Daily Archives: June 20, 2021

Its a funny thing how folks always want to know about the War, mused Felix Haywood about that central fixation of American memory. Haywood had been born in slavery some fifteen years before the Civil War near San Antonio, Texas. The war werent so great as folks suppose, he told his interviewer, a member of the Federal Writers Project collecting testimony from surviving ex-slaves in the late 1930s. Sometimes you didnt knowed it was goin on. It was the endin of it that made the difference.

Juneteenth marks the day June 19, 1865 that the enslaved people of East Texas at long last received word of their freedom as well as the freedom of a quarter million others in the state. Two months had passed since the surrender of Robert E. Lees forces at Appomattox and two and a half years since President Abraham Lincolns Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all slaves still held in Confederate-controlled areas forever free and pledging the federal government to the recognition and maintenance of their freedom.

Juneteenth has been widely celebrated every year since US general Gordon Granger first made the announcement to a crowd of black and white onlookers in Galveston in June 1865. It remains one of the most powerful currents of emancipationist memory in the United States a counterdemonstration to the noxious propaganda of the Lost Cause.

By their very nature, commemorations tend to simplify events, to strip away the freighted complexities of the past in search of one more usable, if not celebratory. Juneteenth deserves celebration. But the circumstances of the original Juneteenth also deserve our fullest appreciation, for in that confounding history of emancipation in Texas we might glimpse prophetic outlines of the very meaning of freedom in the post-slave but far from post-racial United States.

Felix Haywoods account of isolated south-central Texas reveals less about the Civil War itself than the war that was American slavery. He and others on the ranch found that life went on jus like it always had before the war. Work, worship, whippings all meted out as usual.

But the flurry of wartime activity in the trans-Mississippi East infiltrated Texas in other, subtler ways. From time to time, Haywood recalled, someone would come long and try to get us to run up North and be free. We used to laugh at that, he chuckled, for there wasnt no reason to run up North. All we had to do was to walk, but walk South, and wed be free as soon as we crossed the Rio Grande. In Mexico you could be free no matter your color. Though Haywood and his family never fled southward, they knew of hundreds who did.

Texas served as a very different sort of beacon. From the 1860 census to June 19, 1865, the enslaved population of Texas nearly doubled. During the war, more than 150,000 enslaved people had been forcibly relocated to the relative safety of Texas, the frontier of the slaveholding Confederacy. Torn from nearby Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, among other states, those enslaved men and women were the rearguard of the massive forced migration enacted in the six decades before the Civil War, a commercial riptide that pulled over a million enslaved men, women, and children toward the cotton kingdom of the lower Mississippi Valley.

As the war unfolded across the South, those fugitive slaveholders who stole themselves and their human chattel westward to Texas merely delayed what was becoming the inevitable, as the concerted actions of enslaved peoples and the United States Army weakened slavery at every turn. Historians estimate that half a million enslaved people absconded from their plantation labor camps during the war; those who remained engaged in what W. E. B. Du Bois famously termed the general strike.

Having heard Haywoods rather unexciting account of the war in remote San Antonio, his interviewer felt pressed to inquire how the former slave knew the end of the war had come.

How did we know it? the freedman asked incredulously, Hallelujah broke out. . . . Soldiers, all of a sudden, was everywhere comin in bunches, crossin and walkin and ridin. Everyone was a-singin. We was all walkin on golden clouds. Haywood recited one of the anthems heard that day:

Union forever,Hurrah, boys, hurrah!Although I may be poor,Ill never be a slave Shoutin the battle cry of freedom.

Up to that point in his interview, Haywoods account of the Civil War was distant, even dismissive. But the announcement of freedom of Juneteenth forever punctuated his memory. Everybody went wild, he suddenly exclaimed. We all felt like heroes and nobody had made us that way but ourselves. We was free. Just like that. Right away, the erstwhile slaves of Texas started on the move. They seemed to want to get closer to freedom, so theyd know what it was like it was a place or a city.

The landing of US forces at the port of Galveston in June 1865 underscored what the formerly enslaved already knew and what historians are only beginning to fully appreciate: freedom relied not simply on declarations, laws, and amendments in distant Washington, but on the force of arms. The Juneteenth announcement required enforcement by the 1,800 federal soldiers assigned to the state to make freedom meaningful for the freedpeople of Texas.

Though black people had long nurtured their own understandings of what freedom might entail, in June 1865 the very legality and defensibility of their newfound status was anything but certain. Scarcely two weeks had passed since the surrender of Confederate general Edmund Kirby Smiths division in Galveston, though the fighting did not so much disappear as devolve into rampant guerilla warfare and anti-black terrorism.

