Your 81 year old relative may have talked to a slave.. (It's not hundreds of years in the past)

[SoCalDem]

A person born in 1845 would have been a slave for 10 years .

In 1935 they would have been 80 years old..

Your elderly relative would have been 10 years old, when that slave was 80 years old. They could have spoken..

News people love to remind us that "slavery was HUNDREDS of years in the past, and people should be "over it" by now."

I'm just reminding people that there are people alive today who SPOKE with a slave...not a slave-descendant...an actual slave..

People all over the world are keeping past events alive for THOUSANDS of years ( think Jesus,Mohammed, etc)..so why would this stain on our souls just vanish so quickly?

It hasn't and it won't ever..nor should it

[theoldman]

1. There are millions of slaves all over the world today.

It would not surprise me if many live in the US working on farms and as maids. Perhaps it also depends on your definition of a slave.

[SoCalDem]

2. Sadly, that's true.. The "dirty work" always gets done by

people we don't value.

[struggle4progress]

16. On average about 15 human trafficking cases are successfully prosecuted in the US

each year, according to data here:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/fpht05.htm

[Kutjara]

3. I seem to remember...

...a few news stories during my childhood in the 60s about a couple of centenarians who had been slaves. They had worked on their owners plantations as children in the final days of slavery and were still alive in the space age. People who knew them could be as young as 40 today. No, slavery must never be forgotten, but it certainly shouldn't be forgotten yet in any case; it's still within living memory.

[eallen]

4. Many people born into slavery lived into the 1960s.

And many of us here today were alive in the 1960s. :hippie:

There were quite a few efforts to collect slave narratives in the middle part of the 20th century. Clink the link below for an example.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/wpa/wpahome.html

[SoCalDem]

6. That may be what gave a start to the Shoah project

It's important to have a real-time narrative, since we know how history gets "spun" these days :)

[JNelson6563]

11. Great stuff!

Thanks for posting that, I just spent a long time reading those accounts. Heart breaking but enlightening. We must never allow history to be rewritten to make these sound like happy times.

Julie

[nealmhughes]

22. One word on warning on the ex-slave narratives collected by the WPA in 36-8..

They are heavily edited. The respondents actual responses were reproduced as some type of vaudeville stereotype of "Black English." For example, Mother is nearly made "Mammy", "Master" becomes "Marse" or "Massa", etc. It is hard to read rapidly at first, and only after trying to read aloud can one really get the hang of it.

One thing to also recall is that all of the respondents were elderly at the time. Even those born in the waning days of slavery would have been 70 or so at the youngest. Many were living in extreme poverty and were thinking more of the pretty young nice white girl (most of the queries were made in person by white women) from the government that might give them an increase in the pittance of relief they had during the Depression. This is quite notable in the narratives.

Eugene Genovese relied heavily upon them in Roll Jordan, Roll and faced a lot of criticism for this use. However, he replied that he had read every single one of them (as have I) and knew what seemed to be true and what seemed to be too fabulous to include.

I used them at a paper I gave in Memphis at the Annual Conference on Race and Identity at U. Memphis in 2002. However, I used them as a backgound piece for the paper, which was my identification of six distinct modes of rearing the slave children.

For those interested, you will find many examples of the "feeding trough" used to feed slave children on large plantations. However, I argue that it might have been a bread kneading trough that served double duty, and not a trough for animals, or else a vestige of the West African communal cooking pot. I cannot argue for or against the use of the trough as an instrument of humiliation, as it seems that slave cooks were the ones who used it for the children!

The bibliographic data for the ex-slave narratives is:

American Slave: A Composite Biography
George Rawick, gen. ed.
Greenwood Press, Westport, CT 1977-79.

There are a total of 22 volumes, a first set of twelve, and then a set of 10 additional.

[sandnsea]

57. Has there ever been further interviewing?

Has anybody ever taken this collection and gone to family members to gather more info, in order to get a more complete picture or see what didn't get through the racial and class barriers? It'd be a great historic and social project, if it hasn't been done yet.

[nealmhughes]

58. Not to my knowlege. It would be a great project, but I don't like to interview

people or to get a second or third hand "my grandmother told me that her grandmother was a slave and..." that is how family legned is handed down, and frankly, I prefer to let people believe their family legends. Did my ancestor in Olde England really hold King Charles' reins as he surrendered to Cromwell? I doubt it, but I like to believe it!

