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Slavery

Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal

Missouri senator calls for reparations for slavery, criticizes McCaskill, Democrats

By News & Current Affairs, Reparations

By Allison Kite — Concerned about the plight of black people in her Missouri district, a Democratic state senator on Tuesday called for reparations for former slaves and criticized her own party for taking African American votes for granted. Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal, D-University City, criticized white Democrats, such as U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, saying there’s “no difference” between them and Republicans. Both parties, she said, have failed black people. “Neither…

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Slave ship diagram, first printed as a broadside in England in 1789

The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism

By Reparations

What is euphemistically referred to as “modernity” is marked with the indelible stain of what might be termed the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism, with the bloody process of human bondage as the driving and animating force of this abject horror. By Gerald Horne — The years between 1603 and 1714 were perhaps the most decisive in English history. At the onset of the seventeenth…

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Advertisement for a fugitive slave in the Oppenheim (New York, 1824)

A Database of Fugitive Slave Ads Reveals Thousands of Untold Resistance Stories

By News & Current Affairs, Reparations

Freedom on the Move from Cornell University is the first major digital database of fugitive slave ads from North America. By Allison Meier — Readers of the May 24, 1796 Pennsylvania Gazette found an advertisement offering ten dollars to any person who would apprehend Oney Judge, an enslaved woman who had fled from President George Washington’s Virginia plantation, Mount Vernon. The notice described her in detail as a “light mulatto girl, much freckled, with very…

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Cotton and Slaves

How the West Got Rich and Modern Capitalism Was Born

By Reparations

Slavery did not die because it was unproductive or unprofitable, as some earlier historians have argued. Slavery was not some feudal remnant on the way to extinction. By Sven Beckert — By 1830, one million Americans, most of them enslaved, grew cotton. Raw cotton was the most important export of the United States, at the center of America’s financial flows and emerging modern business practices, and at the core of…

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Slave on slave ships

What the Koch Brothers Want Students to Learn About Slavery

By Reparations

The history-teaching wing of the Koch brothers empire is seeking to promote an alternate narrative to slavery. By Adam Sanchez, Zinn Education Project — Given that the billionaire Charles Koch has poured millions of dollars into eliminating the minimum wage and paid sick leave for workers, and that in 2015 he had the gall to compare his ultra-conservative mission to the anti-slavery movement, he’s probably the last person you’d want educating young people about slavery.

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Woman stands in the doorway of then new Historic Colored Entrance at the Lyric Theatre, in Birmingham, Ala

Why Jews should support reparations for slavery

By Commentaries/Opinions, Reparations

By Rabbi Sharon Brous — There is 2,000-year-old rabbinic dispute over what ought to be done if a palace is built on the foundation of a stolen beam. One rabbi, Shammai, argues that the whole structure must be torn down, the beam retrieved and returned to its rightful owner. No home can flourish on a foundation built illegally and immorally. Another rabbi, Hillel, offers a different take: What sense does it make to demolish it? Let the thief pay for the beam, considering its full value as the foundation of what is now a beautiful home. Neither argues that you can pretend, year after year, generation after generation, that the beam wasn’t stolen.

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