Lincoln had fallen to an assassins bullet two months prior to the Juneteenth announcement, succeeded by the embodiment of racist and reactionary Unionism, Andrew Johnson. The Thirteenth Amendment, which formally abolished involuntary servitude, had passed both houses of Congress in January but was still in the process of state ratification. Newspapers in Texas were predicting that slavery would survive in the state at least another ten years thanks to northern industrialists rapacious desire for cotton.

Entering the fray, the official announcement on June 19 might not have settled the matter of emancipation, but it did contain the outlines of a new order. General Grangers declaration informed the people of Texas that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.

But as the army of liberation turned into an army of occupation and one imperfectly dedicated to protecting the rights and lives of black Southerners commanders like Granger stressed that freedom came with many strings attached. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere. In other words: work for your old masters, and dont gather together, especially at places, to borrow Haywoods phrase, closer to freedom.

Making good on the implied threat of the June 19 proclamation, the Galveston mayor, with the tacit approval of the provost marshal, rounded up black refugees and runaways and returned them to their owners. Others were dragooned into working for the army.

With the proclamation of freedom came a practical lesson in its duties, the Galveston Daily News reported on June 22. On Monday morning, a guard of Federal soldiers scoured the streets, rounding up every loose freedman they could lay their hands on, to go to the country and cut wood, man steamboats, or assist in such labor as was necessary for the army. A panic soon seized the new class thus conscripted, the reporter jeered, but the quick feet of the white soldiers and the persuasive and pointed argument of the bayonet brought them to a sense of their obligation to support the government which had given them their freedom.

The new order was to be based on wage labor. But because of the severe cash shortage throughout the postCivil War South, many planters were unable to pay wages; sharecropping thus emerged as a compromise between wage slavery and actual slavery. Black farmers would rent their land from white planters and pay for it using a portion of their crop come harvest time, usually a quarter to a half.

Employers were free to void the contracts for virtually any offense, seizing thereafter the entire harvest and evicting the black sharecropping family from their land, exposing them to vagrancy laws and the dragnet of the convict lease system, what has aptly been called slavery by another name. Such was the vaunted ideal of contract freedom.

It took a while for news of emancipation to reach black Texans in the most remote parts of the state and even longer for it to register with their enslavers. Susan Merritt, enslaved in northeast Texas, reckoned it must have been September when she heard the news. As Merritt recalled in her own Depression-era interview, one day while she and others were picking cotton a stranger rode up to the house a government man, with a big book and a bunch of papers and demanded to know why the planter hadnt surrendered ownership of his workers. It was from this man likely an official of the Freedmens Bureau, a federal agency designed to oversee the transition to freedom and market relations that Merritt first learned she was free.

Yet she and others were still compelled to work for their old enslaver for several months after that. Oft-enacted threats of gunning down deserters doubtless kept many on the plantation. The relative impotency of the US Army and Freedmens Bureau emboldened planters. Freedpeople found themselves as precarious tenants, locked into labor contracts that looked more like debt peonage than the freedom they had long envisioned.

As the Freedmens Bureau began to establish itself in Texas that fall, reports circulated that its officials were planning to consult with local planters trained in the management of black workers a far cry from the agencys founding mission. The original charter had included provisions to distribute hundreds of thousands of acres of land that had been abandoned by or confiscated from rebel planters over the course of the war.

By the spring of 1865, the Freedmens Bureau controlled roughly 900,000 acres of government land, enough for nearly twenty-three thousand black homesteads. General William Tecumseh Sherman, moreover, had issued Field Order No. 15 back in January, arranging for the parceling out of some 485,000 acres to freedpeople in the South Carolina Sea Islands and Lowcountry in 40-acre plots, land on which the general had ordered no white person whatever . . . will be permitted to reside.

But the counterrevolution came in October 1865. President Johnson unceremoniously revoked Shermans order and commanded the head of the Freedmens Bureau to denationalize the governments lands returning it to the rebel planters Johnson had recently pardoned en masse.

In the emancipated South, then, black dispossession went fist in glove with the coerced imposition of free labor. At the same time, Northern capitalists and federal officials conspired to prevent widespread black landownership the very thing freedpeople almost universally regarded as the precondition for freedom in a post-slave society. One sixty-year-old freedman of the Mississippi Valley commented to a Northern journalist shortly after the war, Whats de use of being free if you dont own land enough to be buried in?

Black-led protests during the final months of 1865 were widespread, though on small scales and usually in response to specific inciting confrontations. One exslaveholding planter complained to the Waco Register that although several of his fellow planters deigned to sign contracts with their new black employees, he estimated that three-fourths of the freedpeople in his area look forward to Christmas as the dawn of the millennium, when meat and bread will come as a matter of course.