That is the stuff of legend, and often the legend is more more glorious or terrible than the reality.

I don't have enough training in oral history or folklore to be able to adequately do such a project, much less the time, but there is a Ph.D. and a best seller out there with someone's name on it from your proposed project.

[NYC Liberal]

34. There's also a wonderful collection at American Memory with audio interviews

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/voices/title.html

Almost all of them you can download as MP3s and they're split up into parts.

[johnnie]

5. We shouldn't forget the past...

..but we shouldn't beat it into the ground either. The only way we are going to get past racism is being able to accept our differences, not accept the bullshit that all people are the same no matter what.

In my opinion, the more that the past is shoved down everyone's throats, the more there will be people "defending" themselves. That does us no good. There are hundreds of thousands of years of skeletons in the closets, why keep dragging them out?

We need to promote the "now" and the future and not keep blaming the people of today for the bullshit people pulled in the last hundred of thousands of years.

[pretzel4gore]

8. all people ARE the same

eschatalogically....in preternaturalistic terms, however, differences define the cubic foot!
(btw, as a tottler i recall confederate money being in super abundance, everybody had it! this was in northwestern ontario circa the 1950's....does anyone else remember this in other regions?)

[Igel]

7. US abolished slavery officially in 1865,

but a slave born in 1845 would have had more than 10 years of slavery under his/her belt by the time s/he was definitively freed.

1845 + 80 = 1925. Still possible to know somebody who knew an ex-slave, esp. if you take 1864 as the starting point. (BTW, for me, 'once a slave, always a slave' isn't a valid statement.)

But why limit yourself to the US? We have lots of immigrants.

Cuba had slavery until 1886, Brazil till 1888. Some countries had slavery into the 20th century, and chattel slavery is still asserted to exist in some more enlightened countries. It's not impossible that there are people born as slaves currently alive in the US. You could still talk to somebody that was a slave.

This is leaving aside the extended and more metaphorical definitions where you need to work and are therefore "slaves" to a boss, or where your parents farm you out to a sweatshop. If at age 18 (or whatever majority is) you can get up and leave without being tracked down and returned to your owner, it may be oppressive, but it's not slavery.

[eallen]

9. I think the metaphorical use of slavery steals from its true depravity.

People have to work for a living? Well, that's always been the case, everywhere, and will remain so until some future where smart machines produce everything people desire. In the US, no one has to work for a corporation. There are plenty of opportunities for people at every skill and educational level to work independently, from day labor to running a snack stand to high-tech consulting. People who work for corporations choose to do so because they see more opportunity there than otherwise. Or more security.

Having to work for a living, and the pressure of security or money to make some choices over others, is simply a result of not having a world where every material want is automatically satisfied. Having those choices made for you by an owner, who keeps what you earn, decides how you live, and can sell you as a commodity, is something entirely different. Ex-slaves still had to work for a living, and more, faced discriminatory law and culture that put burdens on that. Yet they understood well the difference between that and their former condition.

:hippie:

[Trillo]

31. You you sure about that?

Or is it just what you believe?

The following are your words I'm responding to: "In the US, no one has to work for a corporation. ... Having those choices made for you by an owner, who keeps what you earn, decides how you live, and can sell you as a commodity, is something entirely different."

Some information, which I basically just hint at below, suggests that most all citizens are in fact owned. I do not know the reliablity of the information.

Quick summary: When any citizen of the U.S. is born, and a Certificate of Live Birth registered, and from which a Birth Certificate is issued (copy), an entry is made on some U.S. corporate account balance sheet somewhere.

I spent some time today reading about this, it is not something that can be understood by me quickly. It looks like one could spend considerable time investigating it even if one is inclined and familiar with legal research.

2. Is the Birth Certificate itself, originally prepared in the county of birth, a contract giving the state control over all aspects of the individual represented thereon?

