#Black Enslavement in america

[ausetkmt]

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The Slave Experience of the Holidays

American slaves experienced the Christmas holidays in many different ways. Joy, hope, and celebration were naturally a part of the season for many. For other slaves, these holidays conjured up visions of freedom and even the opportunity to bring about that freedom. Still others saw it as yet another burden to be endured. This month, Documenting the American South considers the Christmas holidays as they were experienced by enslaved Americans.

The prosperity and relaxed discipline associated with Christmas often enabled slaves to interact in ways that they could not during the rest of the year. They customarily received material goods from their masters: perhaps the slave's yearly allotment of clothing, an edible delicacy, or a present above and beyond what he or she needed to survive and work on the plantation. For this reason, among others, slaves frequently married during the Christmas season. When Dice, a female slave in Nina Hill Robinson's Aunt Dice, came to her master "one Christmas eve, and asked his consent to her marriage with Caesar," her master allowed the ceremony, and a "great feast was spread" (pp. 24-25). Dice and Caesar were married in "the mistress's own parlor . . . before the white minister" (pp. 25-26). More than any other time of year, Christmas provided slaves with the latitude and prosperity that made a formal wedding possible.

On the plantation, the transfer of Christmas gifts from master to slave was often accompanied by a curious ritual. On Christmas day, "it was always customary in those days to catch peoples Christmas gifts and they would give you something." Slaves and children would lie in wait for those with the means to provide presents and capture them, crying 'Christmas gift' and refusing to release their prisoners until they received a gift in return (p. 22). This ironic annual inversion of power occasionally allowed slaves to acquire real power. Henry, a slave whose tragic life and death is recounted in Martha Griffith Browne's Autobiography of a Female Slave, saved "Christmas gifts in money" to buy his freedom (p. 311).

Some slaves saw Christmas as an opportunity to escape. They took advantage of relaxed work schedules and the holiday travels of slaveholders, who were too far away to stop them. While some slaveholders presumably treated the holiday as any other workday, numerous authors record a variety of holiday traditions, including the suspension of work for celebration and family visits. Because many slaves had spouses, children, and family who were owned by different masters and who lived on other properties, slaves often requested passes to travel and visit family during this time. Some slaves used the passes to explain their presence on the road and delay the discovery of their escape through their masters' expectation that they would soon return from their "family visit." Jermain Loguen plotted a Christmas escape, stockpiling supplies and waiting for travel passes, knowing the cover of the holidays was essential for success: "Lord speed the day!--freedom begins with the holidays!" (p. 262). These plans turned out to be wise, as Loguen and his companions are almost caught crossing a river into Ohio, but were left alone because the white men thought they were free men "who have been to Kentucky to spend the Holidays with their friends" (p. 303).

Harriet Tubman helped her brothers escape at Christmas. Their master intended to sell them after Christmas but was delayed by the holiday. The brothers were expected to spend the day with their elderly mother but met Tubman in secret. She helped them travel north, gaining a head start on the master who did not discover their disappearance until the end of the holidays. Likewise, William and Ellen Crafts escaped together at Christmastime. They took advantage of passes that were clearly meant for temporary use. Ellen "obtained a pass from her mistress, allowing her to be away for a few days. The cabinet-maker with whom I worked gave me a similar paper, but said that he needed my services very much, and wished me to return as soon as the time granted was up. I thanked him kindly; but somehow I have not been able to make it convenient to return yet; and, as the free air of good old England agrees so well with my wife and our dear little ones, as well as with myself, it is not at all likely we shall return at present to the 'peculiar institution' of chains and stripes" (pp. 303-304).

Christmas could represent not only physical freedom, but spiritual freedom, as well as the hope for better things to come. The main protagonist of Martha Griffin Browne's Autobiography of a Female Slave, Ann, found little positive value in the slaveholder's version of Christmas—equating it with "all sorts of culinary preparations" and extensive house cleaning rituals—but she saw the possibility for a better future in the story of the life of Christ: "This same Jesus, whom the civilized world now worship as their Lord, was once lowly, outcast, and despised; born of the most hated people of the world . . . laid in the manger of a stable at Bethlehem . . . this Jesus is worshipped now" (p. 203, 47-48). For Ann, Christmas symbolized the birth of the very hope she used to survive her captivity.

Not all enslaved African Americans viewed the holidays as a time of celebration and hope. Rather, Christmas served only to highlight their lack of freedom. As a young boy, Louis Hughes was bought in December and introduced to his new household on Christmas Eve "as a Christmas gift to the madam" (p. 13). When Peter Bruner tried to claim a Christmas gift from his master, "he took me and threw me in the tan vat and nearly drowned me. Every time I made an attempt to get out he would kick me back in again until I was almost dead" (p. 22).

Frederick Douglass described the period of respite that was granted to slaves every year between Christmas and New Year's Day as a psychological tool of the oppressor. In his 1845 Narrative, Douglass wrote that slaves celebrated the winter holidays by engaging in activities such as "playing ball, wrestling, running foot-races, fiddling, dancing, and drinking whiskey" (p. 75). He took particular umbrage at the latter practice, which was often encouraged by slave owners through various tactics. "One plan [was] to make bets on their slaves, as to who can drink the most whiskey without getting drunk; and in this way they succeed in getting whole multitudes to drink to excess" (p. 75). In My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass concluded that "[a]ll the license allowed [during the holidays] appears to have no other object than to disgust the slaves with their temporary freedom, and to make them as glad to return to their work, as they were to leave it" (p. 255). While there is no doubt that many enjoyed these holidays, Douglass acutely discerned that they were granted not merely in a spirit of charity or conviviality, but also to appease those who yearned for freedom, ultimately serving the ulterior motives of slave owners.

