Reparations, the democrat leadership's big freaken lie!

[johnwk]

With all the talk about “fake news” these days, confirmation of fake news is easily found in hundreds of media outlets which continue to condemn the wrong actors for the existence of slavery in the United States. For example, Cory Booker, said “It is a cancer on the soul of our country.” While Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee alleged “The role of the federal government in supporting the institution of slavery . . . must be formally acknowledged and addressed.”


But what these liars refuse to acknowledge is, slavery was first introduced on America soil in the early 1600s when a number of slaves were brought to Jamestown, Virginia, a British colony. And millions more were introduced long before the establishment of the United States. In fact, in their quest to promote a fraudulent collective responsibility upon the good people of the United States, flimflam artists like Cory Booker, Sheila Jackson Lee, actor Danny Glover and other hustlers fail to acknowledge that after the Revolutionary War and the good people of America gained their independence from foreign domination [the real culprit of slavery on American soil] the people within a number of the states, exercising their newly found freedom, immediately moved to share the blessings of liberty to all by abolishing slavery!


For example, the people of Vermont took this immediate action in their 1777 declaration of rights, which declared "no ... person born in this country, or brought here over sea, ought to be holden by law to serve any person as a servant, slave, or apprentice". Likewise, the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 declared that "all men are born free and equal" and was used by the court a few years after its adoption to legally forbid any person to be held as a slave. And, in 1787, the Northwest Ordinance, adopted by the Confederation Congress on July 13, 1787, declared "there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said Territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."


By the year 1788 all the states north of Maryland, except New York and New Jersey, had legislated to extinguish slavery, and by 1804 the remaining two northern states [N.Y. and N.J.] had put slavery to rest.


The truth is, the injustice of slavery was not an injustice inflicted or perpetrated by the government of the United States. Quite the contrary! Upon the creation of the United States government, as witnessed by Article 1, Sec. 2, Clause 3, of the Constitution of the United States, an aversion to slavery was expressed by a specific penalty imposed upon those states having state sponsored slavery. Unfortunately, the constitutional penalty for state-sponsored slavery has been distorted and mischaracterized over the years by race baiters and hustlers who claim the provision "made blacks three-fifths of a person.". But a review of the actual words of Article 1, Sec. 2, clause 3, reveals slave holding states were penalized by this provision which denied them full representation in Congress in proportion to their actual population size---the population of slaves not being fully counted when apportioning representatives among the states, which diminished the voting strength of slave holding states in Congress Assembled!


And then there’s Article 1, Section 9 of our original Constitution by which slavery was intended to be taxed into extinction by the federal government.


”The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.”


So, as it turns out, contrary to Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s false assertion about the “… role of the federal government in supporting the institution of slavery . . .” its real role, from the very beginning, was working to abolish slavery. This is not to say that Africans did not suffer dearly under slavery. They did! But to point a finger at the wrong actors, and ignore how the good people of the United States worked from the very beginning of the United States to end slavery, is to perpetuated and instigate a nefarious cause ___ race baiting and hustling for political gain.


JWK


The Democrat Party Leadership has been angry, stupid and obnoxious ever since the Republican Party Leadership freed democrat owned slaves.___ Author unknown

[jimmyb]

I was born a poor white guy.That isn't fair so where are my reparations?

[consteacher1]

'She-Jack' is a cancer on the soul of this country. Heck, every peoples group on the planet, at one time or another, has been forced into slavery. So, you get a car and you get a car and ....diversion from the real problems of this country like foreign invasion, race relations, infrastructure and the beat goes on. prep and pray, the end has arrived.

[Pastor Guest]

If any group should bear responsibility for slavery and pay reparations it is the Democrat party.

[CaryC]

While I oppose reparations in any form, the above article makes it appear that it's those dastardly Southerners who are the real bad guys, and should be the ones on the hook.

So the article below is to oppose the Yankee Moral high ground that is presented in the article. Neither do I support slavery, or human trafficking in form or fashion, then or now.