Again the answer is NO. A birth certificate is not a contract and has no value in and of itself except as evidence that a Certificate of Live Birth does exist. That Certificate is on file in the official records in Washington, D.C. and stands as incontrovertible evidence that there is a living, breathing man or woman whose existence has been registered with the state and with certain federal agencies. Records of foreign born are on file with a Certificate of Naturalization, Citizenship or other document authorizing their residence here. Public agencies designate the name on the document as a "person." The value placed on the Certificate of Live Birth is based on the ability of the "state" to tax the future assets of that "Debtor." A bond is taken out by the Department of the Treasury and a bond # is stamped on the back of the Certificate of Live Birth. Printouts of some Individual Master Files (IMF) reveal that bond to be about $650,000. One IRS Master File I saw lists an IRS Treasury Bond in the amount of $742,500 that the individual requester knew nothing about. However, all the profit generated by this investment between the birth and the death of the living, breathing man or woman is kept by the "state."
...
Over the past number of years I have had contact with those who have stated they have received proof from Department of Commerce documents that their Certificates of Live Birth are being used as commercial instruments. A detailed investigation by Carl Erickson has revealed some startling facts in this regard.

When the Application and Certificate of Live Birth arrives at the Department of the Treasury in Washington, D.C. the Certificate is bonded, an account is set up with what we know as the Social Security Number, funds are borrowed. The paper credit is invested in stocks and bonds. According to the Bureau of Engraving even Federal Reserve Notes are printed bearing the Bond Number that is assigned to and stamped on the back of each Certificate of Live Birth. The Bond Number consists of a letter (A-N0 followed by eight numbers. A similar combination is now routinely printed on the back of Social Security Cards. The fact is that the very existence of every living, breathing man or woman in the several states is bonded and used for the commercial activities of the United States (Corporate) now in receivership.

http://www.worldnewsstand.net/law/UCC.htm

There is much more information about this online for those interested in researching it.

If any of the above is true, it surely gives a practical rationale for promoting or evangelizing childbirth and growing the population.

[radwriter0555]

10. Back in the 70's I talked to then-still-alive relatives, old of course, who had owned

slaves on their tobacco and peanut and pig farm in North Carolina.

The cabins the slaves lived in were then used for curing tobacco and smokehouses...

It's not a history they were proud of, by any stretch of the imagination, but it's reality and one that we should never forget. It's important that we make sure it is never tolerated, anywhere, or that it is ever allowed to happen again.

[Sherman A1]

12. Agreed and Well Said.

I have been working on my family history for the last several years and have found slave owners in my past on one side of the family. Others include Irish Immigrants, a couple of Civil War deserters (from NC), a member of the Texas Klan in the 20's and 30's, a car thief, holdup man and most folks who just tried to eek out a living farming. It is fascinating to find out just what your family did in the past.

[Bucky]

32. To have a memory of "owning" a slave, they'd have to be 5 yrs old, say, so by 1970 they'd be 110.

You had relatives who were 110 years old in the 1970s? Not just one, but several? That's pretty amazing. You should value your genes.

[radwriter0555]

52. Not all the slaves left the properties they'd worked on. They didn't all just

get up and leave in 1865.

Many stayed on with the only families they'd ever known on one aspect or another; the terms and conditions changed from that point, as it were.

[gollygee]

13. It's a generational issue

people shouldn't think about it in terms of years, but in terms of generations.

[emcguffie]

14. Well, yes, my father knew his great-grandmother --

-- or she could have been his great-great grandmother, I'm not sure. No, she was not a slave. Yes, she probably owned slaves. She was an adult in the Civil War, and lived through Sherman's march to the sea. She was in Georgia.

And she told my father her story about the Yankees coming through and what they did. That first husband, however, the fellow that owned that house that they burned down, was not who I am descended from. I guess he must have been killed. She remarried an ex-Mississippi riverboat captain, and that is who I am descended from.

My father, who is also dead, said she "sat in a rocking chair smoking a corncob pipe and was a teetotaler who had a hot toddy every night," and all you had to do was mention the word "Yankee" to see her hit the ceiling. She lived to be 101 years old.

So yes, I think there must be lots of us who have spoken to someone who have spoken to ex-slaves. My father died way too young -- when he was 68, in an automobile accident, in 1991 -- and if he spoke to a slave owner, my goodness, he could have spoken to ex-slaves, couldn't he? He ought to be alive today, if he'd just put on HIS SEATBELT!

[ThomWV]

15. You Don't Have To Go That Far Back - Let Me Tell You A Story

I am 60 years old. When I was a child my family was centered around central South Carolina. I had and old aunt, Ellen, who's husband had left her with two children and a big old house, part of which she would use for years a a beauty Salon, and Mary. She raised the two children successfully with money she earned with the Salon, it was actually quite a success. Mary was the slave.

