- Mar 11, 2015
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Many people can tell us about one sentence King spoke which they purposefully distort. But let's look at a statement he made shortly before he was murdered.
"At the very same time that America refused to give the Negro any land, through an act of Congress our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor."
"But not only did they give them land, they built land grant colleges with government money to teach them how to farm. Not only that, they provided county agents to further their expertise in farming. Not only that, they provided low interest rates in order that they could mechanize their farms."
"Not only that, today many of these people are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies not to farm, and they are the very people telling the black man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. And this is what we are faced with, and this is the reality."
"Now, when we come to Washington in this campaign, we are coming to get our check."
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There With You-The True Martin Luther King, Jr., I May Not Get There With You
Let's take apart this comment to hopefully get a better understanding.
"At the very same time that America refused to give the Negro any land, through an act of Congress our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor."
There was a series of acts beginning in 1850 that primarily provided whites with one of the greatest government economic assistance programs ever. They were called the Homestead Acts. These acts gave over one million Americans land basically for free as an incentive to move west.
“And be it further enacted, That to all white male citizens of the United States or persons who shall have made a declaration of intention to become such, above the age of twenty-one years, emigrating to and settling in said Territory between the first day of December, eighteen hundred and fifty, and the first day of December, eighteen hundred and fifty-three; and to all white male citizens, not hereinbefore provided for, becoming one and twenty years of age, in said Territory, and settling there between the times last aforesaid, who shall in other respects comply with the foregoing section and the provisions of this law, there shall be, and hereby is, granted the quantity of one quarter section, or one hundred and sixty acres of land, if a single man; or if married, or if he shall become married within one year after becoming twenty-one years of age as aforesaid, the quantity of one half section, or three hundred and twenty acres, one half to the husband and the other half to the wife in her own right, to be designated by the surveyor-general as aforesaid: Provided always, That no person shall ever receive a patent for more than one donation of land in said Territory in his or her own right: Provided, That no mineral lands shall be located or granted under the provisions of this act.”
The Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, Section 5
This act gave FREE land to whites to settle in what is now Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and parts of Wyoming and Montana. This land was given away from 1850 until 1854. In 1854 the government decided to charge 1.25 per acre. The law expired in 1855. Also, several government programs were created to help whites in this westward expansion.
The Homestead Acts began more than one decade before the end of slavery. This alone should provide evidence of the limited benefit this act had for blacks in America. The overturning of Field Order 15 by President Andrew Johnson also reduced the positive effect such land grants would have provided for blacks. The 1863 Homestead Act provided that a person had to be a citizen to qualify and blacks were not given citizenship until 1866. But the major impediment for blacks concerning homesteading was the lack of documentation. This lack of documentation was due to slavery. Many of the newly freed slaves did not have the documents needed to prove their identity, such as birth certificates. Blacks were able to get the documentation after registering for citizenship once freed, but that documentation was not considered proof by whites.
After a lifetime of slavery, it should be noted that many freed blacks did not have complete knowledge of the law. Because it was illegal for blacks to read or write, it should not be surprising that many blacks did not have the documents needed or the ability to write wills to pass down land ownership to succeeding generations. This inability to provide documents proving identity made it hard for newly freed slaves to gain ownership of land and many other things. The disingenuous argument is made declaring how blacks could homestead, but that argument will not recognize or mention the impediments blacks faced to do so. These impediments limited blacks, yet it did not stop them. In a lot of cases white violence did.
After slavery there was a short reconstruction period than a time called "The Great Nadir," or the second slavery. This was a period that lasted until the Civil Rights Act in 1965. Dr. Carol Anderson out what happened in great detail in her book, “White Rage.”
Dr. Anderson chronicles the many methods whites used in the years after slavery to restrict the right for blacks to move around freely in America. Whites in the south used any means necessary to discourage blacks from moving north. In the north whites terrorized blacks competing for jobs with better pay as well as those trying to live in majority white neighborhoods. According to Andersons research, “at the time of emancipation 80 percent of Americas GNP was tied to slavery.” This comment refers to the entire nation of America, not just the south. As shown earlier, slaves were the most valuable commodity in America, the net worth of slaves surpassed all cash in America and assets in the south. Again, blacks got none of the money. As a result of emancipation, in January of 1865, Special Field Order 15 was issued.
