Racism

[Dr. Shane]

Northwest Ordinance

Quote:

The Ordinance unanimously passed on July 13, 1787. The primary effect of the ordinance was the creation of the Northwest Territory as the first organized territory of the United States out of the region south of the Great Lakes, north and west of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi River...

Arguably the single most important piece of legislation passed by members of the earlier Continental Congresses other than the Declaration of Independence, it established the precedent by which the United States would expand westward across North America by the admission of new states, rather than by the expansion of existing states.

The act also through the most empowered recognition of the importance of education and its encouragement provided for the concept of a sponsored higher education. The Morrill Act of 1862 and the Morrill Act of 1890 would follow and forever change the relationship of higher education and government. Higher education would become a tool for a good government and through the Hatch Act of 1887, an equal partner in supporting the growing needs of the expanding agrarian society.

Further, the banning of slavery in the territory had the effect of establishing the Ohio River as the boundary between free and slave territory in the region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. This division helped set the stage for the balancing act between free and slave states that was the basis of a critical political question in American politics in the 19th century until the Civil War.

[bonnie]

Absolutely no doubt the white race had more than it's share of guilt. By 21st century standards. Judge all involved by the same yardstick. If the white race is to be judged by our standards and knowledge of today then all must be. Interesting that africans sold africans to gain guns and profit for their own wars among themselves

http://edition.cnn.com/WORLD/9510/ghana_slavery/

CNN World News

fort

Researchers uncover Africans' part in slavery

October 20, 1995

Web posted at: 8:25 p.m. EDT

From Correspondent Gary Strieker

CAPE COAST, Ghana (CNN) -- For centuries along the West African coast, millions of Africans were sold into slavery and shipped across the Atlantic to the Americas.

The middlemen were European slave traders based in forts like Ghana's Cape Coast Castle, now a tourist attraction and a somber reminder of a brutal crime against humanity.

That crime is usually blamed entirely on the European outsiders who inflicted slavery on African victims. But new research by some African scholars supports a different view - - that Africans should share the blame for slavery.

"It was the Africans themselves who were enslaving their fellow Africans, sending them to the coast to be shipped outside," says researcher Akosua Perbi of the University of Ghana. (88K AIFF sound file or 88K WAV sound)

Based on her studies, Perbi says that European slave traders, almost without exception, did not themselves capture slaves. They bought them from other Africans, usually kings or chiefs or wealthy merchants.

The question is, why did Africans sell their own people?

chiefs For a thousand years before Europeans arrived in Africa, slaves were commonly sold and taken by caravans north across the Sahara.

"Slavery did exist in Africa," says Irene Odotei of the University of Ghana.

In many African cultures, slavery was an accepted domestic practice, but it was slavery of a different kind. In Africa, the slave usually had rights, protection under law, and social mobility.

"Many house owners would call their slaves as their daughters or sons," says Perbi. "They became part of the kin or family or lineage of the owners." (100K AIFF sound file or 100K WAV sound)

The Atlantic slave trade grew at a time when many African states were at war with each other, taking prisoners that could easily be sold to traders in exchange for guns.

"It's the gun which was a deciding factor in the slave trade -- introduced by Europe," says Odotei.

But while Africans may have sold their own people into slavery, researchers say the kings and chiefs had no idea of the brutality of slavery on the other side of the ocean. If they had, they say, maybe the slave trade across the Atlantic would never have grown so huge, or lasted for so many years.

Sharing the guilt for slavery may be disturbing and painful for Africans, but researchers say their objective is clear.

"They're trying to uncover the facts so that people will take a lesson from the evil of the past and say 'no more,'" says Kwame Arhin of the Institute of African Affairs.

gun guy And there is one thing they insist they are not doing.

"I'm not trying to shift blame or to make the Europeans feel less guilty," explains Perbi.

For what many believe was the world's greatest crime against humanity, there is more than enough guilt to share.

