BS: slavery, poverty and culture

Subject: RE: BS: slavery, poverty and culture
From: Chief Chaos
Date: 26 Mar 04 - 02:40 PM

I'll take post 101 thank you.

Okay lets see, black people laying on railroad tracks, swimming in southern rivers with chains on them,

I recall a "story" (in quotes because I don't remember the source)
about a young black male stoned to death by white folk because he accidentally crossed over an invisible line dividing a black beach from a white beach.

Funny thing tho' I never knew Chicago was part of the South.

Subject: RE: BS: slavery, poverty and culture
From: M.Ted
Date: 26 Mar 04 - 03:50 PM

To those not American who perhaps don't understand--this is not a dead issue, and the conflict and the emotions that go with it are always very close to the surface---it is what Bush vs Kerry is really about in a large sense, and in a small sense, it is why you don't see Pete Seeger at bluegrass festivals--we all know who is on which side, and whose turf we are on, though for the most part, we are fairly careful not to let on--

Some of the posters here seem to think that the founding fathers had a culturally induced blindspot on the subject of slavery--not true--they bitterly debated it, and realized that they couldn't resolve the issue before declaring independence--the states that opposed it passed their own laws against it, the others joined the union with the assurance that the constitution would allow them the sovereignty to keep it if they chose--That's why we have the bizarre "Electoral College", and two legislative houses, one apportioned by population, the other by state--

Subject: RE: BS: slavery, poverty and culture
From: Greg F.
Date: 27 Mar 04 - 09:06 AM

Strick-

RE: the Ku Klux Klan in Texas<

Haven't had a chance to get to the library on this as I promised, but in the interim there is something germaine in the "Handbook of Texas Online", a site that's a joint project of The General Libraries at the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas State Historical Association.

The article cites quite a few solid academic works on, and documents that the Klan WAS operating in Texas as early as 1868.

HERE

Seems they're still pretty active today, too.

Best, Greg

Subject: RE: BS: slavery, poverty and culture
From: Strick
Date: 27 Mar 04 - 09:22 AM

I stand corrected, Greg and apologize. I realize there are still minor pocket of the Klan in Texas as there are in most states.

Heck, I hear there are still Democrats in Texas, though their getting more rare daily (meaning no comparison between the two groups, of course.)

Subject: RE: BS: slavery, poverty and culture
From: Greg F.
Date: 27 Mar 04 - 11:32 AM

Heck, I hear there are still Democrats in Texas

Well, there's Jim Hightower, Molly Ivins & possibly Kinky Friedman but
I think they're mostly on the endangered species list. More's the pity.

Best, Greg

Subject: RE: BS: slavery, poverty and culture
From: The Stage Manager
Date: 24 Apr 04 - 05:15 PM

Ok I'll admit this is something of a 'hot topic' with me at the moment, but this is because I'm becoming acutely aware that something I always thought of as a eighteenth/ ninetenth century phenomenom seems never to have left us, and is still present, albeit in a different form perhaps, but also that the history of the subject seems to be continually re-written by different sets of spin doctors.

I've just been listening to a BBC radio 4 pogramme on the subject of a slave burial discovered in New York.

Acclaimed writer Caryl Phillips uses startling new evidence from a huge slave burial site discovered in New York City to expose the extent of slavery in both the Northern and Southern parts of the United States. The human remains discovered during routine building work in Manhattan explode the idea of slavery as a largely "Southern" phenomenon.

This Archive Hour also draws on oral archive of the last people to be born into slavery in the American South and contrasts their experiences with surprising new detail about the lives of their Northern counterparts

You can hear the programme again on the BBC website.   

I was particularly struck by the extracts from the 'Oral Archive' Does anyone know if you can get access to these archives via net?
How come we don't hear more of these particularly in view of their historical significance?

Maybe I'm a little idealistic, I have always considered folk music and stories as being the voice of the disposessed, and a channel, through the oral tradition, for the history that never makes the school text books.