[reasoningdaily]

Late one night several years ago, I got out of my car on a dark midtown Atlanta street when a man standing fifteen feet away pointed a gun at me and threatened to “blow my head off.” I’d been parked outside my new apartment in a racially mixed but mostly white neighborhood that I didn’t consider a high-crime area. As the man repeated the threat, I suppressed my first instinct to run and fearfully raised my hands in helpless submission. I begged the man not to shoot me, repeating over and over again, “It’s all right, it’s okay.”

The man was a uniformed police officer. As a criminal defense attorney, I knew that my survival required careful, strategic thinking. I had to stay calm. I’d just returned home from my law office in a car filled with legal papers, but I knew the officer holding the gun had not stopped me because he thought I was a young professional. Since I was a young, bearded black man dressed casually in jeans, most people would not assume I was a lawyer with a Harvard Law School degree. To the officer threatening to shoot me I looked like someone dangerous and guilty.

I had been sitting in my beat-up Honda Civic for over a quarter of an hour listening to music that could not be heard outside the vehicle. There was a Sly and the Family Stone retrospective playing on a local radio station that had so engaged me I couldn’t turn the radio off. It had been a long day at work. A neighbor must have been alarmed by the sight of a black man sitting in his car and called the police. My getting out of my car to explain to the police officer that this was my home and nothing criminal was taking place prompted him to pull his weapon.

Having drawn his weapon, the officer and his partner justified their threat of lethal force by dramatizing their fears and suspicions about me. They threw me on the back of my car, searched it illegally, and kept me on the street for fifteen humiliating minutes while neighbors gathered to view the dangerous criminal in their midst. When no crime was discovered and nothing incriminating turned up in a computerized background check on me, I was told by the two officers to consider myself lucky. While this was said as a taunt, they were right: I was lucky.

People of color in the United States, particularly young black men, are often assumed to be guilty and dangerous. In too many situations, black men are considered offenders incapable of being victims themselves. As a consequence of this country’s failure to address effectively its legacy of racial inequality, this presumption of guilt and the history that created it have significantly shaped every institution in American society, especially our criminal justice system.

At the Civil War’s end, black autonomy expanded but white supremacy remained deeply rooted. States began to look to the criminal justice system to construct policies and strategies to maintain the subordination of African-Americans. Convict leasing, the practice of “selling” the labor of state and local prisoners to private interests for state profit, used the criminal justice system to take away their political rights. State legislatures passed the Black Codes, which created new criminal offenses such as “vagrancy” and “loitering” and led to the mass arrest of black people. Then, relying on language in the Thirteenth Amendment that prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude “except as punishment for crime,” lawmakers authorized white-controlled governments to exploit the labor of African-Americans in private lease contracts or on state-owned farms.1 The legal scholar Jennifer Rae Taylor has observed:

While a black prisoner was a rarity during the slavery era (when slave masters were individually empowered to administer “discipline” to their human property), the solution to the free black population had become criminalization. In turn, the most common fate facing black convicts was to be sold into forced labor for the profit of the state.

Beginning as early as 1866 in states like Texas, Mississippi, and Georgia, convict leasing spread throughout the South and continued through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Leased black convicts faced deplorable, unsafe working conditions and brutal violence when they attempted to resist or escape bondage. An 1887 report by the Hinds County, Mississippi, grand jury recorded that six months after 204 convicts were leased to a man named McDonald, twenty were dead, nineteen had escaped, and twenty-three had been returned to the penitentiary disabled, ill, and near death. The penitentiary hospital was filled with sick and dying black men whose bodies bore “marks of the most inhuman and brutal treatment…so poor and emaciated that their bones almost come through the skin.”2

The explicit use of race to codify different kinds of offenses and punishments was challenged as unconstitutional, and criminal statutes were modified to avoid direct racial references, but the enforcement of the law didn’t change. Black people were routinely charged with a wide range of “offenses,” some of which whites were never charged with. African-Americans endured these challenges and humiliations and continued to rise up from slavery by seeking education and working hard under difficult conditions, but their refusal to act like slaves seemed only to provoke and agitate their white neighbors. This tension led to an era of lynching and violence that traumatized black people for decades.

Between the Civil War and World War II, thousands of African-Americans were lynched in the United States. Lynchings were brutal public murders that were tolerated by state and federal officials. These racially motivated acts, meant to bypass legal institutions in order to intimidate entire populations, became a form of terrorism. Lynching had a profound effect on race relations in the United States and defined the geographic, political, social, and economic conditions of African-Americans in ways that are still evident today.

Of the hundreds of black people lynched after being accused of rape and murder, very few were legally convicted of a crime, and many were demonstrably innocent. In 1918, for example, after a white woman was raped in Lewiston, North Carolina, a black suspect named Peter Bazemore was lynched by a mob before an investigation revealed that the real perpetrator had been a white man wearing blackface makeup.3 Hundreds more black people were lynched based on accusations of far less serious crimes, like arson, robbery, nonsexual assault, and vagrancy, many of which would not have been punishable by death even if the defendants had been convicted in a court of law. In addition, African-Americans were frequently lynched for not conforming to social customs or racial expectations, such as speaking to white people with less respect or formality than observers believed due.4

Many African-Americans were lynched not because they had been accused of committing a crime or social infraction, but simply because they were black and present when the preferred party could not be located. In 1901, Ballie Crutchfield’s brother allegedly found a lost wallet containing $120 and kept the money. He was arrested and about to be lynched by a mob in Smith County, Tennessee, when, at the last moment, he was able to break free and escape. Thwarted in their attempt to kill him, the mob turned their attention to his sister and lynched her instead, though she was not even alleged to have been involved in the theft.