In July 1865, Circular 13 was issued by General Howard fully authorizing the lease of 40 acres plots of land to the newly freed slaves. As a result of these actions 40,000 former slaves began work on their own land. But President Andrew Johnson killed these two orders and his doing so removed those 40,000 blacks from that land while destroying any income they could make. He gave the land back to whites. Johnson pardoned most of the confederate leaders which allowed them to regain power. By doing this, Johnson unleashed a reign of terror on blacks that really was nothing short of attempted ethnic cleansing. Blacks were beaten, scalped, killed, set on fire with their bodies left in the streets to rot. These atrocities were documented by a representative from the Johnson administration. State to state this man endured the unbearable stench as he looked at piles of dead black bodies decomposing all around him.
"But not only did they give them land, they built land grant colleges with government money to teach them how to farm. Not only that, they provided county agents to further their expertise in farming. Not only that, they provided low interest rates in order that they could mechanize their farms."
For those who do not understand the reality of how the past extends into today, I present you with the Morrill Act of 1862. Early American society was based on agriculture. By the mid-1800s, the U.S. population was more than 80 percent rural. So as Dr. King so eloquently described, the government saw the need to provide education and services to assist whites moving west to help them survive on the free land the government provided. Because of that, the United States Congress passed the Morrill Act of 1862, better known as the Land Grant Act. The act gave each state 30,000 acres of land per senator that was to be used to provide education in agriculture, home economics, mechanical arts, or any other profession available during that time in America. They used the grants of land to build colleges, thus Land Grant colleges are one result of the Morrill Act.
Needless to say, blacks were not allowed to attend many Morrill Act institutions. To combat this, the U.S Congress came up with the Agricultural College Act of 1890, (26 Stat. 417, 7 U.S.C. § 321 et seq.) or easier remembered as the Morrill Act of 1890. Signed on August 30, 1890, the Second Morrill Act made it so that black Americans could be admitted into Land Grant Colleges. States having separate colleges for blacks and whites were required to create colleges to train black students in agriculture, mechanical arts, architecture, and other professions of the time just like whites. This law created some of the Americas legendary HBCU’S, but until desegregation became the law, black land grant colleges were not equally funded. These land grants established white economic advancement and as Dr. King said, they established an economic floor for the European immigrants that entered America. At the same time, blacks were freed from slavery, and that economic floor was ripped out from under them thanks to President Andrew Johnson.
On April 16, 1895, the United States Supreme Court rendered another one of the sorriest decisions in American history. It is known as Plessy vs. Ferguson. From this decision came the principle of separate but equal. This decision was steeped in racism because it determined that blacks were not worthy to be in the same facilities and that racial segregation was fine just as long as equal facilities existed for blacks. So while whites believed blacks were inferior, they were supposed to make certain that blacks and whites had equal facilities even if the races were to stay apart. States made certain to enforce the separate part, but the equal never came. Not for blacks. For whites though, it was an entirely different story. Black public facilities were often cheaply built and blacks schools were underfunded. Black communities lacked amenities white communities had.
This policy was supposed to have ended with the Brown decision in 1954, but states used methods to circumvent the law and continued separate but equal into the 1980's and in fact in some places today.
"Not only that, today many of these people are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies not to farm, and they are the very people telling the black man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. And this is what we are faced with, and this is the reality."
I live in a rural state with families still living on free homestead land while getting government farm and other subsidies. Most of them are republican and deeply conservative. They are the first to lecture people about the sins of government handouts while receiving thousands apeice every month not to farm or not to farm part of their land.
"Now, when we come to Washington in this campaign, we are coming to get our check."
Before King was killed he saw that the matter of economic equality had not been achieved. He was in the process of demanding some kind of economic assistance for blacks. Today when the issue of reparations for blacks is mentioned we hear all the counter arguments and anger, then get told about how we ain't going to pay. There is always the why should we pay for the past. That argument fails for a couple of reasons:
1.The federal income tax has existed in some form since the Civil War. However some say it started in 1913. So from 1913 until at least blacks paid taxes for programs and services we were basically excluded from. These programs built the modern prosperity we live in now.
Wall Street was constructed and grew from the labor of slaves.
“By a conservative estimate, in 1860 the total value of American slaves was $4 billion, far more than the gold and silver then circulating nationally ($228.3 million, “most of it in the North,” the authors add), total currency ($435.4 million), and even the value of the South’s total farmland ($1.92 billion). Slaves were, to slavers, worth more than everything else they could imagine combined.”
Ned & Constance Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry
During slavery, more specifically during the 19th century, wealthy slaveowners looking for a way to get additional capital to buy more slaves came up with an idea- slave backed securities. Your eyes are not playing tricks on you. Slaveowners securitized slavery. Cornell professors Edward E. Baptist and Louis Hyman detailed how it was done in an article published by the Chicago Sun-Times on its website dated March 7, 2014. This is from the article:
In the 1830s, powerful Southern slaveowners wanted to import capital into their states so they could buy more slaves. They came up with a new, two-part idea: mortgaging slaves; and then turning the mortgages into bonds that could be marketed all over the world.
