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By Whitney Stewart, Black Perspectives — How do you make a family tree when you may not know your family history? Beyond the very real physical and emotional toll on enslaved individuals, slavery’s violence also lay in its determination to erase or prevent the creation of family histories. As Frederick Douglass asserted in his 1855 autobiography, “Genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves.” In other words, the constraints of slavery made assembling and representing…
After Republicans lost their first election in 1856, the nineteenth-century Nate Silvers were happy to declare the antislavery movement a radical, fringe idea. Four years later, Abraham Lincoln won on a radical program of change. By Matt Karp, Jacobin — In 1856, the new Republican Party ran its first candidate for President, the western explorer John C. Fremont. He was an unusual leader for an unusual party. The Republicans’ aggressive…
By Christine Buckley, UConn Today — Last month, Georgetown University’s undergraduate students voted in favor of a referendum to voluntarily charge each student a fee to be paid into a fund benefiting the descendants of enslaved people that the university sold to save itself from financial ruin in the 19th century. The move came in response to the university’s lack of action on the recommendation of its own Working Group…
By Jordan Brasher, The Conversation — The aroma of fried chicken and biscuits roused my appetite as the country sounds of Alison Krauss, Alan Jackson and Johnny Cash played over the loudspeakers. This might have been a county fair back home in Tennessee, but it wasn’t. I was in a cemetery in rural Brazil, at the “Festa Confederada” – the “Confederate Party” – an annual celebration of southern U.S. heritage held each April in Santa Bárbara…
By Melissa Nann Burke, The Detroit News — U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. introduced a bill in every Congress for nearly 30 years to study the institution of slavery and to recommend appropriate reparations. Few of his colleagues in the Democratic Party seemed to take him seriously. The bill had a hearing in 2007 and never moved out of committee. But reparations has become a recurrent topic in the Democratic…
By LaMont Jones, Diverse: Issues In Higher Education — It makes sense that African-American students at Princeton Theological Seminary have issued reparatory requests based on research tying much of the school’s current wealth to slavery, and it’s equally fitting that the school live up to its religious precepts in its response, according to some scholars. The Association of Black Seminarians (ABS) has proposed that the seminary commit at least 15…
Understanding what the conversation about reparations is, and isn’t, about. By Richard North Patterson, The Bulwark — In 2014, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote his seminal essay “The Case For Reparations.” Five years later we are talking about reparations again. This presents a fresh opportunity for Americans at large—liberals, conservatives and everyone of goodwill—to thoughtfully consider the ways in which systemic racial injustice has warped our social fabric. For the stark reality is that…
Lincoln signed a bill in 1862 that paid up to $300 for every enslaved person freed. By Tera W. Hunter, New York Times — On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill emancipating enslaved people in Washington, the end of a long struggle. But to ease slaveowners’ pain, the District of Columbia Emancipation Act paid those loyal to the Union up to $300 for every enslaved person freed. That’s right, slaveowners got…
By examining scientific papers, correspondence between naturalists, and the records of slaving companies, historians are now seeing new connections between science and slavery and piecing together just how deeply intertwined they were. By Sam Kean, Science Magazine — At the dawn of the 1700s, European science seemed poised to conquer all of nature. Isaac Newton had recently published his monumental theory of gravity. Telescopes were opening up the heavens to…
By Jordain Carney, The Hill — Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said on Monday that he will introduce legislation creating a commission to study the issue of granting reparations to African-Americans. “This bill is a way of addressing head-on the persistence of racism, white supremacy, and implicit racial bias in our country. It will bring together the best minds to study the issue and propose solutions that will finally begin to…
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