Seems I'm not hearing enough, or maybe it's just the wrong songs?


SM

Subject: RE: BS: slavery, poverty and culture
From: Metchosin
Date: 24 Apr 04 - 06:03 PM

Hell, slavery hasn't abated since the dawn of man and the only thing that has changed about slavery since the 18th or 19th century is that the slaves were worth more then and the profit margin was lower.

In 1830 US currency, a slave was worth about a thousand dollars ($38,000 current value or about the price of a good tractor). Profit of about 5% per year on ownership was considered par.

Now one can buy a healthy young male for farm labour for about $90 US. Think about that before you bite into your unfairly traded chocolate.

Subject: RE: BS: slavery, poverty and culture
From: Greg F.
Date: 24 Apr 04 - 06:07 PM

It's not a "slave burial" but the African Burial Ground in Manhattan where blacks- both free and slave- were interred for most of the 18th century- a time whan slavery was legal in all of North America.

No news or "spin" involved- a gradual emancipation law was passed in 1799 and slavery existed in New York State until 1827.

More info on the burial ground HERE
or a 'google' search for "Manhattan Afrcan Burial Ground" should turn up 500+ hits.

Best, Greg

Subject: RE: BS: slavery, poverty and culture
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 24 Apr 04 - 07:13 PM

...Some of the posters here seem to think that the founding fathers had a culturally induced blindspot on the subject of slavery--not true--they bitterly debated it, and realized that they couldn't resolve the issue before declaring independence"

Not a blind spot, but a sense of priorities that saw slavery as a less important issue than independence, and as somnething which could be tolerated. A view not shared by the many Black Americans who fought on the other side.

Subject: RE: BS: slavery, poverty and culture
From: The Stage Manager
Date: 25 Apr 04 - 04:40 AM

Greg

Thanks for your reply, I'm going to listen to this programme again (BBC Radio 4 Archive hour) because it certainly left me with the impression that this was principally a 'slave' burial site. If my memory serves me correctly it also postulated that New York was second only to Charleston as a centre for slave trading, and that the industrial base of NY was based on slave labour in the same way as it supported agriculture in the south.   

Somewhere along the line I've picked up the notion that slavery was predominantly a Southern phenomena, so had it more or less died out in the North by the time of the civil war?   What happened in 1827 that slavery died out then. I also seem to remember something about riots in NY that led to a number of black people moving to Canada.

My understanding of this period is was shaky to say the least, now I'm getting even more confused. Who were the free Africans in NY?
Were they part of the trade?


SM

Subject: RE: BS: slavery, poverty and culture
From: Greg F.
Date: 25 Apr 04 - 06:34 PM

Hullo-

This is , way, WAY to complicated & lengthly to get into here, but I'll try to address several of your points:

... it also postulated that New York was second only to Charleston as a centre for slave trading,

At one time in the mid-18th C- when NY & South Carolina were still British colonies both, this was indeed true.

and that the industrial base of NY was based on slave labour

Not true in either the 18th or 19th C.

I've picked up the notion that slavery was predominantly a Southern phenomena,

Yes, by the second quarter of the 19th. Century it was restricyed to the South. It had previously existed in ALL the North American colonies cum States.

so had it more or less died out in the North by the time of the civil war?

It didn't "die out", it was specifically legislated out of existence in the North.

For the rest, I'd suggest you investigate

----------------
Harris, Leslie M.: In The Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City 1626-1863. Chicahgo, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Gellman, David N. & Quigley, David: Jim Crow New York. NY & London, New York University Press, 2003

White, Shane: Stories of Freedom in Black New York. Cambridge, Harvard U. Press 2002

Berlin, Ira: Generations of Captivity : A History of African-American Slaves. Belknap Press, 2003

Berlin, Ira: Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America . Cambvridge, Harnard U. Press, 2000

Berlin, Ira (ed): Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation. New Press, 2000.

