Skip to main content
Tag

Slavery

Anita Belle

Poll: Most Americans oppose reparations for slavery

By Reparations

By Corey Williams and Noreen Nasir — DETROIT (AP) — Few Americans are in favor of giving reparations to descendants of enslaved black people in the United States, a new poll shows, even as the idea has gained momentum among Democratic presidential contenders. Only 29% of Americans say the government should pay cash reparations, according to the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. But the poll reveals a large…

Read More
Students at Concord Middle School study the abolitionist movement from a local perspective with artifacts provided by the Concord Museum.

Americans show spotty knowledge about the history of slavery but acknowledge its enduring effects

By News & Current Affairs, Reparations

By Emily Guskin, Scott Clement and Joe Heim, The Washington Post — Americans have spotty knowledge of central facts about the history of slavery in the United States, although younger adults have an edge over their elders, according to a Washington Post-SSRS poll. Even so, a solid majority say the legacy of slavery affects American society today, including majorities across racial, partisan and generational lines. The Post-SSRS poll quizzed a random…

Read More
A slave auction in the South is depicted in a sketch circa 1861 by Theodore R. Davis.

It was the nation’s largest auction of enslaved people.

By Reparations

Now, a search for descendants of the ‘weeping time.’ Historians Henry Louis Gates Jr. and James Swanson are writing a new account of the notorious 1859 auction of 429 slaves and searching for descendants. By Michael E. Ruane, The Washington Post — It poured rain at the Georgia racetrack that Wednesday and Thursday, and the wind blew water into the covered grandstand where the merchandise was gathered for auction. Many…

Read More
Prime Minister Gaston Browne

Prime Minister Gaston Browne on Western Banking, Colonialism and Reparations

By Reparations

Address by Prime Minister Gaston Browne during the Caribbean Reparations Commission Regional Symposium on Western Banking, Colonialism and Reparations, October 10, 2019. I bring no special expertise or unique perspective to the issue of reparations. However, I am here primarily to signify my personal commitment to the fight to achieve reparatory justice. Approximately five years ago, on October 14, 2014, at the second regional conference on reparations, held at…

Read More
The Freedman. Artist: John Quincy Adams Ward. 1863

The Sexual Assault and Exploitation of Enslaved Men in America

By Reparations

By Thomas A. Foster, History News Network — Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men by Thomas A. Foster. Reprinted with permission from The University of Georgia Press. The promise of freedom may also have been used to entice enslaved men into sexual contact with white women. In eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, one court record of punishment meted out to a white woman and an enslaved man for…

Read More
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History

400 years later, America still has so much to learn about its racial history

By Editors' Choice

By Lonnie Bunch, The Washington Post — In his influential treatise on race, “The Fire Next Time,” James Baldwin wrote, “To accept one’s past — one’s history — is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.” Baldwin’s words…

Read More