New research continues to reveal the extent of lynching in America. The extraordinary documentation compiled by Professor Monroe Work (1866–1945) at Tuskegee University has been an invaluable historical resource for scholars, as has the joint work of sociologists Stewart Tolnay and E.M. Beck. These two sources are widely viewed as the most comprehensive collections of data on the subject in America. They have uncovered over three thousand instances of lynching between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950 in the twelve states that had the most lynchings: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

Recently, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery, Alabama—of which I am the founder and executive director—spent five years and hundreds of hours reviewing this research and other documentation, including local newspapers, historical archives, court records, interviews, and reports in African-American newspapers. Our research documented more than four thousand racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950 in those twelve states, eight hundred more than had been previously reported. We distinguished “racial terror lynchings” from hangings or mob violence that followed some sort of criminal trial or were committed against nonminorities. However heinous, this second category of killings was a crude form of punishment. By contrast, racial terror lynchings were directed specifically at black people, with little bearing on an actual crime; the aim was to maintain white supremacy and political and economic racial subordination.

We also distinguished terror lynchings from other racial violence and hate crimes that were prosecuted as criminal acts, although prosecution for hate crimes committed against black people was rare before World War II. The lynchings we documented were acts of terrorism because they were murders carried out with impunity—sometimes in broad daylight, as Sherrilyn Ifill explains in her important book on the subject, On the Courthouse Lawn (2007)—whose perpetrators were never held accountable. These killings were not examples of “frontier justice,” because they generally took place in communities where there was a functioning criminal justice system that was deemed too good for African-Americans. Some “public spectacle lynchings” were even attended by the entire local white population and conducted as celebratory acts of racial control and domination.

Records show that racial terror lynchings from Reconstruction until World War II had six particularly common motivations: (1) a wildly distorted fear of interracial sex; (2) as a response to casual social transgressions; (3) after allegations of serious violent crime; (4) as public spectacle, which could be precipitated by any of the allegations named above; (5) as terroristic violence against the African-American population as a whole; and (6) as retribution for sharecroppers, ministers, and other community leaders who resisted mistreatment—the last becoming common between 1915 and 1945.

Our research confirmed that many victims of terror lynchings were murdered without being accused of any crime; they were killed for minor social transgressions or for asserting basic rights. Our conversations with survivors of lynchings also confirmed how directly lynching and racial terror motivated the forced migration of millions of black Americans out of the South. Thousands of people fled north for fear that a social misstep in an encounter with a white person might provoke a mob to show up and take their lives. Parents and spouses suffered what they characterized as “near-lynchings” and sent their loved ones away in frantic, desperate acts of protection.

The decline of lynching in America coincided with the increased use of capital punishment often following accelerated, unreliable legal processes in state courts. By the end of the 1930s, court-ordered executions outpaced lynchings in the former slave states for the first time. Two thirds of those executed that decade were black, and the trend continued: as African-Americans fell to just 22 percent of the southern population between 1910 and 1950, they constituted 75 percent of those executed.

Probably the most famous attempted “legal lynching” is the case of the “Scottsboro Boys,” nine young African-Americans charged with raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. During the trial, white mobs outside the courtroom demanded the teens’ executions. Represented by incompetent lawyers, the nine were convicted by all-white, all-male juries within two days, and all but the youngest were sentenced to death. When the NAACP and others launched a national movement to challenge the cursory proceedings, the legal scholar Stephen Bright has written, “the [white] people of Scottsboro did not understand the reaction. After all, they did not lynch the accused; they gave them a trial.”5 In reality, many defendants of the era learned that the prospect of being executed rather than lynched did little to introduce fairness into the outcome.

Though northern states had abolished public executions by 1850, some in the South maintained the practice until 1938. The spectacles were more often intended to deter mob lynchings than crimes. Following Will Mack’s execution by public hanging in Brandon, Mississippi, in 1909, the Brandon News reasoned:

Public hangings are wrong, but under the circumstances, the quiet acquiescence of the people to submit to a legal trial, and their good behavior throughout, left no alternative to the board of supervisors but to grant the almost universal demand for a public execution.

Even in southern states that had outlawed public hangings much earlier, mobs often successfully demanded them.

In Sumterville, Florida, in 1902, a black man named Henry Wilson was convicted of murder in a trial that lasted just two hours and forty minutes. To mollify the mob of armed whites that filled the courtroom, the judge promised a death sentence that would be carried out by public hanging—despite state law prohibiting public executions. Even so, when the execution was set for a later date, the enraged mob threatened, “We’ll hang him before sundown, governor or no governor.” In response, Florida officials moved up the date, authorized Wilson to be hanged before the jeering mob, and congratulated themselves on having “avoided” a lynching.

‘The migration gained in momentum’; painting by Jacob Lawrence from his Migration series, 1940–1941. Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York/© 2017 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund (LDF) began what would become a multidecade litigation strategy to challenge the American death penalty—which was used most actively in the South—as racially biased and unconstitutional. It won in Furman v. Georgia in 1972, when the Supreme Court struck down Georgia’s death penalty statute, holding that capital punishment still too closely resembled “self-help, vigilante justice, and lynch law” and “if any basis can be discerned for the selection of these few to be sentenced to die, it is the constitutionally impermissible basis of race.”

Southern opponents of the decision immediately decried it and set to writing new laws authorizing the death penalty. Following Furman, Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland accused the Court of “legislating” and “destroying our system of government,” while Georgia’s white supremacist lieutenant governor, Lester Maddox, called the decision “a license for anarchy, rape, and murder.” In December 1972, Florida became the first state after Furman to enact a new death penalty statute, and within two years, thirty-five states had followed suit. Proponents of Georgia’s new death penalty bill unapologetically borrowed the rhetoric of lynching, insisting, as Maddox put it:

There should be more hangings. Put more nooses on the gallows. We’ve got to make it safe on the street again…. It wouldn’t be too bad to hang some on the court house square, and let those who would plunder and destroy see.

