ALL RISE!!
This mornings lesson:
WHITE HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS AGAINST BLACKS DID NOT STOP AFTER SLAVERY
In fact, they continue right now.
“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
Slaves were worth more than the total currency plus all the farmland in the South combined yet did not receive a dime. As I write this America has 1.9 trillion dollars of total currency in circulation according to the federal reserve. In 1860 the total value of slaves was 17- and one-half times more than the money circulating in the economy. Giving todays amount of currency in circulation, the same equivalence in comparison to the value of slaves would make slaves worth 33,250,000,000,000 dollars. Remember that slaves were considered property. Because they were, the following activity could occur.
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
Dr. Carol Anderson in her book,
“White Rage”, 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. Blacks got none of the money. In January of 1865, Special Field Order 15 was issued.
"Sherman's Special Field Orders No. 15," in
The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Vol. 47, Part II (Washington: GPO, 1895), pp.60-62
5. General William T. Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15 · After Slavery: Educator Resources · Lowcountry Digital History Initiative
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.
“Circular #13
War Department Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. Washington July 28, 1865,” Source: National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 105, Entry 24, No. 139 Asst Adjutant General Circulars 1865-1869, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, pp. 14-15. (Transcribed from the original by John Soos, August, 2003)
As a result of this action 40,000 former slaves began work on several hundred thousand acres of land. 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. Johnson pardoned most of the confederate leaders and they regained their prior positions of state leadership. 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 who traveled the region and saw the carnage. He saw mutilated black women floating in rivers. He saw burned up Black men chained to trees. State to state this man witnessed the piles of dead black bodies decomposing all around him. But blacks were free, right?
After slavery, blacks were being killed by whites with no crimes charged while the Supreme Court basically repealed the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments with a series of rulings. Due the consistent state and federally protected barbaric acts by whites, southern blacks felt they had to go north. When blacks started moving north, southern business and government leaders enacted laws in order to stop free people from going where they could earn a decent living. But even under the threat of jail or death, millions of blacks headed north where they believe they'd be treated right. If they had known what was waiting up north, the migration would have ended in Canada.
As blacks went north they found that the only difference between a southern white and a northern one was geography. When blacks went north, so did lynchings. They are recorded as race riots, but that's disingenuous considering what happened. The reality is there were a series of massacres of blacks by whites in these years due to the northern migration of blacks trying to escape the conditions they had to endure in the south. Historians call what happened riots in the general “American” tradition of trying to reduce the seriousness of the atrocities. You can make your own determination on what to call the following events.
The May and July East St. Louis massacres in 1917 caused the estimated deaths of 250 African Americans. Another 6,000 blacks were left homeless. These were labor and race related as whites felt threatened by the blacks migrating from the south. The damage caused by the rioting and vandalism cost the equivalent of 7.9 million in todays dollars. These massacres are said to be some of the worst “race riots” in the history of America.
The Chicago massacre of 1919 was another conflict started by white Americans against blacks. It began on Chicago’s South Side and lasted approximately 1 week beginning on July 27, and ending on August 3, 1919. Thirty-eight people died, both black and white. Over 500 people were injured, the majority of which were black. An estimated 1,000 to 2,000 people lost their homes with the majority again being black. This was one of over 20 riots in what was called the
"Red Summer" of 1919 This massacre had it all, one full week of arson, looting and murder in what is considered one of the worst “race riots” in Illinois history.
The Omaha Race Riot occurred on September 28–29, 1919. One cause of this riot were whites feeling economic anxiety because of the increasing number of blacks escaping the south who were trying to find work. Weeks before this riot, federal investigators were warning that a conflict was imminent between black and white workers in Omaha. The animosity appears to have begun in 1917 when management at the stockyards hired blacks as strikebreakers. Nobody likes a strikebreaker, so add that to the reasons whites could give themselves for imposing violence on blacks. Once again, we see that it is the Irish who were the ringleaders in the oppression of blacks. As in Chicago, the Irish had established their power as they were the first immigrants in Omaha and used their political power to maintain an advantage.
Three things, property acquisition, economic anxiety and claims of black male sexual aggression, have been the general standard for white violence against blacks throughout American history. The lynching of Will Brown was started by reports in local media about the alleged rape of a 19-year-old woman named Agnes Loebeck on September 25, 1919. The following day the police arrested Brown. Loebeck identified Brown as the rapist but later reports by the Omaha Police and the Army show she did not make a positive identification. There was an attempt to lynch Brown on the day of his arrest, but it failed.
The
Omaha Bee publicized the incident with Loebeck as one of a series of alleged attacks on white women by black men. The
Bee was controlled by Thomas Rosewater who was a Dennison ally opposed to the administration of Mayor Edward Smith. These incidents were orchestrated by Dennison while Rosewaters paper highlighted the incidents of criminality to embarrass the new administration. “
After citizens finally elected a non-Dennison man, one Edward Parsons Smith, as mayor in 1918, Dennison henchmen were accused of putting on blackface, assaulting women, and then stirring up crowds, leading to the lynching of black man Will Brown and the near-lynching of Mayor Smith.” On the night of the lynching, Omaha Police even caught one of Dennisons men wearing blackface. Dennison nor any of his associates were charged or convicted for what they did. Will Brown was not so fortunate. Brown was lynched, shot up after he was dead, dragged through the streets of Omaha and set on fire. He had committed no crime.