Katz, William Loren: Eyewitness. Simon & Schuster 1995
-----------------

This list just barely scratches the surface- Enjoy!

Best, Greg

Subject: RE: BS: slavery, poverty and culture
From: The Stage Manager
Date: 26 Apr 04 - 05:49 PM

Greg

Thanks for this. I'll see what my local library can get hold of for me.


The last time I gave this subject any serious thought was thirty odd years ago while at school. I don't think anyone in my class had ever been to America, neither had any of us ever met an African American. West Indians too were pretty few and far between in Sussex where I was brought up. When I refer to 'spin' I rather mean the context in which my generation was taught about slavery, and the, perhaps rather distorted, view of its place in history that our education left us with. Many of my teachers had fought in WW2, and to some extent were themselves product of 'The Empire'. William Wilberforce we learned was a good Christian and a great reformer. Slavery was made illegal in the Empire, so that was really the end of the matter as far as we were concerned.

At the same time we loved the blues, and bought records of everyone from Leadbelly to Lightning Hopkins, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee.   We thought Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement was inspiring. Joan Baez recorded "Birmingham Sunday" and people sang it in the folk clubs we went to, and around campfires on the beach.

OK we knew about the connections, but I don't think many of us really understood the legacy, let alone had any concept of the reality. Our world, and the world we were growing up in, was just too different.

It'll be interesting for me, reading those books.

SM

Subject: RE: BS: slavery, poverty and culture
From: Greg F.
Date: 14 Sep 06 - 11:38 AM

New book on the "redemption" of the south worth reading:

REDEMPTION: The Last Battle of the Civil War. By Nicholas Lemann. 257 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

REVIEW: A Less Perfect Union [excerpts] By Sean Wilentz Published: September 10, 2006, New York Times ++++

Ten years after Appomattox, Northern support for the newly enfranchised ex-slaves and their white allies had faded. Recalcitrant Southern whites, whose Ku Klux Klan night-riding had been aggressively repressed by the federal government in the early 1870's, regrouped under the political aegis of the Democratic Party. By mid-decade, most of the Reconstruction state governments had fallen at the ballot box to the forces of white supremacy, the self-proclaimed "redeemers."

Mississippi, with a large black voting majority, resisted longer than other states, but redemption finally came there too, in 1875, sealed by a new frenzy of paramilitary carnage and intimidation. Two years later, after a disputed national election, the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes finally won the White House by agreeing to remove from the South the last of the federal troops who had upheld Reconstruction at the points of their bayonets. The troubled effort to build a Southern interracial democracy out of the ashes of the Civil War was over......

In reaching for the attention of general readers with a brief, highly concentrated narrative, "Redemption" simplifies too much. But it offers a vigorous, necessary reminder of how racist reaction bred an American terrorism that suppressed black political activity and crushed Reconstruction in the South. And it illuminates the often bloody fights over black voting rights that would recur for a century to come - and remain, even today, a source of partisan strife, albeit without paramilitary gunfire and with the party labels reversed. [emphasis mine]

Whole review HERE and for those with a fear of registration, for the NYT the username "mudcat4" and the password "mudcat" will work.

Subject: RE: BS: slavery, poverty and culture
From: GUEST
Date: 14 Sep 06 - 01:26 PM

I didn't see any mention here that Abraham Lincoln, when running for President and when elected, said he had no intention of abolishing slavery in the south. He only wanted to stop its westward expansion. Lincoln was pro-slavery. If it meant keeping the Union together, he was more than willing to let slavery continue. You yankees have some really wrong-headed notions about that dictator. There's a reason each of his hands is resting on a fasci in the Lincoln Memorial.

Subject: RE: BS: slavery, poverty and culture
From: Greg F.
Date: 14 Sep 06 - 02:25 PM

Yup.

"Lincoln was pro slavery".

And the anon. jerk that posted same isn't an ignorant asshole.

Both statements are equally valid.