#Slavery in the United States
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
deadpresidents · 3 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
James K. Polk was rare among Presidents in that he didn't just inherit slaves. Polk, like [Andrew] Jackson, actively -- but secretly -- bought slaves while President. Unlike Jackson, however, Polk didn't buy them in Washington, D.C., but secretly back down south. Why the secrecy? Because during his career, Polk straddled the lines between slaveholders and abolitionists, never completely joining either side. Polk was already a major slave owner when he became President but was very cautious about letting people know about his ownership of other people. Perhaps he was afraid of the American people -- especially abolitionists -- finding out that he was buying children. "Of the nineteen slaves Polk bought during his Presidency, one was ten years old, two were eleven, two were twelve, two were thirteen, two were fifteen, two were sixteen, and two were seventeen," said William Dusinberre, author of the great Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James Polk (BOOK | KINDLE). "Each of these children was bought apart from his or her parents and from every sibling. One or two of these children may possibly have been orphans, but it would strain credulity to suggest many of them were." So Polk, who needed more labor for his plantation, did what most rich politicians would do in his situation: he found a way to increase his personal wealth without his constituents finding out about it. He set up agents to buy the slaves in their names and then transferred them to his possession at home... ...He even made sure he had plausible deniability. Dusinberre noted that Polk -- living in a pre-Civil War America -- made sure that while he bought slaves in the White House, he never used his Presidential salary. "He used his savings from his salary to pay campaign debts, to buy and refurbish a mansion in Nashville, and to buy U.S. Treasury certificates, but never to buy slaves," Dusinberre said. "Evidently he distinguished (between) his private income -- from the plantation --(and) the public salary he received from government revenues. Thus, if the public had ever learned of his buying young slaves, he could always have truthfully denied that he had spent his Presidential salary for that purpose. Polk may have been careful about how he bought his slaves because he knew slavery was an evil institution. But Polk kept his slaves throughout his life and didn't even free them upon death, leaving that for his wife.
-- A closer look at the extent of President James K. Polk's record as a slave owner while he was in the White House, including a troubling tendency towards buying children and separating them from their families.
This excerpt is from Jesse J. Holland's excellent and very revealing book, The Invisibles: The Untold Story of African American Slaves in the White House (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO).
17 notes · View notes
reasoningdaily · 5 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
if you'd like to read it, click here and download it for free from the BLACK TRUEBRARY
the internet library does not loan this book or allow printing - so we solved that problem by Liberating the Book for Our Truebrary
Black slaves, Indian masters : slavery, emancipation, and citizenship in the Native American south
by Krauthamer, Barbara, 1967- Publication date 2013 Topics African Americans -- Relations with Indians, Slavery -- United States -- History, Choctaw Indians -- History, Chickasaw Indians -- History, Slaveholders -- United States -- History, United States -- Race relations Publisher Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press Collection internetarchivebooks; inlibrary; printdisabled Contributor Internet Archive Language English
xiii, 211 pages : 25 cm
"From the late eighteenth century through the end of the Civil War, Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians bought, sold, and owned Africans and African Americans as slaves, a fact that persisted after the tribes' removal from the Deep South to Indian Territory. The tribes formulated racial and gender ideologies that justified this practice and marginalized free black people in the Indian nations well after the Civil War and slavery had ended. Through the end of the nineteenth century, ongoing conflicts among Choctaw, Chickasaw, and U.S. lawmakers left untold numbers of former slaves and their descendants in the two Indian nations without citizenship in either the Indian nations or the United States. In this groundbreaking study, Barbara Krauthamer rewrites the history of southern slavery, emancipation, race, and citizenship to reveal the centrality of Native American slaveholders and the black people they enslaved." -- Publisher's description
Includes bibliographical references (pages 155-198) and index
Black slaves, Indian masters: race, gender, and power in the deep south -- Enslaved people, missionaries, and slaveholders: christianity, colonialism, and struggles over slavery -- Slave resistance, sectional crisis, and political factionalism in antebellum Indian territory -- The Treaty of 1866: emancipation and the conflicts over Black people's citizenship rights and Indian nations' sovereignty -- Freedmen's political organizing and the ongoing struggles over citizenship, sovereignty, and squatters -- A new home in the west: allotment,
1 note · View note
antisemitism-us · 5 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
2K notes · View notes
m-c-easton · 1 year ago
Text
Book Picks: The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois
**Triggering Content (child abuse) Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award (yes, people, I’m still catching up on early pandemic booklists), Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ novel The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois has given us an immensely rich novel, one that hooked me with the depth and drama of a Black family spanning the history of America. The structure is complex, opening most of the eleven…
Tumblr media
View On WordPress
0 notes
nando161mando · 1 year ago
Text
Tumblr media
3K notes · View notes
profeminist · 1 year ago
Text
Tumblr media
Source: "Cunk on Earth is a British mockumentary television series produced by Charlie Brooker. The series stars Diane Morgan as Philomena Cunk." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunk_on_Earth
3K notes · View notes
ethioirhab · 29 days ago
Text
watching khaleejis take a sick pride in the fact that they're "the only functioning arab countries" or whatever as if the kafala system is not just slavery in one way or another. one yemeni boy is worth every saudi kuwaiti imarati and more
66 notes · View notes
kemetic-dreams · 5 months ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Anti-literacy laws in many slave states before and during the American Civil War affected slaves, freedmen, and in some cases all people of color. Some laws arose from concerns that literate slaves could forge the documents required to escape to a free state. According to William M. Banks, "Many slaves who learned to write did indeed achieve freedom by this method. The wanted posters for runaways often mentioned whether the escapee could write." Anti-literacy laws also arose from fears of slave insurrection, particularly around the time of abolitionist David Walker's 1829 publication of Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, which openly advocated rebellion, and Nat Turner's Rebellion of 1831.