Many black families indeed refused to sign the loathsome contracts for the coming season, waiting on the promise of land redistribution. Among white Southerners, especially of the planter class, fevered rumors spread of an impending Haitian-style revolution. The pervasive fear in the winter of 186566 was soon given a label: the Christmas Insurrection Scare. But in the end, it proved to be just that. Promises broken, freedpeople reluctantly entered into labor contracts.

The freedpeople of Texas had plenty of reason to be fearful, however, as some thirty-eight thousand Confederate parolees returned with a vengeance. In addition to raiding the treasury in Austin, the rebels of the failed Confederate state harassed, brutalized, and killed freedpeople at will. As Du Bois noted in Black Reconstruction, the pervasive anti-government, anti-black terrorism so widespread across the South was perhaps the worst in Texas. Simply acting free was grounds for white retaliation. The occupying US Army, meanwhile, lacked either the capacity or will to make black freedom meaningful. In any event, the return to peacetime in 1871 and the swift demobilization of the army spelled disaster for the formerly enslaved.

At the twilight of slavery, then, a new system of dependency and precarity greeted freedpeople in Texas and across the emancipated South vastly different from the freedom dreams of the formerly enslaved. For their part, the enslavers-turned-employers routinely griped about perceived obstinacy of their black workers that is, their resistance to being rendered docile vectors of their employers will. They complained that labor is incompatible with their ideas of freedom. Threats and orders from on high appeared to register little with them. One planter, in a letter to the Dallas Daily Herald, sneered that they do not believe anything that we tell them or which we may read from papers that is at variance with their ideas of freedom. It was partly a matter of trust, but even more so a matter of political struggle and conviction that kept them at odds with their exploiters.

After the fall of Reconstruction, that great experiment in biracial democracy, black workers channeled their organizing efforts into various associations such as the Colored Farmers Alliance, formed in Houston County, Texas, in 1886. Then came the ascent of the Populist Party in the early 1890s, which depended especially in the former slaveholding states on the mobilization of black voters. Texas in particular witnessed a surge of black support for the Populist Party and soon became a Populist stronghold.

The Populist Party was the only meaningfully biracial political party that existed. It was also the only party that spoke to the needs of hundreds of thousands of black sharecroppers in the benighted South.

In the words of C. Vann Woodward, Populism offered to working-class blacks and whites an equalitarianism of want and poverty, the kinship of common grievance and a common oppressor. Under unprecedented threat, the two established parties conspired to race-bait and red-bait the Populist Party to death. They succeeded. By the mid-1890s the Democratic Party had cynically adopted a few planks of the Populist platform, coopted some of its leaders, and cast black voters into the electoral oblivion of the increasingly disenfranchised South.

We knowed freedom was on us, Felix Haywood recalled in the late 1930s, but we didnt know what was to come with it. We thought we was goin to get rich like the white folks. We thought we was goin to be richer than the white folks, cause we was stronger and knowed how to work. . . . But it didnt turn out that way. We soon found out that freedom could make folks proud but it didnt make em rich.

Juneteenth is worth celebrating for its promised end to human bondage, but its history also reminds us of the counterrevolution of property waged against the revolution that was the American Civil War a conflict that ultimately freed four million black people once legally held as property, a conflict wherein more than 140,000 formerly enslaved men enlisted and countless other black men and women lent their fullest devotion.

Its common to say nowadays that the Civil War is unfinished. We can, after all, readily point to the ubiquitous battles over so-called Civil War monuments (better understood as monuments to Jim Crow that merely adopt the iconography of the war). But the most enduring legacy of the Civil War is not symbolic or cultural but substantive and economic. Not only did sharecropping prevail into the 1960s, but the particular formulation of freedom exacted upon black people in the emancipated South can be said to weigh like a nightmare on the living, to borrow Marxs phrase.

Over the past year of the pandemic, political leaders on both sides of the aisle spoke and acted like modern-day Gordon Grangers, brandishing the freedom to work and the threat that we will not be supported in idleness. The meager stimulus checks, barely a few weeks worth of subsistence for most families, made good on this threat.

So did conservatives shameless assaults on unemployment benefits, which they roundly denounced as disincentives to work. Like the ex-slaveholding planters of old, they betrayed a bone-deep belief in the natural laziness of the working class and an unstinting opposition to a different vision of freedom. To that end, too, they devoted themselves to austerity and anti-distributive economics, to incapacitating the welfare state while ramping up the punitive one and setting it against black-led protests for something closer to approximating the promise of absolute equality.

It was the endin of it that made the difference, Felix Haywood said of the war. This Juneteenth, lets remember how slavery ended, and how freedom remained and remains elusive. And that nobody can make us free but ourselves.

Read more from the original source:

Juneteenth Is About Freedom - Jacobin magazine

Juneteenth will be observed as an official state holiday for the first time in Massachusetts this year. We celebrate this day as the end of slavery and the outlawing of forced, unpaid labor in the United States. Juneteenth marks an important milestone in our nation's history and has gone unrecognized in a widespread and visible way for much too long.