State representative Guy Hill of Atlanta proposed a bill that would require death by hanging to take place “at or near the courthouse in the county in which the crime was committed.” Georgia state representative James H. “Sloppy” Floyd remarked, “If people commit these crimes, they ought to burn.” In 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s new statute and thus reinstated the American death penalty, capitulating to the claim that legal executions were needed to prevent vigilante mob violence.

The new death penalty statutes continued to result in racial imbalance, and constitutional challenges persisted. In the 1987 case of McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court considered statistical evidence demonstrating that Georgia officials were more than four times as likely to impose a death sentence for the killing of a white person than a black person. Accepting the data as accurate, the Court conceded that racial disparities in sentencing “are an inevitable part of our criminal justice system” and upheld Warren McCleskey’s death sentence because he had failed to identify “a constitutionally significant risk of racial bias” in his case.

Today, large racial disparities continue in capital sentencing. African-Americans make up less than 13 percent of the national population, but nearly 42 percent of those currently on death row and 34 percent of those executed since 1976. In 96 percent of states where researchers have examined the relationship between race and the death penalty, results reveal a pattern of discrimination based on the race of the victim, the race of the defendant, or both. Meanwhile, in capital trials today the accused is often the only person of color in the courtroom and illegal racial discrimination in jury selection continues to be widespread. In Houston County, Alabama, prosecutors have excluded 80 percent of qualified African-Americans from serving as jurors in death penalty cases.

More than eight in ten American lynchings between 1889 and 1918 occurred in the South, and more than eight in ten of the more than 1,400 legal executions carried out in this country since 1976 have been in the South, where the legacy of the nation’s embrace of slavery lingers. Today death sentences are disproportionately meted out to African-Americans accused of crimes against white victims; efforts to combat racial bias and create federal protection against it in death penalty cases remain thwarted by the familiar rhetoric of states’ rights. Regional data demonstrate that the modern American death penalty has its origins in racial terror and is, in the words of Bright, the legal scholar, “a direct descendant of lynching.”

In the face of this national ignominy, there is still an astonishing failure to acknowledge, discuss, or address the history of lynching. Many of the communities where lynchings took place have gone to great lengths to erect markers and memorials to the Civil War, to the Confederacy, and to events and incidents in which local power was violently reclaimed by white people. These communities celebrate and honor the architects of racial subordination and political leaders known for their defense of white supremacy. But in these same communities there are very few, if any, significant monuments or memorials that address the history and legacy of the struggle for racial equality and of lynching in particular. Many people who live in these places today have no awareness that race relations in their histories included terror and lynching. As Ifill has argued, the absence of memorials to lynching has deepened the injury to African-Americans and left the rest of the nation ignorant of this central part of our history.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, arguably the signal legal achievement of the civil rights movement, contained provisions designed to eliminate discrimination in voting, education, and employment, but did not address racial bias in criminal justice. Though it was the most insidious engine of the subordination of black people throughout the era of racial terror and its aftermath, the criminal justice system remains the institution in American life least affected by the civil rights movement. Mass incarceration in America today stands as a continuation of past abuses, still limiting opportunities for our nation’s most vulnerable citizens.

We can’t change our past, but we can acknowledge it and better shape our future. The United States is not the only country with a violent history of oppression. Many nations have been burdened by legacies of racial domination, foreign occupation, or tribal conflict resulting in pervasive human rights abuses or genocide. The commitment to truth and reconciliation in South Africa was critical to that nation’s recovery. Rwanda has embraced transitional justice to heal and move forward. Today in Germany, besides a number of large memorials to the Holocaust, visitors encounter markers and stones at the homes of Jewish families who were taken to the concentration camps. But in America, we barely acknowledge the history and legacy of slavery, we have done nothing to recognize the era of lynching, and only in the last few years have a few monuments to the Confederacy been removed in the South.

The crucial question concerning capital punishment is not whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit but rather whether we deserve to kill. Given the racial disparities that still exist in this country, we should eliminate the death penalty and expressly identify our history of lynching as a basis for its abolition. Confronting implicit bias in police departments should be seen as essential in twenty-first-century policing.

What threatened to kill me on the streets of Atlanta when I was a young attorney wasn’t just a misguided police officer with a gun, it was the force of America’s history of racial injustice and the presumption of guilt it created. In America, no child should be born with a presumption of guilt, burdened with expectations of failure and dangerousness because of the color of her or his skin or a parent’s poverty. Black people in this nation should be afforded the same protection, safety, and opportunity to thrive as anyone else. But that won’t happen until we look squarely at our history and commit to engaging the past that continues to haunt us.

Bryan Stevenson is the Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative and the author of “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.” This essay is drawn from the collection “Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment,” edited and with an introduction by Angela J. Davis, which will be published in July by Pantheon.


[transastronautistic]

i want to make a sewing piece with flowers from different liberation movements — e.g. lavender for queers, poppy for Palestine...

anyone have information on flowers linked to other movements / cultures? For instance, Black liberation or Latin American / Indigenous liberation?

[starlightshadowsworld]

Say it with me now.

Enslaved 👏🏼 people 👏🏼 did👏🏼 not👏🏼 benefit 👏🏼from👏🏼 slavery!

The "skills they acquired" were things they already fucking knew.

Those skills were being taught, handed down and being used for centuries all across Africa.

To demonish centuries worth of their history to when they were enslaved is disgusting.

White people didn't teach em shit.

They wouldn't have been exploited and trafficked round the world if they didn't have no skills.

How dare you, how dare you try to brush aside 12+ generations of enslavement and brand it as "education."

Oh their were people who benefitted from slavery alright but it weren't the enslaved.

[skeleton-bat]

There’s a really cool youtube series about black slavery and enslavement in america and I just finished the first episode and it’s really good. I recommend people go watch it and ill post a link but BRUH! Why are white people so tiring to deal with. So many of them will just say dumb shit that doesn’t even matter to whats being talked about. I’m not even black and they’re goading me like this.