On the evening of Saturday July 19th, 1919, in Washington D.C., a group of white veterans started a rumor about a black man suspected by the D.C, Police Department of sexually assaulting the wife of a white Navy man. This rumor spread like wildfire in the bars and restaurants in downtown Washington D.C. So later that night, a mob of mad white men headed to a predominantly black neighborhood carrying various types of weapons. Those veterans proceeded to beat all the blacks they found. They took blacks out of their cars or off sidewalks and beat them for no reason. Where were the police? I think they had donut shops back then, but I am not sure. The violence continued into Sunday because the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department failed to stop it. Blacks were getting beaten on the streets of Washington and even in front of the White House. This was a race massacre of blacks committed by whites in the capital of the United States.
White mob violence did not end in 1919. One of the worst acts of domestic terrorism in America happened in two days of American history beginning on May 31st, 1921 in Tulsa Oklahoma. This is better known as
“The Tulsa Massacre.” One may as well say this was an act of war waged on the black citizens of Tulsa Oklahoma by white citizens. I say this because not only were blacks attacked on the ground they were attacked by air. In a manner best described by the scene of Ben Richards being told to shoot the people during a food riot in “
The Running Man”, whites in private planes flew over the black community shooting down on blacks and firebombing black homes and businesses.
“I could see planes circling in mid-air. They grew in number and hummed, darted and dipped low. I could hear something like hail falling upon the top of my office building. Down East Archer, I saw the old Mid-Way hotel on fire, burning from its top, and then another and another and another building began to burn from their top,”
B.C. Franklin
The excuse by city law enforcement officials was that the planes were reconnaissance used to protect against a Negro uprising. Still today, an accurate accounting of the number of dead varies. More than 6,000 people were either admitted to hospitals or sent to other large facilities for care. More than 10,000 blacks were left homeless. The bombings and ground attacks destroyed 35 city blocks of Tulsa, resulting in damages that equaled over 32 million dollars in today’s money. None of the victims or their descendants have been compensated for this act of terror to this day. Pretty soon blacks in Tulsa will have to hear that sad, sorry song that starts with, “I was not alive then.”
In 1951 a black man named Harvey Clark and his family tried to move into the Cicero neighborhood of Chicago. A white mob vandalized his home and burned his furniture in the front yard. Aside from trying to force Clark out of his own home, the police did nothing. In first six months of 1955 there were 213 acts of violence against blacks by whites is Philadelphia. These were acts of terror committed to intimidate blacks so they would not move into white communities. In 1964 when blacks again tried renting an apartment in Cicero, their apartment was again vandalized. After the apartment was vandalized, police entered the apartment, took out the furniture and told the renters they had been evicted. At the same time in Detroit, there were over 200 acts of violence against blacks by whites to terrorize black families so they would not move to the suburbs. In Los Angeles during World War II, a entire black family was murdered when their home was bombed. For the first 5 years after WW2 in Chicago alone, there were 317 acts of terror by whites against blacks who tried living in or near majority white neighborhoods. From 1950-1965 there were over 100 bombings of black owned residences in Los Angeles. In 1987, another black family tried moving into Cicero. Whites responded with gunfire and firebombs.
This kind of terrorism has gone long ignored in understanding the brutality and long-lasting effects of such acts upon blacks in America. For decades prosperous blacks were terrorized while black communities were destroyed by mobs of angry whites who felt they were losing out because blacks had acquired the same things whites had. Ignored was the fact that blacks worked hard to get what they had, but that did not matter because blacks were to always be lesser than whites and the caste was to be created and maintained by any means necessary.
Blacks peacefully moved north to compete for same opportunities white immigrants had and this is just a small bit of what happened. White immigrants are the ones who committed the violence against blacks. White immigrants destroyed thriving black communities. The same white immigrants whose descendants will tell you today how they are not responsible because their ancestors did not own slaves.
“Again and again, African-American individuals and families have worked hard to produce wealth, but American finance, whether in the antebellum period or today, has snatched black wealth through bonds backed by asset securitization.”
Edward E. Baptist and Louis Hyman, American Finance Grew on the Back of Slaves
Edward E. Baptist and Louis Hyman,
American Finance Grew on the Back of Slaves, Chicago Sun-Times.com March 7, 2014, derived from:
American Finance Grew on the Back of Slaves
Carol Anderson,
White Rage, New York, Bloomsbury Publishing, pp.39-66, 2016
Dennison’s Political Machine,
Dennison’s Political Machine
B.C Franklin,
The Tulsa Race Riots and Three of It’s Victims,
A Long-Lost Manuscript Contains a Searing Eyewitness Account of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921
Jae Jones,
Cicero Race Riot: Mob of 4,000 Destroys Apartment Building with One Black Family Tenants, November 14, 2018,
Cicero Race Riot: Mob of 4,000 Destroys Apartment Building with One Black Family Tenantsblack-family-tenants/
Charles Abrams,
The Time Bomb That Exploded in Cicero: Segregated Housing's Inevitable Dividend,
The Time Bomb That Exploded in Cicero:Segregated Housing's Inevitable Dividend
Christy Clark-Pujara and Anna-Lisa Cox,
How the Myth of a Liberal North Erases a Long History of White Violence, smithsonianmag.com, August 27, 2020,
How the Myth of a Liberal North Erases a Long History of White Violence