Despite progress, the struggle continues for Black workers in our county, and in particular here in Boston. We see that labor, especially Black labor, is not valued equally. As a Black union member of Iron Workers Local 7, I see others whose work is not compensated and recognized in the way my work is respected and valued by my union.

We honor Juneteenth as a day to reclaim our history and rejoice in how much we have overcome. It's also a day to renew our commitment to the fight for racial and economic justice. Workers, especially people of color, are having a tougher time achieving the American dream. Housing and health care costs are continuing to skyrocket, and without union representation, wages stagnate.

Shockingly, in Boston, the median wealth for Black households is $8 compared to $247,500 for white households. To keep growing and thriving we need to address this disparity. Doing so would benefit all workers in the region. A recent report found that closing the wealth gap could grow Massachusetts' economy by $25 billion over five years.

Just as unions were a key part of expanding the middle class after World War II, they've also been crucial in closing the racial wealth gap between Black and white families. Black union members' wages are about 25% higher compared to Black Americans who are not in a union. Black Americans are almost twice as likely to be uninsured compared to their white counterparts yet a founding principle of labor unions ensures all members have access to high-quality, affordable health insurance. By expanding opportunities for people of color to join unions, we eliminate inequities and invest in the health and future of our nation.

I have experienced the benefits of being in a union firsthand. I've been able to provide a good life for my family. I own my home and can afford to put my kids through college if they choose that path. The union difference is not only fair pay and a living wage, but also health care benefits and a pension. I never have to worry "can I afford to go to the doctor?" if I get sick. I know that one day I'll be able to retire comfortably. Sadly, there are still many workers, especially those who are Black and brown, who lack that type of security.

As a 22-year member, my union has not only made my life better, but has made a difference in the lives of so many other people of color. Our leadership at Local 7 has worked hard to make the union more welcoming to people who look like me. The world is changing, and I'm happy to see how Local 7 has been leading efforts for a more inclusive union.

Our fight to close the wealth gap is part of racial justice. Unions are leading the way by guaranteeing equal pay among all union workers and lifting up standards for working people of all backgrounds. Juneteenth is a day of celebration of the progress we've made, but it should also be a reminder that we still have more work to do in pursuit of racial and economic justice for Black Americans.

Neil Campbell is an union iron worker with Local 7.

More:

Commentary: Unions help achieve racial justice by closing the wage gap - Dorchester Reporter

Editor's Note:The Moral Economyis a new series that tackles key economic topics through the prism of Catholic social teaching and its care for the dignity of every person. This is the sixth article in the series.

In the years after the Civil War, it was obvious to many U.S. leaders that the people their nation had enslaved for 246 years deserved compensation. Then the idea, it seemed, vanished.

In 2021, that moral clarity is being invoked by a new generation of activists leading local, regional and private initiatives that aim to repair the systemic damage done by slavery. In the last year, since the murder of George Floyd refocused this nations attention on Black lives, these smaller-scale efforts have overtaken the more familiar call for the federal government to allocate federal reparations to African Americans.

Together, these two currents, local and national, have elevated the conversation about reparations for slavery to a place it has not occupied since the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction in the 1860s and 1870s.

On Thursday, President Biden signed a law making Juneteenth, a celebration of the end of slavery, a national holiday. Great nations dont ignore the most painful moments, he said.

I never thought that in my lifetime, we would be having a broad conversation about reparations, the Rev. Dr. Joe Thompson, a pastor and professor at Virginia Theological Seminary, told me. Dr. Thompson, who is African American, is in charge of a $1.7 million fund the seminary has created to atone for its past involvement in enslaving people and the segregation and discrimination that followed. The seminary is sending cash payments$2,100 this yearto descendants of people whom it exploited for forced labor, as well as people who worked at the institution during segregation.

Some Black activists and scholars object to the increasingly popular local and private projects. They say they are merely symbolic and a distraction from the broader campaign. A national problem deserves a national solution, William Darity, an economist at Duke University, told me.

But others say these smaller initiatives are worth encouraging and studying. They are, after all, the only reparations being paid right now. They also correlate with a rising level of overall support among Americans for a federal plan, though that support still seems to be less than a majority. And, most important, they are a powerful testimony that reminds us of the truth about this nations crime against humanity. Look at slavery up close, all these stories say, and you see an economic misdeed that unquestionably demands economic justice.

It is the direct human connection that motivates activists. In 2019, Sarah Eisner, a former California technology executive turned writer and activist, connected online with Randy Quarterman, the descendant of one of the men her great-great-great grandfather had enslaved near Savannah, Ga.