“the first slaves were white” is that what were talking about rn? no were talking about the black slavery in america. “slavery isnt a race issue” In america it sure fucking is you dumb piece of twat

anyways heres the video dont look at the comments

[black-paraphernalia]

WE AT BLACK PARAPHERNALIA

WILL FROM TIME TO TIME 

BRING A SERIES THAT HIGHLIGHTS

OUR BLACK HISTORY. 

BELOW IS 6 SEPARATE POSTING 

WITH A VERY INTERESTING READ

This will be a 6 part post to give details of the above statements also the underline links are left so you can click for more of the back story and informational history.

I will post only a synopsis of the information given to the 5 points of truth listed in the introduction, for this is not my story to tell, I am only sharing a bit of truth. Also click on all underlines to get more in depth information on the subject. 

The full story is for the five truths click below the synopsis

FIVE TRUTHS ABOUT BLACK HISTORY If we want to understand the state of race in America, we need to know our past — particularly the painful parts. by

Jeffery Robinson, ACLU Deputy Legal Director and Director of the Trone Center for Justice and Equality

BLACK PARAPHERNALIA DISCLAIMER PLEASE READ

ALL IMAGES ARE FROM GOOGLE IMAGE

THE BLOG IS NOT FOR THE SENSITIVE-CLOSED MINDED-RUDE PERSON

UNDERSTANDING IF WE DO NOT LEARN FROM OUR HISTORY WE ARE DOOM TO REPEAT IT IN THE WORST WAY

“We also would like to thank the many well wishers and supporters of Black Paraphernalia upon our return from a well deserved hiatus”

[firelord-frowny]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ive always thought it's so wiiiiiiiiild that so many of these ~mansions~ that used to be slave plantations are now government-owned and converted into museums instead of being collectively owned by all black americans, liiiiiiiiiiike....

we should fucking own that shit! our ancestors RAN those farms! worked that land! built those mansions! yet somebody other than us is benefiting from it now???

honest to god i wish black folks could all own those properties like a timeshare lmao and we'd all be entitled to spend a few days a year living it up in our luxurious country homes in the deep south. catch me sipping lemonade on my veranda on a hot summer evening while my housekeepers clean up the kitchen after dinner.

[harrelltut]

Lo!… JEHOVAH OKCULT BIBLE [JOB] WIZARD Me [ME = U.S. Michael Harrell = TUT = JAH] on Earth [JE = JESÚS] RESURRECTED from My Immortal [iMI = iMICHAEL] IMHOTEP [iMI = AMENHOTEP] DEATH [A.D.] TOMB… since iBEE A Biblically Ancient [BABYLONIAN] FUTURISTIC Immortal 9 [i9] Ether MAGE… who ASCENDED to the CHTHONIC [MAC] Underworld [MU] of TIAMAT’s EXTRA DARK [SATANIC] Electromagnetic Earth [SEE] SUN & MOON Energies [ME] as Heavenly Archangel [HA = HARRELL] Prince SATAN from Astronomical SATURN… since iElectrophysiologically [iSpiritually] RESURRECTED Inner Earth’s [HADES] Most Darkest [Occulted] Disembodied CHTHONIC [D.C.] 9 Ether Human DEATH Spirits [DAEMONS] from the SUPERCARBONATED SOUL Energy Atmosphere [SEA] DEEP IN:side Inner Earth’s [HADES] Most Darkest [Occulted] GOLDEN Subterranean Underworld of Nocturnal [SUN] SOUL Prince LUCIFER… who Electrophysiologically [Spiritually] Employ the EDIMMU [SEE] SPIRIT CARTEL of Biblically Ancient [BABYLONIAN] ASAKKU TUTELARY [BAT] DAEMONS in 2022 [VI]… as Immortal DEATH [I.D.] GOD MICTLĀNTĒCUTLI & GODDESS MICTĒCACIHUĀTL… Ritualistically + Ancestrally PERFORM [RAP] abracadabra… abracadabra… abracadabra… FUNERARY Rites [GODSPELLS = GOSPELS] from Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte’s Spiritual Underworld of SEKMET’s Ægyptian ANUBIS [SEA] DEITY… MILLIONS of AZTECAN Years Ahead [MAYA] of Lost 2022 [VI] America… Hallelujah & AMEN [HA = HARRELL] HOTEP!!!

MU:13

[ausetkmt]

There are short stories, memoirs and novels written by White Southerners after the Civil War that tend to justify slavery. Some of these novels have made slave Christmases sound like beautiful times, writing about how enslaved men and women sang, danced and sat feasting on special meals during Christmas holidays, just as their owners did.

Some of these memoirs state that enslaved people wore their best clothes during Christmas and even played holiday games with their owners. But in reality, Christmas was never really a wonderful time of the year for enslaved people as these memoirs by White Southerners would want people to think.

It is true that many enslaved people got some time off from work during Christmas. The season becomes their longest break of the year, a break between the end of the harvest season and the start of preparation for the following year of production. They could travel to see their family or get married or partake in certain activities that they didn’t get to do at other times of the year.

“This time we regarded as our own, by the grace of our masters; and we therefore used or abused it nearly as we pleased,” abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery in his 20s, wrote. “Those of us who had families at a distance were generally allowed to spend the whole six days [between Christmas and New Year’s Day] in their society.”

Some enslaved men and women also received gifts from their owners — clothing, shoes or money — and ate special meals that they never tasted at other times of the year. But not all enslaved people got the above privileges, and with those who had these privileges, their owners could take back those privileges at any time. Some slaveowners even continued to brutally punish their slaves during Christmas.