Mary was the oldest black woman on earth when I was a child. She was also the meanest. It was Mary who raised the children. She was stern, she was gruff, she was small, she was swift with the switch. I never once saw her in a good mood. Mary lived in a very small house at the back of my Aunt's property. She might have had 3 acres and the back half was all Mary's. Mary's shed of a home was there and so was her garden. Mary also had a mule.

Mary's parents had been slaves. The were owned by my Aunt's grandparents. Mary was born late in her parent's lives. When Lincoln freed them and the war ended they had no where to go, and maybe not even very much desire to go. The shed in which Mary was born and would become her home was their home. Her parents had worked the same garden she would work. They worked in the same house as Mary would work until she became too old to continue.

Mary worked in my aunts house from her childhood until she died. She had no education at all. She was paid but certainly not very much. If anyone were to tell me she had $100 on the day she died it would surprise me. Mary never married, she had no children.

So, ask me. Have I talked to a slave?

[BlueIris]

40. Wow. Great story. Well, I mean, fascinating.

That's just...something else.

[loyalsister]

50. Wow

This story manifests itself in pieces of our culture.
The white privilege many of us benefit from is why we should not forget.

[YankeyMCC]

17. Shockingly there was a case right here in a Blue NE State

I can't find the article right now but a few months ago there was a case here where some people from Saudi Arabia were keeping what were essentially indentured servants in slave like conditions in their home here in my home town. The servants could not leave the house, they were locked up I think in the basement every night. What papers they did have (passports and such) were taken away from them etc...

The husband and wife ended up being deported as they had some level of diplomatic immunity, I'm not sure what happened to their servants, I think they were deported as illegals.

Here's a piece refering to the story: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/11/19/the_modern_face_of_slavery/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+--+Op-ed+columns

[eallen]

21. Slavery was officially ended in Saudi Arabia in 1962.

In South Yemen in 1967, and in Oman in 1970. Officially, under pressure. Unofficially, is a different matter entirely. The US recently demoted Saudi Arabia from a Tier 2 to a Tier 3 nation, with regard to human trafficking, meaning that the government doesn't much try to stop the practice.

[Lex]

18. My grandfather remembers as a boy talking to Civil War veterans

at what passed for the general store in their town, where people would gather to play checkers and have a pop and trade stories. My grandfather's dad would take him along on their weekly trek to buy whatever was needed--my grandfather was probably 5 or 6 at the time, and these Civil War vets were very old men then, but fought as very young men. He remembers their stories and that some of them still had scars and wounds and one guy was missing a leg, another an eye.

So no, it wasn't that long ago.

[greiner3]

19. My Mom's grandmother was born in 1861;

While that doesn't quite fit in with your post, I see your point with networking to the past. My father worked in the VA and when he was first starting, he got to know a few Spanish War veterans. He also knew the oldest living Civil War bride. She married a veteran when he was late middle aged and she was young. The past is here in the present, if you know where to look.

[Blue_Tires]

20. i'm glad you brought this up

about 3 years ago, the Washington Post published some interviews that had been conducted with former slaves in the 1940s....they even had video clips of the conversations on the website (but for some reason i cannot find them now)

i highly recommend it to anyone that can find it

[BlooInBloo]

23. "Good whites" : Yes, but what have we done to you LATELY?

:rofl: Outta sight, outta mind.

[SoCalDem]

24. "Good Whites"??

:shrug:

[BlooInBloo]

25. Standard term - though admittedly I may ride it harder than is common.

[SoCalDem]

27. Well ..you still have me puzzled..

don't "get" how you got that from what I posted :shrug:

[BlooInBloo]

29. It was satire - a ficticious rejoinder from the, shall we say, "racially apathetic".

[ismnotwasm]

26. When I started in nursing

It was in nursing homes as a nurses assistant. I met several grown men and women who had been the children of slaves. More who had been the grandchildren of slaves. It's never been that far removed from my historical sense.

The whole history of slavery, not just slavery itself, but what it did after it was abolished is important to me. It was within MY lifetime---I'm only 46, segregation was a fact, blacks sat on back of buses, used separate drinking fountains, were denied certain jobs, admittance to schools, neighborhoods, were getting beat, jailed and lynched. Poverty was rampant, laws passed to break up black families.