Her outreach was welcomed. It was a little confusing at first, but Sarahs work has educated us about family history, Mr. Quarterman told me. And theres been truth-telling on both sides. Thats the real reparations, and thats significant, especially because it looks like federal reparations might not happen. Among other efforts, Ms. Eisner helped organize a legal team to protect land Mr. Quartermans family owns. They have also created the Reparations Project, a nonprofit group that organizes lectures, pays reparations to African American families, and fights to prevent Black land loss. Ms. Eisner says she is lucky Mr. Quaterman was willing to grow a relationship with me, which has helped me work toward a small attempt at repairing the past and further opened my heart.

Ms. Eisner and Mr. Quarterman are not alone in forging a reparative relationship. Over the last three years, since I first wrote about the private reparations movement for America in 2018, during a boom in online genealogy, there has been a mushrooming of such efforts.

These include Californias creation of a task force to study the possibility of paying reparations, a move the State of New York voted this month to emulate. The city of Asheville, N.C., has launched a reparations fund with money from a land sale. Evanston, Ill., is paying home repair and improvement grants to African American citizens. And this month, the Tulsa, Okla., city council voted to apologize and make tangible amends for the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, when a white mob torched 35 blocks of a wealthy neighborhood known as Black Wall Street.

Religious groups have joined the cause. The Society of Jesus has pledged $100 million to descendants of people enslaved by Georgetown University. We will restore honor and dignity to our ancestors by institutionalizing these goals for our children, our childrens children, and descendants for centuries to come, said Cheryllyn Branch, president of the GU272 Descendants Association, named after the 272 enslaved people Georgetown sold in 1838. The foundation represents over 10,000 people. Princeton Theological Seminary has promised $27.6 million for scholarships, the hiring of Black scholars, and the financing of doctoral studies for descendants of enslaved people.

Theologians say reparations accord with Catholic social teaching, which emphasizes the dignity of every human being. From a Catholic point of view, theres no question that reparations make sense, said the theologian and writer John Slattery. Theres so much throughout Catholic history that talks about repairing injustice.

As the smaller reparations schemes have proliferated, a U.S. House committee took a major step forward in April by approving H.R. 40, which would create a commission to study the granting of national reparations. A positive resolution appears unlikely, mostly because Americans who support reparations are still in the minority, although that number seemed to increase last year: 31 percent of Americans backed reparations in a July 2020 poll, up from 19 percent in 1999.

The issue is still broadly opposed by Republicans. Slavery was and still is an evil, said Rep. Burgess Owens, a Black Republican congressman from Utah, during House debate. Mr. Owens said that the idea of reparations is divisive and added, It speaks to the fact that we are a hapless, hopeless race that never did anything but wait for White people to show up and help us, and its a falsehood.

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden said he would back a study of reparations. Vice President Kamala Harris, as a candidate for president in 2019, proposed paying for mental and physical health treatment for African Americans. The centuries of slavery were a form of violence where women were raped, where children were taken from their parentsviolence associated with slavery, she told NPR. And that neverthere was never any real intervention to break up what had been generations of people experiencing the highest forms of trauma, and trauma, undiagnosed and untreated, leads to physiological outcomes.

Scholars have shown the connection between slavery and current inequalities. Counties in the United States with higher rates of slavery have higher current rates of income inequality. The average white family has around 10 times the amount of cumulative wealth as the average Black family. Even Black college graduates have only one-seventh the wealth of white college graduates.

But slavery can seem abstract. Like the Holocaust, it is a crime that appears fantastical unless you spend time with its realities: forced poverty, separatied families, unpunished rape and murder. How else to explain the silence of moral leaders other than that they were too distant from, and thus were not looking at, the crime being committed? It was not until 1839 that a pope, Gregory XVI, formally condemned modern slavery.

In contrast to backers of smaller-scale initiatives, supporters of a national reparations plan say it is the only way to redeem a nation stricken with historical amnesia that has struggled to confront its guilt the way Nazi Germany has done for the Holocaust and South Africa for apartheid.

The case against local reparations is that they are insufficient. Mr. Darity, the Duke University economist, argues that only the federal government can afford the bill that needs to be paid. He has calculated that the value of reparations required is over $11 trillion, derived from the amount of wealth the Black population should possess given its share of the U.S. population. The annual budgets of all U.S. states and municipalities combined amount to around $3 trillion, Mr. Darity estimates, and if they spent all that money on reparations, forgoing all other obligations, it would take them four years to reach $11 trillion, and even if you relied on private donations and generous donors who put a billion dollars a month into a reparations fund, it would take us nine centuries to get to eleven trillion, he added.