First, American planters organized new banks, usually in new states like Mississippi and Louisiana. Drawing up lists of slaves for collateral, the planters then mortgaged them to the banks they had created, enabling themselves to buy additional slaves to expand cotton production. To provide capital for those loans, the banks sold bonds to investors from around the globe — London, New York, Amsterdam, Paris. The bond buyers, many of whom lived in countries where slavery was illegal, didn’t own individual slaves — just bonds backed by their value. Planters’ mortgage payments paid the interest and the principle on these bond payments. Enslaved human beings had been, in modern financial lingo, “securitized.”
As slave-backed mortgages became paper bonds, everybody profited — except, obviously, enslaved African Americans whose forced labor repaid owners’ mortgages. But investors owed a piece of slave-earned income. Older slave states such as Maryland and Virginia sold slaves to the new cotton states, at securitization-inflated prices, resulting in slave asset bubble. Cotton factor firms like the now-defunct Lehman Brothers — founded in Alabama — became wildly successful. Lehman moved to Wall Street, and for all these firms, every transaction in slave-earned money flowing in and out of the U.S. earned Wall Street firms a fee.
The infant American financial industry nourished itself on profits taken from financing slave traders, cotton brokers and underwriting slave-backed bonds. But though slavery ended in 1865, in the years after the Civil War, black entrepreneurs would find themselves excluded from a financial system originally built on their bodies.
Edward E. Baptist and Louis Hyman, American Finance Grew on the Back of Slaves
2. Last, to repost information I have posted here before:
Since 2000, U.S. gross domestic product lost that much as a result of discriminatory practices in a range of areas, including in education and access to business loans, according to a new study by Citigroup. Specifically, the study came up with $16 trillion in lost GDP by noting four key racial gaps between African Americans and whites:
$13 trillion lost in potential business revenue because of discriminatory lending to African American entrepreneurs, with an estimated 6.1 million jobs not generated as a result
$2.7 trillion in income lost because of disparities in wages suffered by African Americans
$218 billion lost over the past two decades because of discrimination in providing housing credit
And $90 billion to $113 billion in lifetime income lost from discrimination in accessing higher education
"At the very same time that America refused to give the Negro any land, through an act of Congress our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor."
"But not only did they give them land, they built land grant colleges with government money to teach them how to farm. Not only that, they provided county agents to further their expertise in farming. Not only that, they provided low interest rates in order that they could mechanize their farms."
"Not only that, today many of these people are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies not to farm, and they are the very people telling the black man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. And this is what we are faced with, and this is the reality."
"Now, when we come to Washington in this campaign, we are coming to get our check."
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There With You-The True Martin Luther King, Jr., I May Not Get There With You
Let's take apart this comment to hopefully get a better understanding.
"At the very same time that America refused to give the Negro any land, through an act of Congress our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor."
There was a series of acts beginning in 1850 that primarily provided whites with one of the greatest government economic assistance programs ever. They were called the Homestead Acts. These acts gave over one million Americans land basically for free as an incentive to move west.
“And be it further enacted, That to all white male citizens of the United States or persons who shall have made a declaration of intention to become such, above the age of twenty-one years, emigrating to and settling in said Territory between the first day of December, eighteen hundred and fifty, and the first day of December, eighteen hundred and fifty-three; and to all white male citizens, not hereinbefore provided for, becoming one and twenty years of age, in said Territory, and settling there between the times last aforesaid, who shall in other respects comply with the foregoing section and the provisions of this law, there shall be, and hereby is, granted the quantity of one quarter section, or one hundred and sixty acres of land, if a single man; or if married, or if he shall become married within one year after becoming twenty-one years of age as aforesaid, the quantity of one half section, or three hundred and twenty acres, one half to the husband and the other half to the wife in her own right, to be designated by the surveyor-general as aforesaid: Provided always, That no person shall ever receive a patent for more than one donation of land in said Territory in his or her own right: Provided, That no mineral lands shall be located or granted under the provisions of this act.”
The Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, Section 5
This act gave FREE land to whites to settle in what is now Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and parts of Wyoming and Montana. This land was given away from 1850 until 1854. In 1854 the government decided to charge 1.25 per acre. The law expired in 1855. Also, several government programs were created to help whites in this westward expansion.