[bonnie]

http://www.sciway.net/afam/slavery/flesh.html

South Carolina's First Slaves – Native Americans

South Carolina's first slaves were neither black nor were they from Africa. They were Native Americans who had lived along the rivers of the Lowcountry and among the mountains of the Upstate for thousands of years before the first European settler even arrived. As historian Patrick Minges explains,

Quote:

Native American tribes in South Carolina were often at war with one another. In consequence, they learned to hunt down and capture members of enemy tribes, selling them to whites as slaves. Others, of course, were captured and sold by the new settlers directly. In either case, Native Americans made up a large share of South Carolina's seventeenth and eighteenth century slave population.

Notice the kind gentle behavior of the Native Americans towards Native Americans. We those involved more or less guilty of the white man they dealt with

Quote:

In time, however, white planters began to "phase out" the use of Native Americans on their plantations. For one thing, they had decided that Africans were far better suited to the back-breaking work of cultivating rice than Indians were. For another, black people seemed to have a stronger resistance to white diseases like small pox and yellow fever. And finally, white people learned that if a Native American slave ran away, they probably weren't going to find him again. Native Americans were all too familiar with the nooks and crannies of "the new world." They knew where to hide, and they knew how to find help. If they could escape, they could take refuge in the midst of a nearby tribe.

[bonnie]

http://www.racematters.org/sctruthafricanslavetrading.htm

The Truth About African Slave Trading, by Stanley Crouch

From: New York Daily News, News and Views, — Opinion —

Monday, July 23, 2001, by Stanley Crouch

Truth, at Last, About

African Slave Trading

Stanley Crouchrecisely who was responsible for the slave trade is a hot topic these days. Africans themselves are busy changing our image of the central role Africa played.

This is much to the good.

A remarkable African film about the subject is Roger Gnoan M'Bala's "Adanggaman," showing at the Film Forum until tomorrow. The human complexity of the characters gives tragic dimension to the tale of Africans enslaving other Africans or selling them to Europeans.

But M'Bala's is just one of several voices rising to reexamine some of our long-held myths about Africa's clean hands. Revelations on "60 Minutes" about contemporary African slavery, for instance, recently drew the Rev. Al Sharpton to Sudan. Such openness has been a long time coming.

In the mid '60s, as the civil rights movement went into decline, American black nationalists began to depict Africa as a paradise lost. Africa was the great motherland, distorted by white people and denied by Negroes who had been taught to hate themselves — their color, their hair, their national origin. The slave trade, we were told, was imposed by whites.

This vision took hold in the early black studies departments on college campuses. And by the time Alex Haley's "Roots" told its plagiarized tale on television, Americans were given to believe that the slave trade was kept going by white men bagging Africans in the bush. The simpleminded vision of good guys and bad guys was established — the very vision now under serious siege.

The first strong African assault came when the great Senegalese filmmaker Ousemane Sembene's "Ceddo" got its U.S. debut more than 20 years ago, and the black nationalist movement was stunned. Sembene showed Africans, European Christians and Muslims working together to sell Africans into slavery.

Then, in February 1999, Mathieu Kerekou, president of Benin, which was once a hotbed of slave selling, got down on his knees at the Church of the Great Commission in Baltimore to apologize for the central role of Africans in the slave trade. Later that year, the president of Ghana, Jerry Rawlings, attended a conference in Benin and also apologized.

This spring, Kerekou contacted Henry Louis Gates, head of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard's black studies department, and invited him to the University of Benin for an honorary doctorate. Gates just received that doctorate in recognition of what Kerekou considered his courageous examination of the African role in the slave trade and his simultaneous role in celebrating the splendors of ancient African civilization through his PBS series "The Wonders of the African World."

This is a big leap from the firestorm of hostility Gates received when the PBS series aired — much of it initiated and sustained by East African scholar Ali Mazrui, whose BBC series, "The Africans," had fudged the slavery issue some years earlier (perhaps because Mazrui was descended from a family that had made piles of dough in the slave trade).

Now Kerekou is forging a reconciliation movement, which could come at no better time. Every group needs to know that evil transcends color, place, politics, sex and religion. It is a universal and recurrent problem we all have to face and fight.