Activists in the private reparations movement say they support H.R. 40 or some other national form of redress, but they emphasize the role their work can play in highlighting the truth about slavery. Private reparations are a way of creating a truthful society and healing wounds from our past, said Tom DeWolf, co-founder of an organization called Coming to the Table. The organization now has over three dozen affiliate groups who meet to discuss racial healing and help people who wish to repair damage caused by slavery. The trauma is always present, said Mr. DeWolf, who is a descendant of a family in Rhode Island that enslaved people.

And private and local reparations can be seen as complementary to a national scheme. Kathleen Grimes, a professor of theology at Villanova University, points out that there are cases, like Georgetown, where it is possible to identify a specific harm done by and benefiting a specific institution in a way that contributed to the more general and diffuse harm of anti-Blackness. In those cases, it would make sense to keep the response isolated and focused, she said.

What everybody involved in the conversation about reparations agrees upon is that people need to be reminded of that moment of moral clarity when slavery was ending and we could see it up close.

As the Civil War concluded, the Republican Party under President Abraham Lincoln debated how African Americans might participate in society. Ideas ranged from a wage labor system to wholescale land redistribution. The notion of compensating freed people was familiar: Since slavery was instituted, many Americans, particularly Quakers in the 18th century, had made a practice of giving land or money to people who had once been enslaved.

Marching through the South in 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued his Field Order 15, which set aside 400,000 acres, up to 40 acres per plot, for a population of 40,000 formerly enslaved people, many of whom were following his army around the South. (The acreage provided the name for the bill now under consideration in Congress. Sherman also came up with the idea of giving African Americans surplus mules.)

Sherman was facing a massive humanitarian and refugee crisis, Barton Myers, a professor of history at Washington and Lee University told me. He was looking for a practical solution. Sherman was no progressive, but he recognized that the aftermath of slavery demanded a constructive response. After Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, President Andrew Johnsonone of the most viciously racist presidents, in the words of Dr. Myerscancelled plans for restorative justice.

When I talked to reparations activists recently, many brought up Sherman and the spirit of the 1860s and 1870s, which they said has been brought back to life by the Black Lives Matter movement.

Theres been a sea change in peoples attitudes, said Lotte Lieb Dula. The aftermath of the George Floyd murder has a lot of white people coming out of their bubbles.

In 2018, Ms. Dula was unpacking family heirlooms and found a logbook from a plantation in Mississippi. It included lists of property and equipment, and a list of the names and values of people her family had enslaved. She was dumbfounded, she said. I knew our family was from the South and that my great-grandfather had fought during the Civil War, but no one had ever mentioned a connection to slavery. She started Reparations 4 Slavery, a website that provides information for white families who want to contribute to reparations and collects their stories and other writings.

Conversations among people who are serious about reparations are helpful, scholars say, because they are defining what broader reparations might look like.

We need to talk more about what a federal scheme might look like, said Guy Emerson Mount, a professor of history at Auburn University. It should be driven by local demands, not from the top down, and Im worried well end up with something that mirrors the type of capitalism that enabled slavery in the first place, he said. The African-American experience is more communal, and reparations should mirror that. For example, he said, community land trusts and worker-owned cooperatives would be preferable to cash, or 401(k)-type investment plans. Black communities should be allowed to decide collectively and democratically what form the repair should take, he said.

Whatever its form, every reparations plan is, at heart, an economic solution, because the problem of slavery was economic. In 1840, over half of total U.S. exports consisted of cotton harvested by enslaved people. In a prosperous land, four million people had by law owned nothing, and after the Civil War deserved something. A nation lost its vision of that fact to the restoration of white power in the South, the Ku Klux Klan, anti-Black Jim Crow laws and an imposed nostalgia for the plantation glamour of the Old South.

Racism became institutionalized, stunting efforts to fix the obvious economic problem slavery had created. And the reality of slavery was obscured. The U.S. never had a truth and reconciliation commission, said Dr. Mount.

The importance of speaking the truth about what happened is one thing that all sides of the reparations debate can agree on.

More reporting from John W. Miller:

Read more from the original source:

Private and religious groups are starting to pay reparations for slaverybut it's nowhere near enough. - America Magazine

On a cold day in December 2018, I was helping my son and daughter get ready for school. It was early in the morning and my kids had missed the school bus. They were running late and we were trying to get all their stuff together.

Without any warning, a flashbang went off in the living room of my home in north Minneapolis and my door was smashed down by the police. The flashbangs set my shoes on fire and blew the floor apart two feet away from where my son was standing. He was 6 years old at the time. I had to snatch my son and throw him out of the way. My daughter would not stop crying because she believed they were gonna kill me. She just kept saying, Please dont kill my dad.

The Minneapolis Police Department and The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had a joint task force looking for my brother, who was already in custody in another state. MPD and ATF raided my home, my brothers grandmothers home, and the home of one of my cousins who lives around the corner from me. They destroyed my property, traumatized my children and they didnt find anything. Its an experience that neither my children nor I will ever forget.

