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Here you will find reparation news, articles and media posts

‘Freeing a Slave from the Slave Stick Jamaica’ circa 1876. From the International Mission

How slaveholders in the Caribbean maintained control

By Reparations

By Christer Petley, Edited by Nigel Warburton, Aeona — It is no surprise that the whip is synonymous with New World slavery: its continual crack remained an audible threat to enslaved workers to keep at their work, reminding them that their lives and bodies were not their own, and that they should maintain (outwardly at least) a demeanour of dutiful subordination to their overlords. The whip was a cruel and effective instrument…

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The Imperial Prison Farm Cemetery has 31 marked graves of inmates and guards dating 1912-1943.

A Fate Worse Than Slavery, Unearthed in Sugar Land

By Reparations

Bodies of sugar cane workers recently discovered in Texas reveal gruesome details about the convict leasing system. By Brent Staples, The New York Times — The blood-drenched history that gave the city of Sugar Land, Tex., its name showed its face earlier this year, when a school construction crew discovered the remains of 95 African-Americans whose unmarked graves date back more than a century. The dead — some of whom may have…

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Aerial view of Victoria Park

St Vincent: Reparations Committee calls for renaming of various areas

By Reparations

(CMC) – The St Vincent and the Grenadines Reparations Committee (SVGRC) is calling on the government to re-name the Victoria Park “with a name more befitting and independence country” as the nation celebrates its 39th year of political independence from Britain on Saturday. “Our history is replete with outstanding statesmen, women and symbols from which we can choose,” the Committee said, noting that it is mindful of the fact that ever…

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Denmark Vesey House at 56 Bull Street in Charleston, South Carolina.

Slavery and Memory in Charleston, South Carolina

By Reparations

By Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, AAIHS — The familiar refrain after the Emmanuel AME massacre on June 17, 2015, was that Dylann Roof, the murderer, was not from “here.” But as Ethan Kytle and Blain Roberts’ Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy aptly demonstrates, Roof’s understanding of history and memory in Charleston led him to that church; and his understanding was not alien to the sometimes violently, oft-contested memory of slavery in the…

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Sketch of a flag used by the rebel slaves

Two hundred years since the heroic Barbados slave rebellion

By Reparations

By Christian Høgsbjerg, The Socialist Worker — April 2016 marks the centenary of the Easter Rising in Dublin, a heroic uprising against the British Empire in its oldest colonial territory. But this month also marks the bicentenary of an earlier and less well known heroic “Easter rising” against the brutality of imperial domination in another longstanding British colony. This took place in Barbados in 1816, where it has come to…

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19th Century illustration of British massacres in India

An empire bathed in blood: when Britannia ruled the waves

By Reparations

In a desperate bid to head off a Scottish Yes vote, David Cameron evoked a mythical British Empire that had given democracy to the poor and freedom to the slaves. Here Ken Olende looks back at what life was really like when Britannia ruled the waves. By The Socialist Worker — The British Empire was the largest ever known. It covered a quarter of the world’s land mass and ruled…

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Engraving of the women pirates Ann Bonny and Mary Read by Benjamin Cole, circa 1724

Motley mutinies, popular pirates and slave revolts at sea

By Reparations

Historian Marcus Rediker spoke to Ken Olende about the struggles that took place aboard the ships of early capitalism. By The Socialist Worker — The first strike wasn’t in a factory or an office. It wasn’t even on land. US historian Marcus Rediker explains how sailors in England fought against a wage cut in 1768. “They went from ship to ship and took down the sails. That’s called striking the sails….

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