#us slavery of africans

[ausetkmt]

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — In the murky waters of an Alabama river, diver Kamau Sadiki said he had to pause before entering the last known slave ship to the United States, where 110 people were confined in hellish conditions.

“You feel the reverberation, the pain and suffering, and the screams and the hollering,” said Sadiki, a diver who works with the Smithsonian Slave Wrecks Project. “We do this work to understand the science and archeology and collect all the data we can to help tell the story. But there's another whole dimension here that we need to connect with.”

The documentary “Descendant” retells this once-submerged history, intertwining the 2019 discovery of the ship Clotilda with the stories of the descendants of the 110 people aboard. Along the way, it raises questions about the legacy of slavery and what justice would look like 162 years after the ship's voyage.

In 1860 — decades after the United States had banned the importation of slaves — the Clotilda illegally transported 110 people from what is now the west African nation of Benin to Mobile, Alabama. With Southern plantation owners demanding slaves for their cotton fields, Alabama plantation owner Timothy Meaher made a bet that he could bring a shipload of Africans across the Atlantic. The ship was later scuttled to conceal evidence of the the crime.

Slavery ended five years after the arrival of the Clotilda captives. They saved money to start an community that came to be called Africatown. Some of their descendants continue to live there in the historical hamlet deeply tied to its heritage but now surrounded by heavy industry in south Alabama.

Director Margaret Brown said she hopes viewers walk away with “a little bit of history rewritten for them, and they’re emotionally moved by the resilience of this community."

"This is a community that has been telling the story, to mostly pass down through generations, for 160 years to keep this history alive."

In the film, descendants discuss their family's effort to not let the Clotilda fade into history, showing home videos of relatives recounting the story to younger generations. Some read from “Barracoon,” the posthumously published 1931 manuscript in which former Clotilda captive Cudjo Lewis recounted his story in an interview with author Zora Neale Hurston.

The documentary also puts a focus on environmental challenges surrounding Africatown, with subjects discussing pollution and cancer rates. In wrestling with the economic legacy of slavery, one scene shows a descendant reading Lewis' words while sitting in an antebellum mansion. While the Meaher family did not participate in the film, their name is shown dotting local landmarks. Another scene focuses on the buzz created by the discovery of the ship, raising questions about who will benefit from the discovery.

“I don't want the momentum of the story to just be focused on the ship. It's not all about that ship,” descendant Joycelyn Davis says in one scene.

Brown, who is white, was born and raised in Mobile. The story of the Clotilda was kept alive by descendants, but was not taught in any history books when she was a child.

Sadiki said he hopes the story, “becomes part of every history book in this country" despite the “efforts being made to remove these these sorts of stories from our consciousness.”

“We really have to get past that shame and silence. What I hope the movie does is insert, not only back in our memory, but back into the curriculum of this nation, the story of the Clotilda," he said.

[tonya-the-chicken]

Every time I read a review of "Global South" country politics it's always "We are defying the US by doing this and this. And "This and this" is being friends with authoritarian regimes and not giving a fuck about victims of genocide. But hey! International leftist solidarity against the victims of American imperialism :) If you're a victim of any other imperialism then fuck you. We are building stronger relationships with "Usa's rivals" (regimes that are the reason you are suffering rn)

[dazedasian]

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https://www.focuscongo.com/en/spende/

[life-imitates-art-far-more]

Eastman Johnson (1824-1906) "Dinah, Portrait of a Negress" (c. 1867) Oil on board Located in the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina, United States In the Book of Genesis, Dinah was the seventh child and only daughter of Leah and Jacob, and one of the matriarchs of the Israelites. In 19th-century America, "Dinah" became a generic name for an enslaved African woman. At the 1850 Woman's Rights Convention in New York, a speech by Sojourner Truth was reported on in the New York Herald, which used the name "Dinah" to symbolize black womanhood as represented by Truth:

In a convention where sex and color are mingled together in the common rights of humanity, Dinah, and Burleigh, and Lucretia, and Frederick Douglas [sic], are all spiritually of one color and one sex, and all on a perfect footing of reciprocity. Most assuredly, Dinah was well posted up on the rights of woman, and with something of the ardor and the odor of her native Africa, she contended for her right to vote, to hold office, to practice medicine and the law, and to wear the breeches with the best white man that walks upon God's earth.

Lizzie McCloud, a slave on a Tennessee plantation during the American Civil War, recalled that Union soldiers called all enslaved women "Dinah." Describing her fear when the Union army arrived, she said: "We was so scared we run under the house and the Yankees called 'Come out Dinah' (didn't call none of us anything but Dinah). They said 'Dinah, we're fightin' to free you and get you out from under bondage.'" The name Dinah was subsequently used for dolls and other images of black women.

[drsonnet]

African Town

By Charles Waters and Irene Latham

Category: Teen & Young Adult Fiction | Teen & Young Adult Historical Fiction

Chronicling the story of the last Africans brought illegally to America in 1860, African Town is a powerful and stunning novel-in-verse. In 1860, long after the United States outlawed the importation of enslaved laborers, 110 men, women and children from Benin and Nigeria were captured and brought to Mobile, Alabama aboard a ship called Clotilda. Their journey includes the savage Middle Passage and being hidden in the swamplands along the Alabama River before being secretly parceled out to various plantations, where they made desperate attempts to maintain both their culture and also fit into the place of captivity to which they’d been delivered. At the end of the Civil War, the survivors created a community for themselves they called African Town, which still exists to this day. Told in 14 distinct voices, including that of the ship that brought them to the American shores and the founder of African Town, this powerfully affecting historical novel-in-verse recreates a pivotal moment in US and world history, the impacts of which we still feel today.