Who is going to pay for my sons therapy? What justification do we get out of this? Is somebody fired? Is someone going to come talk to my children and tell them this experience was not supposed to happen to them? Where do we go from here? I received nothing.

In 2020, MPD restricted no-knock warrants, but when I hear the stories of Dolal Idd, Daunte Wright, and Winston Smith, its clear small reforms arent enough. It keeps happening. It couldve been me.

This Saturday is Juneteenth, a celebration of Black peoples freedom from slavery in the United States. Juneteenth is the date in which Black folks in Galveston, Texas, finally received the news in 1865 that emancipation of slavery had happened in the United States. Black Visions and Future Fighters a committee of Black workers within Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Luchas (CTUL) are hosting our second annual Juneteenth celebration at Phillips Park in south Minneapolis, just down the street from the site of the police murder of George Floyd.

We should use this celebration to see the link between liberation from a militarized police force and the rights of workers to earn a fair wage in humane conditions. The city of Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota, for instance, are together receiving billions of dollars from the American Rescue Plan Act for COVID-19 related economic relief. Instead of throwing money at a policing system that militarizes our neighborhoods and traumatizes Black communities, Minneapolis should fund our communities, invest in worker protections, housing and health care the things that actually keep us safe. Until then, we still arent free.

The Juneteenth celebration is called Til Were All Free, because our communities are being pitted against each other by corporate interests. This is a method to drive a wedge between our solidarity. The wealthiest at the top are enjoying record-setting income and wealth through our displacement. Workers wages are being stolen daily, many frontline workers didnt receive paid sick days or quarantine pay through the pandemic, and people of color are brutalized by the police and immigration system. Its all connected and we need to unite.

I dream of a Minneapolis where people only have to work one job and where parents can spend time with their kids instead of always going to work or living in fear of the police. Workers deserve the freedom to live a life without fear of police violence and workers deserve the right to be paid a wage we can actually live on.

No parent should have to work two or three jobs just to take care of their family. No parent should live in fear of a senseless police raid. No parent should be forced to go into work when their kids are sick. We need a city where people can flourish, be free, and be paid a living wage.

Studies show that more wealth is stolen through the wage theft of workers than all of the robberies and petty street theft combined. Meanwhile, Minneapolis has hundreds of police officers armed in the streets to protect property, and only a handful of wage theft investigators. Whose wealth are we protecting when wages are stolen from workers everyday, but we spend hundreds of millions militarizing the city against the people. The city must address the root problem, and policing cannot do that.

True freedom is when people can get the resources that they need. If parents could spend more time with their families, if everyone had access to mental health care, if everyone had an affordable place to live, jobs that pay, and we invested in the social programs that actually keep communities safe instead of a policing system that continues the legacy of slavery, then Minneapolis would be a completely different city. Then we could all be free.

See original here:

Juneteenth: The struggle for freedom and workers' right to thrive | Opinion - Minnesota Reformer

Distribution center adds 350 jobs in Tennessee

Helen of Troy Limited, a designer and developer of consumer housewares and other products, is expanding in Tennessee.

The company is building a new 2 million-square-foot distribution facility in Gallaway, Tennessee that will create 350 jobs. Julien R. Mininberg, CEO of Helen of Troy Limited, said the new building will house a state-of-the-art automation and direct-to-consumer fulfillment facility.

"Having grown our sales by more than 60 percent since we launched our Transformation Plan seven years ago to over $2 billion, this new distribution center is a critical project to catch up with our expansion and deliver on our future growth strategies with greater scale and efficiency," Mininberg said.. "The new facility expands our distribution operations in the region, allowing us to re-optimize our existing facilities to better fit the specific needs of each of our business segments as we serve our retail and direct-to-consumer customers."

Court rejects claims of child slave labor

The Supreme Court has sided with food giants Nestle and Cargill and thown out a lawsuit that claimed they knowingly bought cocoa beans from farms in Africa that used child slave labor.

The justices ruled 8-1 that an appeals court improperly let the lawsuit against the food companies go forward. The companies had been sued by a group of six adult citizens of Mali who claimed they were taken from their country as children and forced to work on cocoa farms in neighboring Ivory Coast.

"Although respondents' injuries occurred entirely overseas, the Ninth Circuit held that respondents could sue in federal court because the defendant corporations allegedly made 'major operational decisions' in the United States. The Ninth Circuit erred by allowing this suit to proceed," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a majority opinion for the court.

The case had been twice dismissed at an early stage before being revived by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. When the case was argued in December, then-President Donald Trump's administration backed Nestle and Cargill.

The Malian citizens had argued that Minneapolis-based Cargill and the American arm of Switzerland-based Nestle "aided and abetted" their slavery as children by, among other things, buying cocoa beans from farms that used child labor.