INTRODUCTION

African slavery is so much the outstanding feature of the South, in the unthinking view of it, that people often forget there had been slaves in all the old colonies. Slaves were auctioned openly in the Market House of Philadelphia; in the shadow of Congregational churches in Rhode Island; in Boston taverns and warehouses; and weekly, sometimes daily, in Merchant's Coffee House of New York. Such Northern heroes of the American Revolution as John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin bought, sold, and owned black people. William Henry Seward, Lincoln's anti-slavery Secretary of State during the Civil War, born in 1801, grew up in Orange County, New York, in a slave-owning family and amid neighbors who owned slaves if they could afford them. The family of Abraham Lincoln himself, when it lived in Pennsylvania in colonial times, owned slaves.[1]


When the minutemen marched off to face the redcoats at Lexington in 1775, the wives, boys and old men they left behind in Framingham took up axes, clubs, and pitchforks and barred themselves in their homes because of a widespread, and widely credited, rumor that the local slaves planned to rise up and massacre the white inhabitants while the militia was away.[2]


African bondage in the colonies north of the Mason-Dixon Line has left a legacy in the economics of modern America and in the racial attitudes of the U.S. working class. Yet comparatively little is written about the 200-year history of Northern slavery. Robert Steinfeld's deservedly praised "The Invention of Free Labor" (1991) states, "By 1804 slavery had been abolished throughout New England," ignoring the 1800 census, which shows 1,488 slaves in New England. Recent archaeological discoveries of slave quarters or cemeteries in Philadelphia and New York City sometimes are written up in newspaper headlines as though they were exhibits of evidence in a case not yet settled (e.g. "African Burial Ground Proves Northern Slavery," The City Sun, Feb. 24, 1993).


I had written one book on Pennsylvania history and was starting a second before I learned that William Penn had been a slaveowner. The historian Joanne Pope Melish, who has written a perceptive book on race relations in ante-bellum New England, recalls how it was possible to read American history textbooks at the high school level and never know that there was such a thing as a slave north of the Mason-Dixon Line:

"In Connecticut in the 1950s, when I was growing up, the only slavery discussed in my history textbook was southern; New Englanders had marched south to end slavery. It was in Rhode Island, where I lived after 1964, that I first stumbled across an obscure reference to local slavery, but almost no one I asked knew anything about it. Members of the historical society did, but they assured me that slavery in Rhode Island had been brief and benign, involving only the best families, who behaved with genteel kindness. They pointed me in the direction of several antiquarian histories, which said about the same thing. Some of the people of color I met knew more."[3]

Slavery in the North never approached the numbers of the South. It was, numerically, a drop in the bucket compared to the South. But the South, comparatively, was itself a drop in the bucket of New World slavery. Roughly a million slaves were brought from Africa to the New World by the Spanish and Portuguese before the first handful reached Virginia. Some 500,000 slaves were brought to the United States (or the colonies it was built from) in the history of the slave trade, which is a mere fraction of the estimated 10 million Africans forced to the Americas during that period.

Every New World colony was, in some sense, a slave colony. French Canada, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Cuba, Brazil -- all of them made their start in an economic system built upon slavery based on race. In all of them, slavery enjoyed the service of the law and the sanction of religion. In all of them the master class had its moments of doubt, and the slaves plotted to escape or rebel.


Over time, slavery flourished in the Upper South and failed to do so in the North. But there were pockets of the North on the eve of the Revolution where slaves played key roles in the economic and social order: New York City and northern New Jersey, rural Pennsylvania, and the shipping towns of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Black populations in some places were much higher than they would be during the 19th century. More than 3,000 blacks lived in Rhode Island in 1748, amounting to 9.1 percent of the population; 4,600 blacks were in New Jersey in 1745, 7.5 percent of the population; and nearly 20,000 blacks lived in New York in 1771, 12.2 percent of the population.[4]


The North failed to develop large-scale agrarian slavery, such as later arose in the Deep South, but that had little to do with morality and much to do with climate and economy.

---

The elements which characterized Southern slavery in the 19th century, and which New England abolitionists claimed to view with abhorrence, all were present from an early date in the North. Practices such as the breeding of slaves like animals for market, or the crime of slave mothers killing their infants, testify that slavery's brutalizing force was at work in New England. Philadelphia brickmaker John Coats was just one of the Northern masters who kept his slave workers in iron collars with hackles. Newspaper advertisements in the North offer abundant evidence of slave families broken up by sales or inheritance. One Boston ad of 1732, for example, lists a 19-year-old woman and her 6-month-old infant, to be sold either "together or apart."[5] Advertisements for runaways in New York and Philadelphia newspapers sometimes mention suspicions that they had gone off to try to find wives who had been sold to distant purchasers.