Within my lifetime.
My dad told me about a billboard sign in a South Carolina town "N***** don't let the sun set down on you" This was in the 50's.

I was a little girl when Martin Luther King got shot. They played the news on TV in my classroom. I was part of the first school desegregation efforts. I remember race riots, the fustrations, the racial slurs that were part of everyday language, the white flight from neighborhoods.

Within my lifetime

No, it's not just hundreds of years in the past. How do you estimate the damage it caused? Not by a time line. Only by the results of the efforts who fought and bleed and cried and shouted to overcome. The fight- we call it racism today, so obviously continues. I refuse to put my head in the sand and pretend that it's all ok, that slavery was "back then" that it still doesn't effect the lives of people today.

And as other posters have pointed out, slavery is alive and well in other countries. It's a vicious horrid thing no matter what culture it belongs to.

[CatWoman]

28. ever see this? These interviews were conducted in the late 30's

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/wpa/wpahome.html

[JI7]

35. i just posted this, it's incredible

[Jade Fox]

45. Ya beat me to it!

I was going to respond to this thread with something about those interviews. Thanks for the link.

[kineneb]

30. songs from the Civil War

in line with other posts here-

My grandmother taught me Civil War songs she learned from her "uncles" (various older male relatives) as a child. They were Union soldiers who had come out west (Washington state) to end their days as farmers. She was born in 1905.

She also told me a story (not sure if it was true), that one of the uncles joined the Union Army because of his childhood experiences: growing up on a southern farm, he could not understand why the skin color of his playmates (obviously children of slaves) should make them different than him. Guess that is why grandma always taught me all people are equal. She was quite ahead of her times in a number of ways.

[JI7]

33. audio recordings of people who were slaves (shown on Nightline)

in 1999 Nightline did a piece on actual recordings of people who were slaves. i'm trying ot find links on it and i come up with some things but i'm trying to find the actual audio online.

here is one link if you want to buy it

http://www.films.com/id/11092/Found_Voices_The_Slave_Narratives.htm

looking for others which has more info. i remember when i first heard this. it's just amazing. i think just a year or 2 ago a woman died who was the last surviving wife of someone who fought in the civil war.

these things always amaze me.

here is another link i found on the audios of slaves. if anyone does enough research to put it into a thread of it's own, please do . it would make for an interesting discussion.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/wpa/wpahome.html

[JI7]

36. and it's not as if there was equal rights with the abolition of slavery

there was Jim Crow and even after civil rights laws were passed there still exists institutionalized racism and segregation.

[SoCalDem]

37. Exactly. The contrarians consider slavery "over" when Lincoln

signed the papers, and even if you go THAT far back, it's still just a generation away from many of us..not hundreds of years ago, like they love to say.

Add Jim Crow, and it's yesterday :( (metaphorically)

[demobrit]

38. There is slavery today,ie minimum wage, out saucing

Why do people say that slavery was in the past?
Slavery is alive and kicking today in many parts of the World.
Illegal aliens are exploited for low wages.They have to work several jobs,even then, they find it hard to support themselves and their families.
Outsourcing of work to third world countries is on the increase where the poor work in sweatshops for very low wages by western standards while the big corporations rake in the profits.

[KharmaTrain]

39. How About A Daughter Of A Slave...She Had Quite A Story, Too...

My father started practicing medicine in the 40's...he treated several ex-slaves during his residency at Cook County Hospital.

My story is of the "household help" we had growing up, the lady was the daughter of slaves...born around 1900 (we never knew her exact age, she never had a birth certificate) and worked for my family for 30 years. She came to Chicago as part of the mass migration of share-croppers during the 20's. She was the first black person I knew and at a very early age I was introduced to a lot of the fine things she had to offer...like a great love for Jazz & R & B, she made the best Pumpkin Pie (I still miss that every year) and was a great guide during the Civil Rights struggles...explaining to me what this was about and why she left her dirt poor town in Mississippi (Hattiesburg...why do I remember this??) and came north to escape both the poverty and the racism she faced...only to find much of the same up here. I vividly remember her coming in with a copy of the Chicago Daily Defender and I asked her why she read that as opposed to the Tribune, she would laugh and say "they don't cover news about invisible people".