The United States is the only country known to have had anti-literacy laws.
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Significant anti-African laws include:
1829, Georgia: Prohibited teaching Africans to read, punished by fine and imprisonment
1830, Louisiana, North Carolina: passes law punishing anyone teaching Africans to read with fines, imprisonment or floggings 
1832, Alabama and Virginia: Prohibited Europeans from teaching Africans to read or write, punished by fines and floggings
1833, Georgia: Prohibited Africans from working in reading or writing jobs (via an employment law), and prohibited teaching Africans, punished by fines and whippings (via an anti-literacy law)
1847, Missouri: Prohibited assembling or teaching slaves to read or write
Mississippi state law required a white person to serve up to a year in prison as "penalty for teaching a slave to read."
A 19th-century Virginia law specified: "[E]very assemblage of negroes for the purpose of instruction in reading or writing, or in the night time for any purpose, shall be an unlawful assembly. Any justice may issue his warrant to any office or other person, requiring him to enter any place where such assemblage may be, and seize any negro therein; and he, or any other justice, may order such negro to be punished with stripes."
In North Carolina, African people who disobeyed the law were sentenced to whipping while whites received a fine, jail time, or both.
AME Bishop William Henry Heard remembered from his enslaved childhood in Georgia that any slave caught writing "suffered the penalty of having his forefinger cut from his right hand." Other formerly enslaved people had similar memories of disfigurement and severe punishments for reading and writing.
Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee were the only three slave states that did not enact a legal prohibition on educating slaves.
It is estimated that only 5% to 10% of enslaved African Americans became literate, to some degree, before the American Civil War
Tumblr media
95 notes · View notes
thoughtportal · 8 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
48 notes · View notes
korrasera · 3 months ago
Text
Remembering History
If you ever see someone talking about how we can't remove the statues to Confederate generals because we'd be erasing history, remember this:
We don't put up statues to remember history, we put them up to honor people. They won't be history until long after we're all gone.
We shouldn't be honoring racists for their racism.
16 notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media
By: Angel Eduardo
Published: Jul 4, 2024
If anyone had a right to hate America, it was Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery and witnessing its horrors first hand, Douglass could lay claim to resentment against our country in a way that only he and his enslaved brethren ever could. He also possessed a unique ability to articulate those feelings—and in his famous 1852 “What, to a Slave, is the Fourth of July?” speech, he showed just how powerful a skill that was.
Every year on Independence Day, advocates and activists across the political spectrum share that speech on social media, and every year I fear too few of them truly grasp its content. Some focus only on the beginning, where Douglass calls the Founding Fathers “brave…[and] great men too—great enough to give fame to a great age.” They revel in Douglass’ acknowledgement of these “statesmen, patriots and heroes,” and that “for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, [he] will unite with [us] to honor their memory.”
Others skip to the middle, once Douglass notes that, for all the aforementioned praise of the Founders, he is “not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary.” Readers of a certain ideological bent will delight in the fact that Douglass didn’t take the stage to join in the jubilation, but rather to “call in question and to denounce…everything that serves to perpetuate slavery—the great sin and shame of America,” and to bring into stark relief the “revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy,” for which “America reigns without a rival.”
Indeed, the majority of Douglass’ time is dedicated to enumerating and elucidating America’s inhumanity and moral contradictions, and those who quote him to paint a purely flattering image of our country often elide the speech’s substance. Douglass himself pre-empts this by noting Sydney Smith’s dictum that “men seldom eulogize the wisdom and virtues of their fathers, but to excuse some folly or wickedness of their own.”