It is documented that on one South Carolina plantation, a slaveowner locked up an enslaved woman during Christmas after accusing her of deliberately miscarrying her pregnancy. Runaway slave Gordon, who was nicknamed “Whipped Peter”, was photographed at a union camp upon escaping slavery in the south. Gordon’s photograph displaying his very conspicuous scourged back stunned Americans in the north. Sources say he was whipped at Christmas.

During Christmas, some slaveowners also forced enslaved workers to wrestle with each other to amuse the household or the slaveowners’ family. Other slaves were forced to get drunk by their owners. Some slaveholders also continued to buy and sell enslaved workers during the holidays. Other slaves were even shipped off, far away from their families.

Indeed, Christmas was not a good time for many enslaved people in America. As such, many took advantage of the holidays to plot their escape. In December 1848, Ellen and William Craft, an enslaved married couple from Macon, Georgia, used passes from their owners during Christmas to plan their escape. They boarded trains and a steamboat to Philadelphia. Harriet Tubman also helped her three brothers enslaved in Maryland to escape during Christmas in 1854.

And as Christmas became an opportunity for resistance, some slaveowners feared rebellion during the season. So they often armed themselves during the period or banned Black people from the streets amid intense security. Slaves who proved stubborn or their owners felt were acting strange were whipped or killed. These and many other disturbing moments made Christmas almost unwelcome for America’s enslaved people.

Even for those who received gifts, their owners were just reinforcing their control over them. Historian Stephen Nissenbaum writes that one slaveowner said giving gifts to enslaved people on Christmas was a more appropriate tool to control them than physical violence.

“I killed twenty-eight head of beef for the people’s Christmas dinner. I can do more with them in this way than if all the hides of the cattle were made into lashes,” he said.

[reasoningdaily]

History of the Slave Trade: The Origins of the Slave Trade and Its Impacts Throughout History and the Present Day

by Hareth Al Bustani, Josephine Hall, Edoardo Albert

Book Overview

The transatlantic slave trade is one of the most shameful chapters in human history. Between 1500 and 1900 it's estimated that around 12 million African men, women, and children were stolen from their homes by Europeans, before being forcefully transported thousands of miles across the Atlantic. Those who survived the horrific 'Middle Passage' would then be sold, often separated from their families, and put to work as enslaved labor on plantations throughout the New World. While this inhumane trade was eventually abolished in the 19th century, the scars still remain and the lasting impact is still being felt by communities around the world. In History of the Slave Trade, we seek to tell the story of the transatlantic slave trade - from its origins to its abolition. We discover the impact on Africa, the horrors of the Middle Passage, and what life was like for millions of enslaved people. We also look to explore the legacies of slavery and how the effects are still being felt in the modern world.

CLICK THE TITLE TO DOWNLOAD FROM THE BLACK TRUEBRARY

[lowcountry-gothic]

Corey Alston (Mount Pleasant, SC)

“​​My name is Corey Alston. I'm a fifth generation Sweetgrass Basket Weaver. I currently run the family business in the Charleston City Market. Sweetgrass Basket Weaving has been a major part of the Gullah Geechee Culture dating back to days of Enslavement. This coastal art form has been recognized as South Carolina State Handcraft and has been known to be kept alive the longest along Sweetgrass Basket Makers HWY of South Carolina. This skill is one of the rare arts of our country that is founded nowhere else in America. Gullah Sweetgrass Baskets are a national treasure.

“​​Being chosen as one of the artisans of Mt. Pleasant does not only bring awareness to my skill set and my culture as a Gullah Geechee representative, but in collaboration with Acres of Ancestry raises awareness of the unjustifiable treatment that Black and minority farmers have endured. The more that this topic is brought to the forefront, the more that our nation's leaders will see that treating white farmers one way and then treating Black farmers another way will not be accepted. I applaud Acres of Ancestry for working tirelessly on making sure that everyone understands what our elder farmers are going through.

“​​These two Sweetgrass Baskets are called ‘Poppa’ and ‘Big Momma.’ It took six months to complete ‘Big Momma’ and four months to complete ‘Poppa.’ They both measure 36 inches tall.”

​​—Corey Alston, fifth generation basket weaver and cultural preservationist from Mount Pleasant, SC, Artisan Statement

[icanseethefuture333]

Whenever I hear other African Americans say they're not black but indigenous/aboriginal a part of me dies

[hitaka5ever]

A video on my Subscription feed reminded me that today is Juneteenth and that there'd be no mail. So I went out into the cold rain bc I like to freeze my ass off apparently

Speaking of *gestures to tags*

[transmutationisms]

can u elaborate on posture being a lie

As Beth Linker explains in her book “Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America” (Princeton), a long history of anxiety about the proximity between human and bestial nature has played out in this area of social science. Linker, a historian of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that at the onset of the twentieth century the United States became gripped by what she characterizes as a poor-posture epidemic: a widespread social contagion of slumping that could, it was feared, have deleterious effects not just upon individual health but also upon the body politic. Sitting up straight would help remedy all kinds of failings, physical and moral [...] she sees the “past and present worries concerning posture as part of an enduring concern about so-called ‘diseases of civilization’ ”—grounded in a mythology of human ancestry that posits the hunter-gatherer as an ideal from which we have fallen.

[...]

