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Slavery

Vice Chancellor of The University of the West Indies (UWI) Sir Hilary Beckles

Glasgow University To Pay Reparations For £200m Extracted From Region

By Reparations

The Jamaica Gleaner — Vice Chancellor of The University of the West Indies (UWI) Sir Hilary Beckles has reported that The University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom (UK) is planning to pay reparations for £200 million (approximately J$34 billion) taken from the Caribbean. According to Beckles, who recently returned from the UK, “The University of Glasgow has recognised that Jamaican slave owners had adopted the University of Glasgow as…

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‘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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John A. Madison, great-grandson of Dred Scott, points to his ancestor's unmarked grave.

The Real Origins of Birthright Citizenship

By News & Current Affairs

Its purpose 150 years ago was to incorporate former slaves into the nation. By Martha S. Jones, The Atlantic — Birthright citizenship just might be, former slaves believed, the safeguard they needed. In the decades before the Civil War, in an era when a remedy like the Fourteenth Amendment was hard to imagine, free black Americans embraced the view that they were citizens by virtue of having been born on…

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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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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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Jeremy Corbyn waves after making his inaugural speech at the Queen Elizabeth Centre in central London, Sept. 12, 2015.

Jeremy Corbyn Says UK Schools Should Teach Colonialism, Slavery History

By News & Current Affairs

“Let’s understand our history, let’s understand the brutality that went with it and let’s understand the immense bravery of people that spoke out,” said Corbyn. By TeleSur — Jeremy Corbyn has announced proposals to increase the amount of Black history taught in schools, along with the history of the British empire, colonialism, and slavery, which becomes much more important in light of the recent Windrush scandal. “Black history is British history, and…

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