavery illegal, but that didn't wipe it out completely. White farmer, John Williams, forced his black overseer to murder 11 slaves in the wake of a 1921 federal investigation. The Dial Brothers were also convicted by the Justice Department for "African slavery" in the 1940s. In another case, a black genealogist found a 104-year-old man who claims he and his family were enslaved until the 1960s. It's not necessary to rehash the entire reparations debate to realize that some of these post-Civil War slavery cases may finally have a day in court.

Senator Blanche K. Bruce

oissubke — Mon, 16 Dec 2002 22:25:29 -0800

Senator Blanche K. Bruce was the first black person to serve a full term in the United States Senate (representing Mississippi from 1875 to 1881), and the first person born into slavery to preside over the Senate. The Senate Commission on Art recently unveiled a newly-acquired portrait of this determined leader.

Gone to Croatan -- Hi, Iconomy!

y2karl — Fri, 15 Nov 2002 15:27:03 -0800

In the late 18th or early 19th century a group of runaway slaves and serfs fled from Kentucky into the Ohio Territory, where they inter-married with Natives and formed a tribe - red, white & black - called the Ben Ishmael tribe. The Ishmaels (who seem to have been Islamically inclined) followed an annual nomadic route through the territory, hunting & fishing, and finding work as tinkers and minstrels. They were polygamists, and drank no alcohol. Every winter they returned to their original settlement, where a village had grown.

But eventually the US Govt. opened the Territory to settlement, and the ~official~ pioneers arrived. Around the Ishmael village a town began to spring up, called Cincinnati. Soon it was a big city. But Ishmael village was still there, engulfed & surrounded by "civilization." Now it was a ~slum~.

Maroons, Ramapaughs, Jackson Whites, the Moors of Delaware, Melungeons, the Ben Ishmaels--hat tip to Footnotes of History on that last--Red Bones, Brass Ankles, Turks, Lumbees, Croatans and other lost tribes and rebel slave communities.

The questions raised are what is race, tribe and family ...among others.

Included by extension are Hakim Bey, The Moorish Orthodox Church, various tribes of Black Indians, Jukes, Kallikaks, Margaret Sanger, The Bell Curve and Heather Locklear. (Step within the tent for the latter's interpetive dance)

swank6 — Mon, 07 Oct 2002 23:49:27 -0800

Non-blacks expelled from anti-racism conference. Delegates at an anti-racism conference voted last Wednesday to expel non-blacks from the meeting, saying it was too traumatic to discuss slavery in front of them. Ironic? Hypocritical? Justified?

darren — Tue, 20 Mar 2001 06:23:07 -0800

Here's your reparations money, now shut up! Another POV in the slavery reparations debate: From the conservative National Review, an argument that paying off black Americans would be worth it "if they could no longer play the race card."