Black History Fact Of The Day: Benjamin Banneker’s Grandfather

Red, Black & Green Elsie Law LogoVia his African grandfather, Benjamin Banneker had a royal lineage. Benjamin Banneker’s grandfather, Bannaky, came to America on a slave ship. In addition to his regal lineage, Bannaky also had an extensive knowledge of agriculture. This included building irrigation systems that prevented flooding. Bannaky also planted crops composed of foods he had grown in Africa (yams, sweet potatoes, rice, and watermelon).

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This Country Was Built By Whom? Who Are The Biggest Victims Of Crime?

Public Burning
“For 246 years our uncompensated labor launched wealthy institutions and private corporate fortunes in America such as Brown University and Fleet Bank, both founded by the Brown brothers, who got their start in American business building slave ships and investing in the slave trade.

Cotton made everyone associated with it wealthy- the plantation owners, the brokers, the shippers, the shipbuilders, the jobbers, the United States treasury- everyone became rich except for the people who produced the cotton. They- we- us- our forebearers- were stripped of everything- the value of our labor, our mothers, our fathers, our children, and by the tens of millions, our very lives.

And so my friends, let us tell our young that we are behind in America not because there is anything wrong with us, but rather, that something heinous happened a long time and continued for a long time after. Tell them that our people have a proud and ancient history that must be told to them, that slavery robbed us of warranted wealth and memory, that slavery extended under new guises well into the 20th century, that we have endured in America every imaginable discrimination for 346 years.

Tell them we have been the victims of the longest-running crime against humanity in the world over the last 500 years. And lastly, tell them that like all other peoples in the world who’ve suffered human rights crimes at the hands of governments- Jews, Koreans, Japanese-Americans- we too must be compensated by the government complicit in the crime against us.” -From, “The Reckoning” By: Randall Robinson

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Black History Fact Of The Day: Dr. Ulysses Grant Daily

Red, Black & Green Elsie Law LogoDr. Ulysses Grant Daily was a surgical assistant to the great Dr. Daniel Hale Williams. Dr. Daily also achieved greatness in his own right.

Dr. Ulysses Grant Daily achieved prominence in the medical field internationally. His achievements included: helping to found the International College of Surgeons, editing the Journal of the National Medical Association, being a professor of anatomy at Northwestern University, becoming the Honorary Counsel to Haiti, being a correspondent for newspapers internationally (including Pakistan), establishing his own hospital, and practicing medicine internationally.

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Quote Of The Day

“We will not be satisfied to take one jot or title less than our full manhood rights. We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America. The battle we wage is not for ourselves alone but for all true Americans. It is a fight for ideals, lest this, our common fatherland, false to its founding, become in truth the land of the thief and the home of the slave- a by-word and a hissing among the nations for its sounding pretensions and pitiful accomplishment.

Never before in the modern age has a great and civilized folk threatened to adopt so cowardly a creed in the treatment of its fellow-citizens born and bred on its soil. Stripped of verbiage and subterfuge and in its naked nastiness the new American creed says: Fear to let black men even try to rise lest they become equals of the white. And this is the land that professes to follow Jesus Christ. The blasphemy of such a course is only matched by its cowardice.” -The Niagara Movement (1906)

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Some Interesting Facts About Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman Quote
• Harriet Tubman was born a slave. She escaped slavery in her early 20s.
• Harriet Tubman was a confidante of John Brown.
• Harriet Tubman was a frequent guest at the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
• There was a $40,000 ransom for Harriet Tubman’s capture.
• Harriet Tubman opened a home for the elderly on land that she owned.
• Harriet Tubman made about 19 trips to the South the free more than 100 slaves.

[SOURCE: “Black Manhattan” By: James Weldon Johnson]

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