In America at the turn of the twentieth century, anxieties about posture inevitably collided with anxieties not just about class but also about race. Stooping was associated with poverty and with manual, industrialized labor—the conditions of working-class immigrants from European countries who, in their physical debasement, were positioned well below the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment. Linker argues that, in this environment, “posture served as a marker of social status similar to skin color.” At the same time, populations that had been colonized and enslaved were held up as posture paradigms for the élite to emulate: the American Posture League rewarded successful students with congratulatory pins that featured an image of an extremely upright Lenape man. The head-carrying customs associated with African women were also adopted as training exercises for white girls of privilege, although Linker notes that Bancroft and her peers recommended that young ladies learn to balance not baskets and basins, which signified functionality, but piles of flat, slippery books, markers of their own access to leisure and education. For Black Americans, posture was even more fraught: despite the admiration granted to the posture of African women bearing loads atop their heads, community leaders like Dr. Algernon Jackson, who helped establish the National Negro Health Movement, criticized those Black youth who “too often slump along, stoop-shouldered and walk with a careless, lazy sort of dragging gait.” If slouching among privileged white Americans could indicate an enviable carelessness, it was seen as proof of indolence when adopted by the disadvantaged.

This being America, posture panic was swiftly commercialized, with a range of products marketed to appeal to the eighty per cent of the population whose carriage had been deemed inadequate by posture surveys. The footwear industry drafted orthopedic surgeons to consult on the design of shoes that would lessen foot and back pain without the stigma of corrective footwear: one brand, Trupedic, advertised itself as “a real anatomical shoe without the freak-show look.” The indefatigable Jessie Bancroft trained her sights on children’s clothing, endorsing a company that created a “Right-Posture” jacket, whose trim cut across the upper shoulders gave its schoolboy wearer little choice but to throw his shoulders back like Jordan Baker. Bancroft’s American Posture League endorsed girdles and corsets for women; similar garments were also adopted by men, who, by the early nineteen-fifties, were purchasing abdominal “bracers” by the millions.

It was in this era that what eventually proved to be the most contentious form of posture policing reached its height, when students entering college were required to submit to mandatory posture examinations, including the taking of nude or semi-nude photographs. For decades, incoming students had been evaluated for conditions such as scoliosis by means of a medical exam, which came to incorporate photography to create a visual record. Linker writes that for many male students, particularly those who had military training, undressing for the camera was no biggie. For female students, it was often a more disquieting undertaking. Sylvia Plath, who endured it in 1950, drew upon the experience in “The Bell Jar,” whose protagonist, Esther Greenwood, discovers that undressing for her boyfriend is as uncomfortably exposing as “knowing . . . that a picture of you stark naked, both full view and side view, is going into the college gym files.” The practice of taking posture photographs was gradually abandoned by colleges, thanks in part to the rise of the women’s movement, which gave coeds a new language with which to express their discomfort. It might have been largely forgotten were it not for a 1995 article in the Times Magazine, which raised the alarming possibility that there still existed stashes of nude photographs of famous former students of the Ivy League and the Seven Sisters, such as George H. W. Bush, Bob Woodward, Meryl Streep, and Hillary Clinton. Many of the photographs in question were taken and held not by the institutions themselves but by the mid-century psychologist William Herbert Sheldon. Sheldon was best known for his later discredited theories of somatotypes, whereby he attributed personality characteristics to individuals based on whether their build was ectomorphic, endomorphic, or mesomorphic.

[...]

Today, the descendants of Jessie Bancroft are figures like Esther Gokhale, a Bay Area acupuncturist and the creator of the Gokhale Method, who teaches “primal posture” courses to tech executives and whose recommendations are consonant with other fitness trends, such as barefoot running and “paleo” eating, that romanticize an ancestral past as a remedy for the ills of the present. The compulsory mass surveillance that ended when universities ceased the practice of posture photography has been replaced by voluntary individual surveillance, with the likes of Rafi the giraffe and the Nekoze cat monitoring a user’s vulnerability to “tech neck,” a newly named complaint brought on by excessive use of the kind of devices profitably developed by those paleo-eating, barefoot-running, yoga-practicing executives. Meanwhile, Linker reports, paleoanthropologists quietly working in places other than TikTok have begun to revise the popular idea that our ancient ancestors did not get aches and pains in their backs. Analysis of fossilized spines has revealed degenerative changes suggesting that “the first upright hominids to roam the earth likely experienced back pain, or would have been predisposed to such a condition if they had lived long enough.” Slouching, far from being a disease of civilization, then, seems to be something we’ve been prone to for as long as we have stood on our own two feet.

[packedwithpackards]

A "social and professional role": the story of Captain Samuel Packard

There are many subjects I could write about here. Either looking at vital records for Abington, Massachusetts to see where Packards pop up, results on Family Search for the surname of Packard, or mentions in a "Genealogical Dictionary" seemingly. [1] What I am inquiring here about is a man named Captain Samuel Packard painted by an American painter named James Earl, in the last years of his life, in circa 1794. The oil on canvas painting, which measures 35 by 29 1/4 inches, is of a prominent man in New England, begging the question: who is this man?

A photo of the above painting, held by the RISD Museum, is reposted here from the RISD website based on the Creative Commons license used for all RISD Museum works, which lets "others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms." This post is a non-commercial work as it is intended purely for educational purposes about the Packard family.

In their description of the above painting, [2] the RISD Museum writes that

Seated casually in a Windsor chair, Samuel Packard signals his social and professional role in the new republic. The plush drapery, the decorative column, Packard’s fashionable bright-hued waistcoat all suggest that is a man of wealth. The ship in the distance and the spyglass refer to his interests in maritime trade. A merchant and talented mariner, Packard owned 39 vessels that sailed from Providence. Around the time of this portrait, Packard had completed missions abroad for George Washington, so the ships may also allude to Packard’s diplomatic travels.