Generally, however, as the numbers of slaves were fewer in the North than in the South, the controls and tactics were less severe. The Puritan influence in Massachusetts lent a particular character to slavery there and sometimes eased its severity. On the other hand, the paternal interest that 19th century Southern owners attempted to cultivate for their slaves was absent in the North, for the most part, and the colonies there had to resort to laws to prevent masters from simply turning their slaves out in the streets when the slaves grew old or infirm. And across the North an evident pattern emerges: the more slaves lived in a place, the wider the controls, and the more brutal the punishments for transgressions.

---

Slavery was still very much alive, and in some places even expanding, in the northern colonies of British North America in the generation before the American Revolution. The spirit of liberty in 1776 and the rhetoric of rebellion against tyranny made many Americans conscious of the hypocrisy of claiming natural human rights for themselves, while at the same time denying them to Africans. Nonetheless, most of the newly free states managed to postpone dealing with the issue of slavery, citing the emergency of the war with Britain.


That war, however, proved to be the real liberator of the northern slaves. Wherever it marched, the British army gave freedom to any slave who escaped within its lines. This was sound military policy: it disrupted the economic system that was sustaining the Revolution. Since the North saw much longer, and more extensive, incursions by British troops, its slave population drained away at a higher rate than the South's. At the same time, the governments in northern American states began to offer financial incentives to slaveowners who freed their black men, if the emancipated slaves then served in the state regiments fighting the British.


When the Northern states gave up the last remnants of legal slavery, in the generation after the Revolution, their motives were a mix of piety, morality, and ethics; fear of a growing black population; practical economics; and the fact that the Revolutionary War had broken the Northern slaveowners' power and drained off much of the slave population. An exception was New Jersey, where the slave population actually increased during the war. Slavery lingered there until the Civil War, with the state reporting 236 slaves in 1850 and 18 as late as 1860.


The business of emancipation in the North amounted to the simple matters of, 1. determining how to compensate slaveowners for the few slaves they had left, and, 2. making sure newly freed slaves would be marginalized economically and politically in their home communities, and that nothing in the state's constitution would encourage fugitive slaves from elsewhere to settle there.


But in the generally conservative, local process of emancipating a small number of Northern slaves, the Northern leadership turned its back on slavery as a national problem.

State	Mass.	N.H.	N.Y.	Conn.	R.I.	Pa.	N.J.	Vt.
European settlement	1620	1623	1624	1633	1636	1638	1620	1666
First record of slavery	1629?	1645	1626	1639	1652	1639	1626?	c.1760?
Official end of slavery	1783	1783	1799	1784	1784	1780	1804	1777
Actual end of slavery	1783	c.1845?	1827	1848	1842	c.1845?	1865	1777?
Percent black 1790	1.4%	0.6%	7.6%	2.3%	6.3%	2.4%	7.7%	0.3%
Percent black 1860	0.78%	0.15%	1.26%	1.87%	2.26%	1.95%	3.76%	0.22%

1. For Seward, see Doris Kearns Goodwin, "Team of Rivals" [Simon & Schuster, 2005], pp.30-31. For Lincoln: "RUN away on the 13th of September last from Abraham Lincoln of Springfield in the County of Chester, a Negro Man named Jack, about 30 Years of Age, low Stature, speaks little or no English, has a Scar by the Corner of one Eye, in the Form of a V, his Teeth notched, and the Top of one of his Fore Teeth broke; He had on when he went away an old Hat, a grey Jacket partly like a Sailor's Jacket. Whoever secures the said Negro and brings him to his Master, or to Mordecai Lincoln ... shall have Twenty Shillings Reward and reasonable Charges" [Pennsylvania Gazette, Oct. 15, 1730]. Mordecai Lincoln (1686-1736) was great-great-grandfather of President Lincoln.

