By The Daily Observer — In a surprising bit of news, we learned that the the University of the West Indies (UWI) will receive £200 million in cash and kind from…
Scotland should take responsibility for the major and highly lucrative role it played in the transatlantic slave trade. By Elliot Ross, Al Jazeera — The late Jamaican-British intellectual Stuart Hall liked…
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…
Image: A new statue (2015) of Frederick Douglass stands in Hornbake Plaza. Note: While most of us generally think about the profound activism and wisdom of Frederick Douglass being acknowledged…
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…
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…
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…
Universities in the UK which benefited in previous centuries from the slave trade should contribute to a £100m fund to support ethnic minority students, says a university leader. By Sean…
The Black Press USA is the Web site of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), an umbrella grouping of over 200 African-American newspapers spread across the USA. The NNPA has…
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…
“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…