He was married to a woman named Abigail Congdon and had a daughter with her which had the same name (Abigail). They were married on December 13, 1789 in Saint Pauls Church, Narragansett, Washington, Rhode Island as the record shows:

Page 345 of Vital record of Rhode Island, 1636-1850, Vol 10, within the section "St. Paul's Church marriages"

In January 1942, the Rhode Island Historical Society displayed the painting of Samuel Packard on the cover of their historical magazine. One article titled "A Rhode Islander Goes West to Indiana" by George A. White, Jr. explained more about Capt. Samuel Packard's role in the early United States. He wrote on pages 21-22 that

Captain Samuel Packard was the son of Nathaniel Packard and was born in Providence, October 17, 1760. His father owned land bordering North Main, Howard, and Try Streets. Captain Samuel Packard's life followed a similar pattern...he was a mariner, ship master, ship--owner, and merchant. He owned 39 ships, sailing from Providence to all ports of the world...an ardent admirer of George Washington...Captain Packard acted for him in secret work [during the revolutionary war]...[after 1797] Captain Packard and his family lived in a mansion [in Providence] built of wood and brick, measuring 25 feet on the street and 60 feet deep. It was three stories high...On December 13, 1789, Captain Packard had married Abigail Congdon...in 1798, Abigail (Congdon) Packard inherited a portion of the Congdon homestead farm on Boston Neck...in the early 1800's Captain Packard purchased the remainder of the farm...Captain Packard owned land in Cranston, R.I., and in Illinois. Captain Packard furnished his Providence and North Kingston homes with fine furniture, china, and silver

Mr. White continues by quoting letters from Captain Packard's son, John Congdon Packard, describing his experiences "out West" which are addressed to Captain Packard's residence in North Kingston, Rhode Island.

Note: This was originally posted on Mar. 9, 2018 on the main Packed with Packards WordPress blog (it can also be found on the Wayback Machine here). My research is still ongoing, so some conclusions in this piece may change in the future.

Apart from the confusion of Samuel Packard who arrived in 1638 with Captain Samuel Packard (as noted here and here), some got it right. It is evident that Captain Packard was a "revolutionary patriot," which was also recognized by William Shaw Bowen who gave some of the Captain's belongings to the Redwood Library in 1878. He may have commanded a company during the war with the British from 1812-1815 as well, although this be a confusion with another Packard.

There is no doubt that Captain Packard was renowned as a master of ships, while transporting important financial papers. While it would seem, reportedly, was pointed to the spot where Roger Williams, Rhode Island's founder, was buried, with one book saying that, this is actually referencing Nathaniel Packard who married a woman named Nabby. He was, however, one of the original members of the Providence Marine Corps of Artillery and, later on, the Providence Marine Society.

Captain Packard clearly had a role in the revolutionary war in moving supplies past the British blockade as Vol 4 of Naval Documents in the American Revolution reports:

These events happened in April 1776

I still question whether this is the right Packard, however.

Captain Packard went beyond the owning of slaves by Zachariah Packard as noted in my family history. He sailed a ship to the coast of Africa looking for Black Africans to enslave in 1797 contrary to Rhode Island law. As the University Publications of America noted in a guide to certain Rhode Island Historical Society records,

Moreover, Moses Brown’s letters reveal not only the Abolition Society’s formal legal stratagems but also its traditional policy of intense but informal negotiating with slave traders who often yielded to the group’s demands without a court fight. Cyprian Sterry, for example, the principal slave trader in Providence during the 1790s with fifteen voyages to the African coast in 1794 alone, fully succumbed to the society’s persistent pressure. He escaped prosecution (along with his captain, Samuel Packard) for an African voyage involving the ship Ann by signing a written pledge to leave the slave trade forever.

Captain Packard was seemingly related to a Capt. Nathaniel Packard who was also in Rhode Island. Other books sadly only exist as snippets and hence do not give much information about his life. However, there is no doubt that he lived in Providence, Rhode Island near houses that nowadays are called historic (see pages 16 and 17 of this PDF).

Page 17 excerpt

You would be able to look at the deed books either by going to the Rhode Island State Archives, as noted here, or being at a Family Search Library.

He was alive and well in Providence in September 1794 when a ship, Hope, came into the harbor:

Courtesy of Chronicling America.

Thanks to Family Search, I have also discovered:

Captain Packard (called Samuel Packard in record) living in Providence, Providence, RI in 1790 and in 1800, as summarized also in an article later on on this blog, using the original records.

Captain Packard (called Samuel Packard in record) living in Providence RI's West District in 1810.

Captain Packard and Abigail's daughter died in 1860 (no publicly available image is available)

Abigail, Captain Packard's wife, died in 1854 (no publicly available image is available)

As it was noted, in one of the books I found, that a Captain Packard died at age 80 in 1809. There is a Samuel Packard who died in 1824 at sea with a tombstone in Rhode Island along with a Samuel Packard Jr who died in Providence in 1799. His tombstone makes it clear that he was born in Oct 1760 and died on July 17, 1760. This is clear from the following transcription:

In the memory of

Capt

Samuel Packard

Who Died

July 17, 1820

Aged

59 Years & 9 Months

Via page 382 of Vital record of Rhode Island, 1636-1850, Vol 10, shows deaths of varying Packards in Rhode Island.

Notes

[1] Also it is worth noting that no Packard popped up here, meaning that there is nothing in Family Search's Massachusetts, Town Clerk...Town Records, 1626-2001 specifically for  Norfolk,  Weymouth or  Land records 1642-1644. Packards could be on this page, but is also questionable. Additionally, I could look at online records of Hingham to see if the Packards appear, possible Packards on pages such as this one or this. But I have already done that in the past and future searches at this time are a waste.

[2] The Rhode Island Medical Journal writes that "several other portraits by James Earl in the RISD show bear a strong stylistic similarity [to the one of Dr. Amos Thoop], particularly that of Capt. Samuel Packard of Providence, a successful ship captain, merchant, and ship owner of Throop’s era." The painting is in the Smithsonian's Art Inventories Catalog but resides at RISD. As one person writes about the collections in Rhode Island, "Postwar Windsor production at Providence for domestic use is indicated in the accounts of the Proud brothers and in a circa-1795 portrait of Capt. Samuel Packard seated in a sack-back Windsor."

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