2. Josiah H. Temple, History of Framingham, Massachusetts, Framingham, 1887, p.275.
3. Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and 'Race' in New England 1780-1860, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998, preface, page xiii.
4. Stanley L. Engerman, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright, "Slavery," in Susan B. Carter, Scott S. Gartner, Michael Haines, Alan Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright, eds., Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2004.
5. "Boston News Letter," May 1, 1732.

http://slavenorth.com/index.html

If one wishes they can follow the above link to see slavery broken down by state with links on the left. If anyone wants to oppose reparations, then oppose it, but don't make it sound like the north was innocent.

[Lenno]

[Green Man]

The distinction between the white slaves aka indentured servants and black slaves was irrelevant if the indentured servants died before completing their term of service. The children of the indentured were not technically slaves themselves but there's very little about them in the historical record.

So many of the indentured were able to escape to the frontier that it became way more practical to import black slaves who were easier to single out in areas of mostly white settlement.

It's no wonder that the areas settled by escapees from the indentureship situation are still suspicious of government.

[ractivist]

I'd say the democrat party and the muslims of the world should pay all reperations......make sure the Irish get their fair share as well....
Frickin joke, logistics, no way. Like disarming America, too late, no way. Both ideas are not feasible.

[lonewolfinoregon]

The US Gov't already did this..

They offered money and transportation back to Africa, which is how Liberia came into existance..

[CaryC]

How New York City became the capital of the Jim Crow North

www.washingtonpost.com

5 mins read
Racial injustice is not a regional sickness. It's a national cancer.


Eleanor Butler and her daughter Leonora, 6, are escorted by police after her arrest for loitering following a sit-in at the predominantly white elementary school in Lynbrook, N.Y., on Sept. 4, 1963. (Jack Kanthal/AP)
By Brian Purnell and
Jeanne Theoharis
August 23, 2017


Ninety years ago, Donald Trump’s father was arrested at a Klan parade — in Queens.

Fifty-five years ago, more than 10,000 white mothers marched over the Brooklyn Bridge to protest a very modest school desegregation program. Fifty years ago, 16,000 people packed into Madison Square Garden to cheer George Wallace’s candidacy for president.

And a mere three years ago, New York City settled a federal lawsuit that had branded the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices unconstitutional and a form of racial profiling.

The events in Charlottesville earlier this month have focused urgent public attention on the history of white nationalism and white supremacy in the South. But there is a danger that this necessary focus on the South will obscure the long and sordid history of racism in the North, where it often hides behind polite faces, coded language, arcane policies and venal law enforcement rather than torch-lit marches through the streets.

But that does not mean the racism of the Jim Crow North is less destructive, or its history is less important.

As in the South, that task of confronting historical racism will not happen only through the removal of metal sculptures. The first step is to understand the history of racism outside of the South, in the regions of the United States we call the Jim Crow North. Racial injustice was not a regional sickness.

It was a national cancer.

Jim Crow segregation and racism had a strange and robust career outside of the South, especially in that supposed bastion of liberalism, New York City.

Citizens at every level of New York society gave it life: journalists at national newspapers, wealthy suburban homeowners, working-class renters, university bureaucrats, police commissioners, mayors, union leaders and criminal court judges.

Many did so at the same time they condemned racism in the South. Indeed, one of the longest-standing facets of Northern racism and segregation was the constant deflection to the problems in the South. “Ultraliberal New York had more integration problems than Mississippi,” Malcolm X observed.

“The North’s liberals have been for so long pointing accusing fingers at the South and getting away with it that they have fits when they are exposed as the world’s worst hypocrites.”

Slavery arrived in New Amsterdam, the colony now home to Manhattan, in 1626. It remained intact during and after the American Revolution, when slaves still represented 20 percent of New York’s population. The state outlawed new racial slavery in 1799, but masters still had use of their slaves, and their children, for 28 more years.

Nor are the city’s hands clean when it comes to the Civil War. New York was a stronghold of abolitionism, but it also bred proslavery sentiments and anti-immigrant white nationalism.

The majority of city voters did not vote for Abraham Lincoln in 1860 (nor in 1864) because the city’s economy, its ports and its banks were wedded to slavery.

In July 1863 a bloody Civil War battle actually happened in New York City (although we rarely recognize it as an official battle in the war) when immigrant artisans rebelled against the Union Army’s mandatory draft.

They attacked draft offices, Republican newspapers and black people, killing random African Americans in the streets and even burning down the colored orphanage.