When she passed away, around 1980, my mother and I went to her funeral...one of the only white faces in the church and we were welcomed like members of the family and heard many more stories about her early struggles and those of her parents and children. I always admired her for her strength of character and great sense of humor. She was very cynical of a lot of the civil rights leaders of the time, including Dr. King, as she felt protests and riots would lead to a backlash.

Those who grew up in the segregated South of the late part of the 19th century and early 20th faced as bad, if not worse, conditions than their parents did. Most grew up as sharecroppers on poor land with limited rights (many were prohibited from voting) and kept in a second-class world.

While remembering the evils of slavery are important, remembering what happened to their decendents is also important.

[HamdenRice]

41. Five of my eight great grandparents were slaves -- Pics

And three of my four grandparents were the children of ex-slaves, and I'm only in my mid 40s. Only my mother's mother was not the child of an ex-slave. So you are correct that slavery certainly isn't the ancient past for African Americans with roots in the South.

My father was from the south (Virginia) and all four of his grandparents, whom he knew as a child, were slaves. This is a picture of my grandmother on her farm in Virginia circa 1974. Both her mother and father were slaves:

?

My mother was from Brooklyn, of mixed American, West Indian and Irish background, and unfortunately, her grandmother grew up in an orphanage, so she didn't know much about her mother's people.

But her father (my grandfather) was the son of a runaway slave from Virginia and an immigrant mother from the Virgin Islands. I posted this before once, but here is my grandfather, son of a slave, circa 1974:

?t=1164551772

And here is a picture of my great grandfather, circa 1915, the runaway slave from Virginia, with his sons, including my grandfather:

?t=1164551413

[Katzenjammer]

42. Wonderful photos.

We should remember, too, that the people of the West Indies and the Caribbean generally are also descendents of enslaved African and aboriginal people.

[HamdenRice]

43. Yes, West Indian were slaves too, but ...

Thanks for the compliment!

West Indians were slaves too, but they were part of the British Empire, and Britain abolished slavery in the 1830s. Although a difference of 30 years is not so significant in the context of the last 180 years, they did have something of a head start.

Another difference is that the West Indies had few white people, and after abolition it became pretty clear that the only way to maintain any kind of agricultural production was to turn the plantations over to the ex slaves, who became small scale independent farmers, rather than sharecroppers. This is one reason that West Indians from several former British colonies tend to be entrepreneurial.

Needless to say there was no Klan and what segregation existed was in the cities and irrelevant to the vast majority of West Indian farmers.

The big issues after slavery in the British West Indies were when the freemen would get the vote and then when the islands would get independence or commonwealth status -- so different from the historical issues in the southern US.

[Katzenjammer]

44. Good points on the British-Caribbean head start

And a big contrast to, e.g., the US treatment of the people of Haiti -- still exploiting them viciously 200+ years after Toussaint L'Ouverture's fight for freedom.

[Recursion]

46. My dad is 58 and knew a former slave

The guy was very old when my dad was a kid; he was born during the war between the states but before emancipation was effected (I think it was after the proclomation, but that was theoretical until Sherman came through).

The guy's name was Manchild because women didn't give their children a "real" name until they knew whether they would get to keep them or not.

Makes you think.

[madokie]

47. to put it in perspective, my grandad fought in the civil war

he fought to free the slaves while his family had slaves. He is my HERO

[dollydew]

48. Outlawing Slavery was not the end of Oppression

My SO had a relative that was born in 1857 and died in 1977. She was born a slave and remembered the Civil War. She would gather all of the children around her and tell them what slavery was really like. So quickly we forget.

Re: the West Indies: I met a Jamaican who told me that Jamaica did not receive it's Independence from Britain until the late sixties. Not all of the West Indies were immediately freed from "The Tyranny of Empire" despite the outlawing of slavery. See Africa.


The Haitians freed themselves. They're still being punished for that to this day. Look at the murder, mayhem, and rape in Haiti. It was started, once again, by the U.S. and Europe (and their allies) working in concert. Why invade Haiti? Nobody was watching and nobody cared.

:grr:

[boolean]

49. Fuck slavery

What about just plain old segregation?




There are people alive NOW that went through that kind of shit.

[happydreams]

51. The stain has been cleaned.

The Civil War did that IMHO.

[political_outcast]

53. most americans have at least one recent slave ancestor

most of the colonists in north america in the 1600s were indentured servants from the British Isles. And many of them or most of them were sold at auction in chains once off the ship in north america. Because it happened so long ago, most americans living today have at least one ancestor who was sold at auction in chains in the american colonies.

