Laissez Faire has always held up an ideal that if one works hard towards a goal, success…
In the first weeks of class we discussed how in the telling of history, there is always more than one “historical truth” and in these “truths” history has been edited to benefit different agendas. Because history can be easily manipulated, the lecture stressed how significant these revisions can be in the formation of master narratives. However, we reviewed how through recovery projects, counter-narratives have started to refute these previously “truths.” In these contested recollections we acknowledged at times this new information can be hard to emotionally process. This brings me to the topic of slavery. Up until a few months ago, slavery never crossed my mind as anything other than a horrible and dark chapter in both Northern American and European history. I understood that…
Originally written by American writer and journalist Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name was a book published in 2008 that talks about the travesties of the mistreatment of newly free African Americans in the south, now made into a 2012 PBS documentary. Throughout the documentary many different historians are brought on to impart knowledge on the various events that happened in the post Emancipation South, the movie often takes a dark and dreary tone when talking about the events that happened in America’s troubled past, and rightly so. The subject matter of this movie wants to convince the watcher that what the whites did during those years were unforgivable.…
Slavery in the United States is most historically notorious for its inherent injustice toward blacks. In the decades prior to the Civil War, the slavery controversy carried increasing political weight. Proslavery and antislavery factions began to consider how slavery fit into the United States’ political and historical background.1 Accelerating expansionism in the 1840s revived conflicts earlier settled by the 1820 Missouri Compromise.2…
In schools around the US, students are taught that past the civil war, slavery became nonexistent. However, as I read through Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name, I realized that slavery did not stop in 1865, but that it had continued for decades after, with arguably worse conditions and restrictions. In his book, Blackmon describes the struggles of African Americans after the 13th Amendment’s enactment. He describes the south’s transition from pre civil war legalized slavery to the post civil war modern industrial slavery.…
The history of America is colored with deep systematic injustice towards people who helped build our nation. Such deep rooted is not uncommon in nations around the globe. In Ta-Nehisi Coates The Case for Reparations, he highlights the United States’ treatment of African Americans as one of the clearest examples of injustice in the history of our nation. The institution of slavery that subjected African Americans to inhumane treatment. Later Jim Crow Laws that classified the African American community as second class citizens and segregated them from white Americans in the south.…
This documentary helps us obtain better insight on how slavery has evolved through the years as well as the effect that is has had on those people of color through rhetoric which have been the most affected through these different laws. Through this new mean of slavery which we call mass incarceration people of color have been victims to dehumanization, terrorism and over representation in the media. “13th” emphasises the correlation of slavery being an economic system with the massive racism that has undoubtedly been embedded in the heart of the United States. This entire process that is still running today can be best explained in the recording found by Reagan's campaign strategist, Lee Atwater in 1981, “ You start out in 1954 by saying nigger, nigger, nigger. By 1968 you can't say nigger. It hurts…
Before this weeks study I knew the Atlantic slave trade had a wide reach but the slave trade database brought my understanding to a new level. An unfathomable number of lives were loss and families torn about by lowering a human being to nothing more than an animal or property. The lives of the slaves were seen as disposable and many did not even survive the voyage by sea. Through our study of the Trans-Atlantic database I was able to learn how far the slave trade stretched and the number of human beings were taken and imprisoned to work while being tortured mentally and physically against their will paints a bleak picture of what this period in history was like by mans moral standards. “It is difficult to believe in the first decade of the twenty-first century that just over two centuries ago, for those European’s who thought about the issue, the shipping of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic was morally indistinguishable from shipping textiles, wheat, or even sugar.” (Eltis,…
Slavery has always been a controversial issue within the United States. Whether one considers its involvement with the Civil War or its obvious racial subjugation, slavery is thought to have been one of the most debilitating elements of American history. Slave labor, which profoundly embedded itself within both Southern and Northern societies, provided a method of economy for those who relied heavily on agriculture, while others were more concerned with industrialization. Its main supporters, Southern plantation owners, had everything invested in this “peculiar institution” and were devastated when it was abolished. Their economy simply revolved around slavery; without it they had nothing. It was an…
Although slavery was abolished in 1865, nothing in the Constitution provides for racial equality. In today’s society, the color of skin or the race of the individual often triggers behavior by other members of society. Dr. King once said “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” (King). Although many appear to ignore the mistakes of the past in professing that our society has evolved and is pro-diversity, even Jacobs wrote “There are wrongs which even the grave does not bury.” (Incidents Chapter XLI). Slavery remains a part of America’s history that cannot be merely forgotten as if it did not happen. Today’s society should learn from the mistakes of the past and work to eliminate the racial equality issues, sexual equality issues, and the moral decisions described by Harriet Jacobs over 100 years ago that remain prevalent…
The subject of slavery is an ongoing, and profound topic that has drawn debates for years now. Racism and Resilience in the Slave South and the Free North has existed since the time the United States of America had gained its Independence from Great Britain. In addition the United States of America had successfully formed a stable constitution that provided rights for all people who are created by God. We’ve all heard of the civil rights movement and the abolishment of slavery but the real question is do people truly understand the struggles of being a slave in two different societies such as the north and south.…
Amistad was a very touching film about the struggle that the Africans faced during the slave trade. As we have talked about in class watching these movies in the light of the class is very impactful. I originally watched this movie as part of a history class. I watched in as a series of events that impacted the civil war nothing more nothing less. Now as I watched it again in light of the class the Amazing Grace, I started seeing the relation between why things progressed the way they did in the case. Because of this events set forth by William Wilberforce we see the illegality of acquiring new slaves from Africa, and how they were smuggled into the country.…
Slavery was abolished in America 150 years ago, however, the color line it created is very much still alive. From the overtly racist Jim Crow laws to the discriminatory covert practices within the housing industry today, there is a clear division of white versus black, superior versus inferior that divides the nation. In her article “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates makes the case for why African Americans should be paid back for all of the injustices they had to, and continue to, endure. Granting reparations would be more than just handing out money to blacks to make up for the astronomical wealth gap certain discriminatory actions and policies have created, though. Coates said that making “reparations to those on whose labor and…
In the book the Mugging of Black America, Earl Ofari Hutchinson relays an interesting experience by a reporter. The reporter, who spent two and a half hours watching suspects march before Washington, D.C. Superior Court Judge Morton Berg, noted that all but one of these subjects was Black. He stated, ¡§There is an odd air about the swift afternoon¡Xan atmosphere like that of British Africa in colonial times¡Xas the procession of tattered, troubled, scowling, poor blacks plead guilty or not guilty to charges of drug possession, drug distribution, assault, armed robbery, theft, breaking in, fraud and arson.¡¨ According to Hutchinson, the reporter witnessed more than a courtroom scene; he witnessed the legacy of slavery.…
It is commonly believed that after the onset of the Civil War, Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation was the key driver to freeing the slaves of the south. After the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Constitutional amendments were passed which aided newly freed slaves in being equally treated under the law, or so the story goes. The fact of the matter is that even after the Emancipation Proclamation and after the amendments, slavery in the United States was still “legal” and not only that, but it took on a much different form. The institution of slavery changed from having the direct enslavement of blacks, to the United States legal and prison system enslaving blacks. Yet, the enslavement itself was changed as black convicts were no longer slaves to individual masters, but rather they were enslaved to the companies in which they were leased out to. To create this system there not only had to be the involvement of the Southern judicial system and individual Northern and Southern elites, but also the involvement of the corporation and reinstitution of slavery within a corporate context. This paper will examine our main focus—Was the US convict lease system “slavery” by another name?…