[prettyhighforawhiteguyblog]

You know why we are taught to despise the French?

and poo poo their military prowess? Even though they are lovely people & have historically been glorious, brave, and victorious on the battlefield?

And were our partner in our own revolution?

It is because they killed their masters.

And they hold their police in check.

And protest for everything. And chase their police away. And get what they want. And have a pretty nice life.

They had a violent, coordinated people's revolution. Actually several. They kept trying and dying till one finally succeeded. They put the Aristocrats to death.

All the Aristocrats. Not just the bad ones. All of them. Even Marie Antoinette who was just a spoiled princess who quipped a stupid joke that got turned into revolutionary propaganda. She got disposal as well. Some people are just too dangerous to let live.

Because Aristocrats have babies! And those babies will network and rebuild Aristocracy and no Aristocracy may be allowed to exist if the people are to thrive.

That's why. Our Aristocrats don't want us getting Frenchy ideas.

Maybe we should.

[whitesinhistory]

The stage was set for slavery in the U.S. as early as the 14th century, when Spain and Portugal began to capture Africans for enslavement in Europe. Slavery eventually expanded to colonial America, where the first enslaved Africans were brought to the Virginia colony at Point Comfort on the James River on August 20, 1619. It was reported that “20 and odd Negroes” from the White Lion, an English ship, were sold in exchange for food; the remaining Africans were transported to Jamestown and sold into slavery.

Historians have long believed that these first Africans enslaved in the colonies came from the Caribbean, but Spanish records suggest they were captured in Angola, then a Portuguese colony in West Central Africa. While aboard the ship São João Bautista bound for Mexico, they were stolen by two English ships, the White Lion and the Treasurer. Once in Virginia, the enslaved Africans were dispersed throughout the colony.

Although in the mid-17th century Virginia became the first British colony in North America to legally mandate race-based, hereditary enslavement, slavery did not immediately become the predominant form of labor there. For decades after slavery was formalized, Virginia plantation owners held nearly 10 times as many indentured servants as enslaved Africans, and many of them were white. By the 1680s, however, African slave labor became the dominant system on Virginia farms and the population of enslaved people continued to grow exponentially. As enslavement became a status centrally tied to race, colonial American laws and culture developed to create a narrative of racial difference that defined African people as intellectually inferior, morally deficient, and benefitting from the "civilizing" influence of slavery.

This belief system and institution spread widely over the next two centuries, even as the U.S. gained independence and embraced a national identity as the "land of the free." At the start of the Civil War in 1861, Virginia had the largest population of enslaved Black people of any state in the Confederacy.

[sanyu-thewitch05]

Link:

Never thought I’d ever post anything political on this blog, but crazy and terrifying he’s suggesting the US go back to slavery times

@queen-shiba

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said Black people benefitted from some of the skills they learned in slavery — and students in the state will soon learn about that "personal benefit" in Florida's education curriculum.

Florida's Department of Education on Wednesday approved a new curriculum for the state's African-American Studies program in public schools which instructs students on the personal benefit of slavery to Black people.

"They're probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life," DeSantis said at a press conference on Friday.

The state's curriculum standards for the African-American Studies course say students will learn "how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit."

DeSantis noted at the press conference that he did not play a role in the changes to Florida's curriculum, but also defended the curriculum change as a purely academic decision by the state Department of Education.

"If you have any questions about it just ask the Department of Education. But I mean these were scholars that put this together," DeSantis said. "This is not anything that was done politically."

The curriculum change follows the "Stop WOKE Act," which DeSantis signed into law in 2022 and aimed to ban the teaching of anything that made students in public schools feel "shamed because of their race."

The law was intended to push back against the supposed teaching of critical race theory – examining how America's history of racism and discrimination continues to impact the country today — in public schools.

[tmarshconnors]

What If Abraham Lincoln did not die.

If Abraham Lincoln did not die, the course of American history would have been dramatically altered. Here are some possibilities of what could have happened:

Reconstruction: Lincoln's plan for Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War was more lenient towards the defeated Confederacy than the plan implemented by his successor, Andrew Johnson. If Lincoln had lived, it's possible that his plan could have been implemented, leading to a smoother and more successful Reconstruction period.

Civil Rights: Lincoln was an advocate for the abolition of slavery, but it's unclear how he would have approached the issue of civil rights for African Americans after the war. If he had survived, he may have pushed for more rapid progress in granting rights to black Americans.

Politics: Lincoln was a skilled politician, and his leadership during the Civil War helped keep the Union together. If he had lived, he could have potentially continued to influence politics in the United States and shape the future of the country.

Foreign Relations: Lincoln's foreign policy was characterized by his attempts to avoid conflict with other nations, while still promoting American interests. If he had survived, he may have continued to pursue this approach to foreign relations and avoided some of the conflicts that arose later in American history.

It's impossible to say for certain how American history would have unfolded if Lincoln had survived, but it's clear that his influence on the country would have continued for many years to come.

[maggi-cube]

There’s just so much evil I’ve learned about today I don’t know how to hold it all

[silas-soule]

from the slave's cause by manisha sinha

[twotailednekomata]

Slavery in a nutshell:

✩⋆｡ ˚ Racism ⋆｡˚✩