The Homestead Acts began more than one decade before the end of slavery. This alone should provide evidence of the limited benefit this act had for blacks in America. The overturning of Field Order 15 by President Andrew Johnson also reduced the positive effect such land grants would have provided for blacks. The 1863 Homestead Act provided that a person had to be a citizen to qualify and blacks were not given citizenship until 1866. But the major impediment for blacks concerning homesteading was the lack of documentation. This lack of documentation was due to slavery. Many of the newly freed slaves did not have the documents needed to prove their identity, such as birth certificates. Blacks were able to get the documentation after registering for citizenship once freed, but that documentation was not considered proof by whites.
After a lifetime of slavery, it should be noted that many freed blacks did not have complete knowledge of the law. Because it was illegal for blacks to read or write, it should not be surprising that many blacks did not have the documents needed or the ability to write wills to pass down land ownership to succeeding generations. This inability to provide documents proving identity made it hard for newly freed slaves to gain ownership of land and many other things. The disingenuous argument is made declaring how blacks could homestead, but that argument will not recognize or mention the impediments blacks faced to do so. These impediments limited blacks, yet it did not stop them. In a lot of cases white violence did.
After slavery there was a short reconstruction period than a time called "The Great Nadir," or the second slavery. This was a period that lasted until the Civil Rights Act in 1965. Dr. Carol Anderson out what happened in great detail in her book, “White Rage.”
Dr. Anderson chronicles the many methods whites used in the years after slavery to restrict the right for blacks to move around freely in America. Whites in the south used any means necessary to discourage blacks from moving north. In the north whites terrorized blacks competing for jobs with better pay as well as those trying to live in majority white neighborhoods. According to Andersons research, “at the time of emancipation 80 percent of Americas GNP was tied to slavery.” This comment refers to the entire nation of America, not just the south. As shown earlier, slaves were the most valuable commodity in America, the net worth of slaves surpassed all cash in America and assets in the south. Again, blacks got none of the money. As a result of emancipation, in January of 1865, Special Field Order 15 was issued.
In July 1865, Circular 13 was issued by General Howard fully authorizing the lease of 40 acres plots of land to the newly freed slaves. As a result of these actions 40,000 former slaves began work on their own land. But President Andrew Johnson killed these two orders and his doing so removed those 40,000 blacks from that land while destroying any income they could make. He gave the land back to whites. Johnson pardoned most of the confederate leaders which allowed them to regain power. By doing this, Johnson unleashed a reign of terror on blacks that really was nothing short of attempted ethnic cleansing. Blacks were beaten, scalped, killed, set on fire with their bodies left in the streets to rot. These atrocities were documented by a representative from the Johnson administration. State to state this man endured the unbearable stench as he looked at piles of dead black bodies decomposing all around him.
"But not only did they give them land, they built land grant colleges with government money to teach them how to farm. Not only that, they provided county agents to further their expertise in farming. Not only that, they provided low interest rates in order that they could mechanize their farms."
For those who do not understand the reality of how the past extends into today, I present you with the Morrill Act of 1862. Early American society was based on agriculture. By the mid-1800s, the U.S. population was more than 80 percent rural. So as Dr. King so eloquently described, the government saw the need to provide education and services to assist whites moving west to help them survive on the free land the government provided. Because of that, the United States Congress passed the Morrill Act of 1862, better known as the Land Grant Act. The act gave each state 30,000 acres of land per senator that was to be used to provide education in agriculture, home economics, mechanical arts, or any other profession available during that time in America. They used the grants of land to build colleges, thus Land Grant colleges are one result of the Morrill Act.
Needless to say, blacks were not allowed to attend many Morrill Act institutions. To combat this, the U.S Congress came up with the Agricultural College Act of 1890, (26 Stat. 417, 7 U.S.C. § 321 et seq.) or easier remembered as the Morrill Act of 1890. Signed on August 30, 1890, the Second Morrill Act made it so that black Americans could be admitted into Land Grant Colleges. States having separate colleges for blacks and whites were required to create colleges to train black students in agriculture, mechanical arts, architecture, and other professions of the time just like whites. This law created some of the Americas legendary HBCU’S, but until desegregation became the law, black land grant colleges were not equally funded. These land grants established white economic advancement and as Dr. King said, they established an economic floor for the European immigrants that entered America. At the same time, blacks were freed from slavery, and that economic floor was ripped out from under them thanks to President Andrew Johnson.
