By Marisa Iati, The Washington Post — More than two decades after the Southern Baptist Convention — the country’s second-largest faith group — apologized to African Americans for its active defense of slavery in the 1800s, its flagship seminary on Wednesday released a stark report further delineating its ties to institutionalized racism. The year-long study by the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary found that all four founding faculty members owned slaves…
What a Danish slave trade castle in Accra revealed about Ghana’s history and my family. By Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann, Hampshire College — As a Ghanaian archaeologist, I have been conducting research at Christiansborg Castle in Accra, Ghana. A UNESCO World Heritage site, the castle is a former seventeenth century trading post, colonial Danish and British seat of government, and Office of the President of the Republic of Ghana. Today,…
The Danish government has officially apologized to Ghanaians for their country’s role in the dark history of slave trade in the then Gold Coast where millions of Africans were shipped…
We are profoundly thankful to Danny Glover for his support of the work of the Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW) and the National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC). As a tireless advocate for the U.N. Decade for People of African Descent and reparatory justice, Danny Glover has been with IBW every step of the way in our successful effort to intensify the U.S. and global reparations movements. We urgently need your support to continue this vital work.
Reparative justice, whereby communities are compensated for losses caused by the slavery or the Holocaust, is morally fair. By Julian Baggini, The Guardian — Justice requires a good memory, one that is both accurate and not self-servingly selective. But whether it is well-served by a long memory is more contentious. We know that many still pay the price for sins previous generations never paid for. But most agree with the…
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…