Her ancestry is less relevant than her own personal historyHamilton Brown was a Caucasian....Irish, Jamaica plantation and slave owner.
Kamala's father claims that family lore for his black Jamaican grandmother, is that she is a descendant of Hamilton Brown....the slave owner...
If this is true, Kamala's great times two or three grandmother was a black slave of Hamilton Brown's..... many white slave owners raped the slaves they owned, especially slave owners like Hamilton Brown, who loved and defended slavery.
Did U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris' Ancestor Own Slaves in Jamaica?
Based on an article written by the 2020 presidential Democratic primary candidate's father, right-leaning opponents dove head-first into an ill-judged attack on her.www.snopes.com
Hamilton Brown
The slave owner at the heart of this controversy died in Jamaica on Sept. 18, 1843, “in the sixty-eighth year of his age.” His headstone is located in St. Mark’s Anglican (Church of England) cemetery in Brown’s Town and establishes that he was born, likely in 1776, in County Antrim, in what is now Northern Ireland.
According to one contemporary news article, he died after he was “thrown from his gig” in a horse-and-carriage accident. Another contemporary news report indicated he first immigrated to Jamaica in or around 1795. According to a National Library of Jamaica entry, Brown “started out humbly as an estate book-keeper and rose to become a large landowner.” He was the founder of Brown’s Town in St. Ann’s parish, which he represented in the colonial House of Assembly for 22 years.
He also owned many slaves. According to one document, held by the U.K. National Archives, Brown owned at least 121 slaves in 1826, comprising 74 females and 47 males. In 1817, he owned at least 124 slaves, made up of 74 females and 50 males. According to records held by the “Legacies of British Slave-Ownership” project at University College London (UCL), Brown was at various times the owner, manager, or executor of several dozen plantations and estates on the island of Jamaica.
Brown was also a steadfast slavery apologist. In contributions to the colonial House of Assembly, he opposed efforts, emanating from mainland Britain (where slavery was by then widely opposed), to “interfere” in the slave trade in Jamaica. In one 1823 speech, he lashed out at the “hypocrisy” and “cloven foot” of William Wilberforce, a British M.P. widely regarded as the hero of the anti-slavery abolitionist movement.
In 1832, a Methodist missionary named Henry Whiteley spent three months in Jamaica, touring the island and inspecting the conditions of life for slaves, and the practices of colonial settlers and slave owners, including Brown. In a pamphlet published the following year, Whiteley recalled that he and Brown discussed the concept of “amelioration” — a gradualist approach to slavery in the 1820s and 1830s which, as distinct from the outright prohibition and extinction of slavery that characterized abolitionism, instead proposed making slavery more humane and tolerable. Brown was opposed even to this, according to Whiteley:
… I was rather startled to hear that Gentleman [Brown] swear by his Maker that [amelioration] should never be adopted in Jamaica; nor would the planters of Jamaica, he said, permit the interference of the Home [London] Government with their slaves in any shape. A great deal was said by him and others present about the happiness and comfort enjoyed by the slaves, and of the many advantages possessed by them of which the poor in England were destitute.
Among other circumstances mentioned in proof of this, Mr. Robinson, a wharfinger [wharf owner], stated that a slave in that town had sent out printed cards to invite a party of his negro acquaintance to a supper party. One of these cards was handed to Mr. Hamilton Brown, who said he would present it to the Governor [imperial viceroy of Jamaica] as proof of the comfortable condition of the slave population.
Notwithstanding that dinner party, the conditions suffered by slaves in Jamaica were far from “comfortable,” and Whiteley’s pamphlet went on to document, in disturbing detail, the punishments meted out to slaves by their owners, which he personally witnessed and described in some cases as “inhumanly severe.”
Whiteley saw slaves, some girls as young as 12 years old, flogged between 40 and 50 times with a horse whip, for supposed misconduct as trivial as over-sleeping or not meeting their assigned work targets. In one case, a man was whipped 39 times despite not having committed any discernible “offense” — rather, one planter had him flogged as a method of petty revenge against the slave’s owner, for some unspecified sleight. Whiteley’s findings about the conditions of life for slaves in Jamaica could not have been further from the outlandish claims made by Brown and his fellow colonial settlers.
Uncertain links
We discovered ample evidence of Brown’s slave ownership and his political and business career on the island of Jamaica. However, details about his immediate family are lacking, by comparison. With the generous and expert assistance of Rachel Lang, a researcher at University College London’s “Legacies of British Slave-Ownership” project, we have managed to piece together the following facts:
A “Hamilton Brown Jnr.” (likely the Antrim slave owner) had a daughter named Mary Melvina Brown, born to an unnamed woman, and baptised on June 4, 1839. The father’s residence was listed as Grier Park (an estate Brown once owned), and the father’s occupation was listed as “Planter.”
Mary Melvina later married a different Hamilton Brown. By him, she gave birth to several children, including Mabel Melvina (born 1879, died 1935); Edwin Hamilton (born 1877, died 1932); and Gilbert Charles Clement (born 1875, died 1948). (In these baptism records, Mary Melvina’s last name and maiden name are both listed as Brown, which makes it highly likely she is the Mary Melvina born to Hamilton Brown in 1839).
We have not yet found a record of a Christiana Brown being born to Mary Melvina Brown.
BLM will go after her over her slave-owning ancestry and her hellish work to imprison black Americans