On April 16, 1895, the United States Supreme Court rendered another one of the sorriest decisions in American history. It is known as Plessy vs. Ferguson. From this decision came the principle of separate but equal. This decision was steeped in racism because it determined that blacks were not worthy to be in the same facilities and that racial segregation was fine just as long as equal facilities existed for blacks. So while whites believed blacks were inferior, they were supposed to make certain that blacks and whites had equal facilities even if the races were to stay apart. States made certain to enforce the separate part, but the equal never came. Not for blacks. For whites though, it was an entirely different story. Black public facilities were often cheaply built and blacks schools were underfunded. Black communities lacked amenities white communities had.
This policy was supposed to have ended with the Brown decision in 1954, but states used methods to circumvent the law and continued separate but equal into the 1980's and in fact in some places today.
"Not only that, today many of these people are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies not to farm, and they are the very people telling the black man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. And this is what we are faced with, and this is the reality."
I live in a rural state with families still living on free homestead land while getting government farm and other subsidies. Most of them are republican and deeply conservative. They are the first to lecture people about the sins of government handouts while receiving thousands apeice every month not to farm or not to farm part of their land.
"Now, when we come to Washington in this campaign, we are coming to get our check."
Before King was killed he saw that the matter of economic equality had not been achieved. He was in the process of demanding some kind of economic assistance for blacks. Today when the issue of reparations for blacks is mentioned we hear all the counter arguments and anger, then get told about how we ain't going to pay. There is always the why should we pay for the past. That argument fails for a couple of reasons:
1.The federal income tax has existed in some form since the Civil War. However some say it started in 1913. So from 1913 until at least blacks paid taxes for programs and services we were basically excluded from. These programs built the modern prosperity we live in now.
Wall Street was constructed and grew from the labor of slaves.
“By a conservative estimate, in 1860 the total value of American slaves was $4 billion, far more than the gold and silver then circulating nationally ($228.3 million, “most of it in the North,” the authors add), total currency ($435.4 million), and even the value of the South’s total farmland ($1.92 billion). Slaves were, to slavers, worth more than everything else they could imagine combined.”
Ned & Constance Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry
During slavery, more specifically during the 19th century, wealthy slaveowners looking for a way to get additional capital to buy more slaves came up with an idea- slave backed securities. Your eyes are not playing tricks on you. Slaveowners securitized slavery. Cornell professors Edward E. Baptist and Louis Hyman detailed how it was done in an article published by the Chicago Sun-Times on its website dated March 7, 2014. This is from the article:
In the 1830s, powerful Southern slaveowners wanted to import capital into their states so they could buy more slaves. They came up with a new, two-part idea: mortgaging slaves; and then turning the mortgages into bonds that could be marketed all over the world.
First, American planters organized new banks, usually in new states like Mississippi and Louisiana. Drawing up lists of slaves for collateral, the planters then mortgaged them to the banks they had created, enabling themselves to buy additional slaves to expand cotton production. To provide capital for those loans, the banks sold bonds to investors from around the globe — London, New York, Amsterdam, Paris. The bond buyers, many of whom lived in countries where slavery was illegal, didn’t own individual slaves — just bonds backed by their value. Planters’ mortgage payments paid the interest and the principle on these bond payments. Enslaved human beings had been, in modern financial lingo, “securitized.”
As slave-backed mortgages became paper bonds, everybody profited — except, obviously, enslaved African Americans whose forced labor repaid owners’ mortgages. But investors owed a piece of slave-earned income. Older slave states such as Maryland and Virginia sold slaves to the new cotton states, at securitization-inflated prices, resulting in slave asset bubble. Cotton factor firms like the now-defunct Lehman Brothers — founded in Alabama — became wildly successful. Lehman moved to Wall Street, and for all these firms, every transaction in slave-earned money flowing in and out of the U.S. earned Wall Street firms a fee.
The infant American financial industry nourished itself on profits taken from financing slave traders, cotton brokers and underwriting slave-backed bonds. But though slavery ended in 1865, in the years after the Civil War, black entrepreneurs would find themselves excluded from a financial system originally built on their bodies.
Edward E. Baptist and Louis Hyman, American Finance Grew on the Back of Slaves
2. Last, to repost information I have posted here before:
Since 2000, U.S. gross domestic product lost that much as a result of discriminatory practices in a range of areas, including in education and access to business loans, according to a new study by Citigroup. Specifically, the study came up with $16 trillion in lost GDP by noting four key racial gaps between African Americans and whites:
$13 trillion lost in potential business revenue because of discriminatory lending to African American entrepreneurs, with an estimated 6.1 million jobs not generated as a result
$2.7 trillion in income lost because of disparities in wages suffered by African Americans
$218 billion lost over the past two decades because of discrimination in providing housing credit
And $90 billion to $113 billion in lifetime income lost from discrimination in accessing higher education