Nor did the end of the war and slavery bring racial reconciliation to New York. Just as Jim Crow segregation laws spread throughout the South in the 1890s and early 1900s, black people in New York suffered from written and unwritten rules against racial mixing in marriage, public accommodations and housing. Racial violence broke out in New York City over brutal encounters between black people and police officers in 1900, 1935 and 1943.

Not even the nation’s fight against the Nazis eliminated Jim Crow practices from New York City. When the city’s master builder, Robert Moses, expanded construction of housing, parks, playgrounds, highways and bridges in the decades following World War II, he adhered to ethnic composition rules for urban planning. This practice exacerbated the racial segregation that already existed in the city’s neighborhoods.

The Federal Housing Authority’s neighborhood rating system and city zoning policies meant that New York City schools and neighborhoods grew even more segregated after the war.

The building of Stuyvesant Town, a residential development in New York City, shows how both private decisions and public policy shaped the Jim Crow North. Made possible by the city’s use of eminent domain to clear the area, the reversion of public streets and land to private ownership and a 25-year tax abatement, Stuyvesant Town opened in 1947 completely racially segregated. (Moses, who had championed the project, had directly opposed inserting a provision into the city contract that would have opposed discrimination in tenant selection.)

When black people sued, the New York Supreme Court protected segregation and sided with the developer’s claim that the development was private — despite all the public money used to make it possible — and therefore entitled to discriminate as it sees fit.

With the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, black parents and civil rights activists thought desegregation would finally come to the city’s separate and unequal schools.

But city leaders, many white New Yorkers and the city’s newspapers repeatedly demurred. Schools superintendent William Jansen directly instructed his staff to refer to New York City’s segregated schools as “separate” or “racially imbalanced”: “The use of the word ‘segregation’ in releases is always unfortunate.”

After a decade of meetings, rallies and black parent organizing, on Feb. 3, 1964, over 460,000 students and teachers stayed out of school to protest the lack of a comprehensive desegregation plan for New York City schools — the largest civil rights demonstration of the era, far outstripping the March on Washington. But the city bowed to white parents’ pressure not to desegregate.

As that episode suggests, opposition to civil rights activism was fierce in New York. In 1964, a year before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, in a poll conducted by the New York Times, a majority of white people in New York City said the civil rights movement had gone too far. Respondents spoke of black people receiving “everything on a silver platter” and of “reverse discrimination” against whites. Nearly half said that picketing and demonstrations hurt black people’s cause.

Civil rights opponents in New York weren’t trumpeting segregation at the schoolhouse door. Rather they laid blame for black poverty, over-policing of black communities, educational disparities and black uprisings at the foot of black people’s “cultural deprivation,” not the histories of segregation and discrimination that had shaped this city’s political, economic and social life since the 17th century. Which makes it unsurprising that a sold-out audience cheered Alabama Gov. George Wallace at Madison Square Garden, when he campaigned in New York City in 1968.

More recently, New York City became a primary practitioner of the racially discriminatory policing practice called “stop, question and frisk.” Such tactics targeted nearly 4.5 million individuals for no reason other than the color of their skin and the neighborhood they were walking through. Only one word exists for that: racism.

When racism is portrayed only through spitting and screaming, tiki torches and vigilante violence, many people rest easy, believing they share little responsibility for its maintenance.

But systemic racial discrimination has long existed across the country and worked through multiple means: through language that disguised it, through government bureaucracy and the leveraging of political power and law enforcement that enabled it, and through arguments about cultural dysfunction that justified inequity and the need for punitive approaches.

Statues of Confederate soldiers and generals who rose up in rebellion against the United States need to come down. But when they do, we will still have to grapple with the history of racism in our country, especially in the Jim Crow North, where we have yet to recognize how deep our history of racial segregation is and yet to do the necessary work of removing its destructive practices and effects.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.46c8d9889256

Where as I disagree with some of the statements by the Washington Post, especially that of taking down "Statues of Confederate Soldiers", I thought the article showed that, in general, the finger is pointed in the direction of the South, where as Jim Crow laws, as well as slavery was also prominate in the North.

If they want to REALLY to that, then Gracie Mansion should top the list, Grandson of Archibald fought for the South and even served in one Battle as Lt. Gen N.B. Forrest's artillerist.