I would argue, however, that those who are hyper-focused on Douglass’ invective—those who use it to argue that America is irredeemably corrupt, or that descendants of slaves shouldn’t celebrate July 4th, are also missing something crucial: Namely, the reason Douglass was compelled to speak at all.
For all the venom in his Fourth of July speech, Frederick Douglass didn’t hate America. He believed in it—so much so that he fought his whole life for his rightful place in it, on the basis of its founding principles.
Douglass recognized America as an ideal. He saw in those founding documents not just hypocrisy, but also a boundless and unfulfilled potential. In what he called the Declaration’s “saving principles,” he saw a hope he considered “much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon.” Douglass spoke to his audience of their America, and the ways in which it failed to be his America. He bravely and rightfully held a mirror up to our country, and demanded that it work to live up to its promise, because he wanted that promise to be fulfilled.
And that’s what too many seem to miss. Despite having every right to be, Douglass’ criticisms weren’t cynical, or merely angry and spiteful. Anyone who reads the speech in full, rather than pulling convenient bits and pieces to serve their ideological ends, will see that Douglass not only “[does] not despair of this country,” but chooses to end his address “where [he] began, with hope.”
That hope is present throughout even the most vicious of his criticisms. In fact, hope is what fuels them. Without it, I imagine Douglass wouldn’t have bothered to criticize America at all. What would have been the point?
There’s a heartbreaking bleakness to the idea, communicated by some, that progress is impossible. I believe this is a mistake—not simply for the fact that despite our myriad problems, all around us is evidence to the contrary. It’s also mistaken because without hope there is no real reason to fight. Douglass knew that. We should too.
The United States was only seventy-six years old on the day Douglass addressed that audience on the Fourth of July. He noted that the country was “only in the beginning of [its] national career, still lingering in the period of childhood.” As we approach our two hundred and forty-sixth year, perhaps the beginning of our national adolescence, we still have plenty of work to do to live up to our founding principles. That work will likely never be finished. But if we wish to get somewhere, we must first acknowledge not just where we’ve been, but also where we are and how far we’ve come.
==
Anger isn't the real destroyer; it's apathy. When you're angry, you still care enough to want better. But when apathy sets in, there's nothing left; that's the end of the line. Just ask Star Wars fans.
16 notes · View notes
apenitentialprayer · 5 months ago
Text
At the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, slaves in the United States comprised about 50 percent of the slaves living in the western hemisphere, despite the U.S. being the destination of less than 4 percent of slaves surviving the transatlantic Middle Passage.
J. David Hacker ("From '20. and odd' to 10 Million: The Growth of the Slave Population in the United States")
11 notes · View notes
nando161mando · 14 days ago
Text
Tumblr media
This is almost too on the nose.
219 notes · View notes
profeminist · 1 year ago
Text
Tumblr media
203 notes · View notes
nickysfacts · 5 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
All racism has ever done is slow down the creation of beauty🖋️
🇺🇸👩🏽‍🦱📖
9 notes · View notes
kemetic-dreams · 1 year ago
Text
Tumblr media
The American English expression "fried chicken" was first recorded in the 1830s, and frequently appears in American cookbooks of the 1860s and 1870s. The origin of fried chicken in the southern states of America has been traced to precedents in Scottish and West African cuisine. Scottish fried chicken was cooked in fat, and West African fried chicken added different seasonings,and was battered and cooked in palm oil. Scottish frying techniques and African seasoning techniques were used in the American South by enslaved Africans
Tumblr media
Fried chicken provided some means of an independent economy for enslaved and segregated African-American women, who became noted sellers of poultry (live or cooked) as early as the 1730s.Because of the expensive nature of the ingredients, it was, despite popular belief, a rare dish in the African-American community reserved (as in Africa) for special occasions.When it was introduced to the American South, fried chicken became a common staple. Later, as the slave trade led to Africans being brought to work on southern plantations, the enslaved people who became cooks incorporated seasonings and spices that were absent in traditional Scottish cuisine, enriching the flavor. Since most enslaved people were unable to raise expensive meats, but were generally allowed to keep chickens, frying chicken on special occasions continued in the African-American communities of the South, especially in the periods of segregationthat closed off most restaurants to the African population
Tumblr media
American-style fried chicken gradually passed into everyday use as a general Southern dish, especially after the abolition of slavery, and its popularity spread. Since fried chicken traveled well in hot weather before refrigeration was commonplace and industry growth reduced its cost, it gained further favor across the South. Fried chicken continues to be among this region's top choices for "Sunday dinner". Holidays such as Independence Day and other gatherings often feature this dish. During the 20th century, chain restaurants focused on fried chicken began among the boom in the fast food industry. Brands such as Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) and Popeyes expanded in the United States and across the world.
Tumblr media
92 notes · View notes