Also, between 5 and 30% (depends on what confidence interval you use) of all white americans have at least one recent black ancestor, due to admixture rate between whites and blacks between 1600s and today.

So, when you talk about slavery, be sure you include you and YOUR family tree, because unless you and your ancestors came to america recently, YOU have a slave in your recent family tree....

[SoCalDem]

54. Indentured servitude was different.

If one could "slip away" and get to another place, it was very possible to present yourself as just another immigrant,and to blend in.

Black people did not have that option. They had to worry that every person they met, might be the one who would capture them and return them to slavery, and they had few if any freed people in their families who were in a position to take them in.

[political_outcast]

55. quibbles!

When you get knocked over the head or kangaroo-courted for begging or homelessness, and then you get dragged aboard a white guineaman ship along with 100 other "indentured servants," and then once you get to america, stripped naked, sold in chains at auction, THAT is slavery.

And when your owners CALL you a slave, thass BIG OL' CLUE, too.

It's all there in the books, iffn that's your thing. It is my thing. But it's not everyone's "thing." So here is a nice documentary for you to watch:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2179287111477800737&q=white+slavery+in+colonial+america&hl=en

another copy here:
http://www.archive.org/details/HomoSapiensAmericanusPart2WhiteSlaveryInColonialAmerica

I don't know who made that documentary, but they got the facts right.
Of course, some people want to keep the populace divided up, the better to rule, and hiding the real truth of white and black slavery in america is a good way to do that.

But that's not my thing.

[HamdenRice]

59. You should learn a little more history

The most important difference between indentured servitude and slavery should be obvious: i.s. was a contract that lasted for a set period of time, after which the former servant was free to try to get land and work for himself; a slave was a slave for life and so were his children and descendants, for ever. That's a big difference isn't it?

At the very beginning of the Virginia colony, both Africans and Europeans had limited contracts, but very early on, Africans' servitude began to lengthen and quickly became for life, while courts prevented Europeans' servitudes from extending past the contract deadline.

Also the dragooning you describe was more likely to occur to sailors and soldiers, not servants. The conditions on board ships for servants cannot be compared to the conditions suffered by slaves on slavers, who were considered cargo, not passengers.

Sorry, but there is no comparison, whatsoever.

[political_outcast]

61. I guess you didn't watch the video

such an impatient society!

[HamdenRice]

62. No need to

I am responding to your posts. Your posts equate slavery and indentured servitude, which is preposterous on its face. No historian of colonial America would support such an assertion for the reasons I stated above. There was no comparison in conditions or terms of service.

I did read some of the text and the author makes some fundamental mistakes. For example, it is true that indentured servants called their employers "masters", but until the late 1800s, the employment was called "master and servant" even for free men.

[political_outcast]

63. I guess it's true about what they say

you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

[political_outcast]

56. Do you think that the "liberal" focus on race defers universal healthcare

and do you think it pushes away from leftism the American white majority because they feel like they are being punished for something they never did?

Can these social issues ever be resolved?

Is the energy of the "left" in America being frittered away on unsolvable issues like race guilt when they could be used to promote populist economics issues like progressive taxation and universal healthcare, which would help unite the working classes of America instead of dividing them?

[HamdenRice]

60. You've got it backwards: White racism prevents white workers

from understanding their own class interests. White people will vote against universal health care, the social safety net, progressive income taxes, and virtually any other law or program that benefits themselves, so long as conservatives can characterize it as somehow helping minorities.

I'll never forget living in Boston in the mid 1970s when a California style property tax "revolt" was on the ballots. Slick advertisements characterized it as a way of limiting municipal budgets and thereby getting people off welfare, even though it was basically a pro landlord measure.

The racist white tenant class of Boston voted overwhelmingly against their own interests in favor of lowered property taxes and in the next days public transit shut down because it instantly ran out of money.

That's the stupidity of racism at work.

[noonwitch]

64. Some of us may have spoken to an ex-slave (born before the 1970)

there were still a few very old people who had been slaves alive in the 50s and 60s.

I remember watching/reading "The Autobiography Of Miss Jane Pitman" when I was a kid in the 70s, and she lived into the civil rights era (and was over 100 years old when she died-she was a child/teen when slavery was ended.