“In 1871, Tennessee leased its nearly eight hundred prisoners, nearly all of them Black to Thomas O’Conner, a founding partner along with Arthur Colyar of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. In the four decades after the war, as Coylar built his company into an industrial behemoth, its center of operations gradually shifted to Alabama, […]
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Slavery After Emancipation: The Beginning Of The Prison Industrial Complex- Part 2
“Hardly a year after the end of the war, in 1866, Alabama governor Robert M. Patton, in return for the total sum of $5, leased for six years his state’s 374 state prisoners to a company calling itself ‘Smith and McMillen.’ The transaction was in fact a sham, as the partnership was actually controlled by […]
Read the rest of this entry »Slavery After Emancipation: The Beginning Of The Prison Industrial Complex- Part 1
“With the southern economy in ruins, state officials limited to the barest resources, and county governments with even fewer, the concept of reintroducing the forced labor of Blacks as a means of funding government services was viewed by Whites as an inherently practical method of eliminating the cost of building prisons and returning Blacks to […]
Read the rest of this entry »African American Voting: A Retrospective
“As of 1901, nearly every African American had been effectively stripped of all elective rights in Alabama and virtually every southern state. After passage of a new state constitution in 1901, Alabama allowed the registration only of voters who could read or write and were regularly employed, or who owned property valued at $300 or […]
Read the rest of this entry »The African Constitution
The following is an excerpt from the book, “The Destruction of Civilization” By: Chancellor Williams. [SIDEBAR: I’m not certain which time period this came from.] “Drawn from African Constitutional and Customary Laws. Different versions and modifications of the same laws occurred in different societies… THE FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS OF THE AFRICAN PEOPLE The following is a […]
Read the rest of this entry »How Many American Corporations Were Built On The Backs Of Slaves?
“In 1858, 75 percent of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance policies were written on slaves.” – From, “Medical Apartheid” By: Harriet Washington. So many American corporations were built on the backs of slaves. Tweet
Read the rest of this entry »The Importance Of Knowing Your History: Part 6
“When we get into social amnesia- into forgetting our history- we also forget or misinterpret the history and motives of others as well as our own motives. The way to know other people is to know one’s self. The way to learn of our own creation, how we came to be what we are, is […]
Read the rest of this entry »The Importance Of Knowing Your History: Part 5
“As Russell Jacoby says in his book, ‘Social Amnesia’: “Exactly because the past is forgotten, it rues unchallenged. To be transcended it first must be remembered. Social amnesia is society’s repression of remembrance.’ Simply because we choose to forget a traumatic event, simply because we choose not to learn of a traumatic history and a […]
Read the rest of this entry »The Importance Of Knowing Your History: Part 4
“Historiography may function as propaganda- propaganda being an effort to persuade people to a point of view on an issue. History can be used to intimidate. European achievements are inflated and the next thing we know, we are asking ourselves ‘How can we fight this great people?’ We’ve been frightened! They talk about the great […]
Read the rest of this entry »The Importance Of Knowing Your History: Part 3
“If we don’t know our history, or if we’ve made our history unconscious and therefore placed it out of awareness, that unconscious history becomes a source of unconscious motivation, then why we behave the way we do becomes a puzzle. We’re confused by our own behavior. If we want to know why we behave the […]
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