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Never Forget Part 2

Part 1: We Came Before Columbus
Part 2 : Were the economic benefits to Europeans of owning African-Americans as chattel property? The returns must have been enormous. We see companies today traveling around the world seeking the most slave-like conditions they can find. Whether it’s 23-cents-an-hour in Haiti or a dollar-a-day in Malaysia, by buying labor so low and selling the output so high multinational corporations like Nike and Disney are market phenomena and widely admired in the financial communities. So if paying low wages is good, then paying no wages is better. The combination of stolen land and stolen labor at the coming industrial age made the United States( in those early years) the greatest ground-floor opportunity of all time, a ground floor that was constructed and financed by the labor of Africans.
The Middle Passage

“The period of the 1500’s and 1600’s came after a thousand years of great independent states in West Africa,” said Professor Henrik Clarke. “After the Moslem Africans lost control over Spain, they began to prey on the Africans further to the south. They destroyed the -great independent states of West Africa, and subsequently set Africa up for the Western
Slave Trade.”
As any other nationalities, when Africans were brought to this hemisphere, they came carrying their many languages and their learning. But unlike any other nationality, everything else was taken from them, and they were delivered physically and psychologically decimated and naked on these shores. Those that survived the 240 years of the Middle Passage (1619-1859) found themselves now Africans-in-America, held captive by a people who viewed them as property enough to be bought and sold, but human enough to be raped.

Forbidden their own languages, the Africans began to use local words to identify objects and their environment. They standardized on the local language, whether it was French, Portuguese or English. For the Africans, this learning process had to be done in an atmosphere of terror, where killings and beatings were only a glance away. As the centuries passed, and as American slavery centered more in the southern United States, many Africans escaped into the north or joined others in the tribes of the indigenous people.

Communities were formed from the Seminoles of Florida to the Brooklyn, NY districts of Weeksville and Vinegar Hill.
Escapees Organize in the North Escapees to the north found each other and worked together to build their communities from the dirt ground up.
By the 1800’s, the Africans had positioned themselves to build schools and large churches. In the pamphlet “Weeksville Then and Now,” authors Joan Maynard and Gwen Cottman show the importance of learning and self-help to the Africans. The pamphlet has a replica of “The Freedmen’s Torchlight”, a community newspaper published by the African Civilization Society, which was housed in its own building on the comer of Dean Street and Troy Avenue in Brooklyn, NY. Dated December 1866, a year after the Civil War ended, “It included stirring statements of its philosophy of Black self-help, information on the Freedmen’s schools, featured moral anecdotes and listings of their contributors. The front page was devoted to the Alphabets, Basic English, Arithmetic, Geography and view of the nature of God and Man. In this way, the newspaper also served as a textbook for the newly freed slaves to learn reading and writing.” “Some organizations prior to and during the development of Weeksville were the New York Society for Mutual Relief, founded in 1808; the African Woolmen Society, founded in 1810; the Brooklyn African Tompkins Society, founded circa 1827; and the Weeksville Assistance Society, circa 1854. A chapter of the Prince Hall Free and Accepted Masons started in Brooklyn with the formation of Widows Sons Lodge, No. II in 1849.” And then there were the churches. “Brooklyn’s first Black church, the Bridge Street African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church, was incorporated in 1818. Along with Siloam Presbyterian, founded in 1849, these churches were terminals on the slave escape route called “the Underground Rail-
road”.

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“Education for Black children in Brooklyn grew from the independent efforts of Black religious leaders such as Peter Croger, who had a school in his home in 1815. And in 1819, William M. Read, a graduate of the New York African Free School, was teaching Black children in segregated settings. However by 1827, even these quarters were denied. By 1840, some Manhattan Black folks who had settled in Carsville, just south of Weeksville, had established another African school.” While this community building was going on in Brooklyn, legal slavery was the reality for the vast majority of Africans in the United States. Because it was against the law to teach Africans to read and write (and the penalty for doing so could be death), this learning had to be done in secret places by an exhausted people who had been worked hard in the fields from sunup to sundown. And it was by candlelight that the English language was learned.
More generations of social isolation passed and some of those Africans who remained captured in the South were being called upon to perform more and more responsible tasks on the plantations and in the manufacturing areas. They were used as expert farmers, builders and craftspeople. Brooklyn’s Professor William Mackey noted that the furnishings of
Thomas Jefferson’s mansion were made by slaves. “The house itself was built by them.” Many masters were breeding their personal slaves themselves. Fathering mulatto children who were raised with their white children and often educated with them as well.


Slavery as Big Business

The buying and selling of human beings during the American Slave Trade was the biggest business the world has
ever known. In a text on the period, H. A. Texler writes in Slavery in Missouri, 1805-1865, “The slave trade was partly
systematic, partly casual. For local sales, every public auctioneer handled slaves along with other property, and in each
city there were brokers buying them to sell again or handling them on commission. One of these at New Orleans in
1854 was Thomas Foster, who advertised that he would pay the highest prices for sound Negroes as well as sell those
whom merchants or private citizens might consign him. Expecting to receive Negroes throughout the season, he said
he would have a constant stock of mechanics, domestics and field hands; and in addition, he would house as many as
three hundred slaves at a time, for such as were importing them from other states. Similarly, Clark and Grubb, of
Whitehall Street in Atlanta, when advertising their business as wholesale grocers, commission merchants and Negro
brokers, announced that they kept slaves of all classes constantly on hand and were paying the highest market prices
for all that might be offered.” More money was invested in slaves than all stock-in-trade, including bank stock,
incorporated funds and more. This is indicative of the value placed on an unpaid labor pool and with good
reason.


The land was virgin territory that had to be worked and built upon. It was the slave workforce that released
the value of the land and made it income-producing. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the first estimate
of national wealth of the United States is found in Economica: A Statistical Manual for the United States of America,
1806 edition by Samuel Blodget, Jr. (See Table 1) Of the $2,505 million dollars ($2.5 billion) of national wealth,
$1,661 million was in land stolen from the indigenous people, and $200 million was the value assigned to the slaves.
Blodget writes, “Slaves are rated too high till they are better managed, everything else is below the mark.” The
Historical Statistics of the United States notes that, “No statement is made by Blodget as to the source material
underlying his tabulations.” And Mr. Blodget, by going out of his way to degrade the worth of the slaves, is telling
us he may have something to hide, so we checked his figures.

Taking the census of 1800 and averaging it with the 1810 census (not available to Mr. Blodget), we find him
pretty accurate, and arrive at a slightly higher figure of 1,042,732 slaves. Mr. Blodget may himself have extrapolated
from the 1800 census. In any event, knowing how much difficulty the Census Bureau had counting the descendants
of the slave population in 1990, we can guess that these census figures are “below the mark.”
Secondly, we turn to American Negro Slavery: A survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro
Labor As Determined by the Plantation Regime by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (1966 p. 370), and find this: “The
accompanying chart (see below) will show the fluctuations of the average prices of prime field hands (unskilled
young men) in Virginia, at Charleston, in middle Georgia and at New Orleans, as well as the contemporary range of
average prices for cotton of middling grade in the chief American market, that of New York. The range for prime
slaves, it will be seen, rose from about $300 and $400 a head in the upper and lower South, respectively in 1795 to a
range of from $400 to $600 in 1803…” By using these figures we find that the minimum amount of money invested
in slaves was $521,366,000 in 1805. Therefore, the total national wealth could be more accurately calculated as $2.8
billion dollars ($2,826,366,000), adding an additional $300 million to Blodget’s figure. This means that 77% of the
total national wealth of the United States of 1805 ($2,182,366,000) was based on holding African-Americans as
property to work the stolen land.

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