Nestle and Cargill have maintained throughout the case that they have done nothing wrong and that they have taken steps to combat child slavery. In statements following the ruling both Nestle and Cargill repeated that they remain committed to working to combat child labor in the cocoa industry.

Southern hospital chains to combine

A large New Orleans-based health system with hospitals in Louisiana and Mississippi plans a merger that will deepen its presence in Mississippi.

Ochsner Health and Rush Health Systems said in a news release that officials expect a proposed merger to become final in mid-2022 pending regulatory approval.

Ochsner has 40 owned, managed and affiliated hospitals and specialty hospitals in Louisiana and Mississippi, plus more than 100 health and urgent care centers.

Rush, based in Meridian, Mississippi, owns six hospitals in east Mississippi and one in west Alabama, along with more than 30 clinics. All but one Rush's hospitals are small and rural.

Officials say more than 400 Rush employees making $7.25 an hour will earn Ochsner's $12 minimum wage after the merger.

The two systems have had a strategic partnership since 2019.

See the rest here:

Distribution center to add 350 jobs in Tennessee and more business news - Chattanooga Times Free Press

When I think of Juneteenth, I cant help but think about a famous speech by Frederick Douglassand about the young Mexican American activist who told me a couple of years ago that he wanted to celebrate Juneteenth instead of the Fourth of July.

On July 5, 1852, at an Independence Day celebration organized by the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society, Frederick Douglass asked What to the slave is the Fourth of July? And he answered that it is a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.

As Americans begin to embrace Juneteenth and Douglass wisdom from nearly 170 years ago, we now must ask What to America is Juneteenth?

Despite being completely unfamiliar with Douglass speech, this Mexican American child knew that it made no sense for people of color to celebrate the Fourth of July when we did not get our freedom for another 89 years. July 4, 1776 might have liberated white colonizers from the British, but it amounted to nothing for the Black people they continued to enslave.

As a Black American, I grew up celebrating the Fourth of July and it was not until much later in my life that I learned about Juneteenth. I knew that the Fourth did not celebrate my own freedom, but the lack of an alternative meant that I was encouraged to tacitly celebrate the absence of my own freedom in the name of what America calls freedom.

Making Juneteenth a federal holiday is a step in the right direction, but much work still needs to be done for Juneteenth to become a national celebration on par with the Fourth.

Juneteenth occurred on June 19, 1865, when Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, and issued General Order Number 3 that stated that all Slaves are free.

The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued two and a half years earlier, but the Confederacy paid no attention to it as they continued to wage a war to defend slavery.

The Union needed to win the war in order for any iteration of Black freedom to exist in the South, yet even after being defeated the South refused to end slavery. Union soldiers literally had to occupy the South and force Southerners to free their slaves. Since Texas was the most distant western state at the time, it was the last state that Union soldiers needed to occupy to finally free all of Americas enslaved population.

And despite the Union freeing the slaves, General Order Number 3 still advised Blacks to remain quietly at their present homes, and work for wages. This iteration of American freedom still encouraged white supremacy and the subservience of Black Americans.

During Reconstruction, after the Civil War, Union soldiers continued to occupy the former Confederate states to ensure that Black Americans remained free and not terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan, and racist law enforcement and politicians. The constant military presence in the South allowed the federal government to implement the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments, but the removal of federal troops from the South in 1877 ended Reconstruction, precipitated Jim Crow, and birthed the struggle for freedom again.

In the 1960s, a century later, Black Americans finally re-earned many of the freedoms that had been taken away from them after the end of Reconstruction.

As Juneteenth approaches this year, America confronts a resurgent conservative movement that appears somehow emboldened by Donald Trumps defeat. They have attacked the Capitol, passed new laws to make it harder for people of color to vote, and have worked to outlaw the teaching of critical race theory, critical thinking, and the 1619 Project in schools.

The conservative response to the empowered communities of color that helped Joe Biden win the presidency has been the strategic denial of freedom and the silencing of voices of color. Their actions echo the philosophy of the Confederacy and those intent on destroying Reconstruction.

Their version of America cannot coexist with the criticism of Americas systemic oppression that will inevitably occur as people of color obtain more freedom and agency in American society. Instead they respond to criticisms that can reveal the truth about America by silencing dissent, and crafting a new narrative that depicts white Americans as the benevolent rulers of American society.

In 2020, then-President Trump planned to hold a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahomahome of one of the deadliest racist massacres in American historyon Juneteenth. Following national outcry he changed the date of the rally to June 20, but also attempted to take credit for popularizing the holiday.

I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous, said Trump. Nobody had ever heard of it.

For those Americans fighting against freedom and equality, Juneteenth may tragically become another opportunity to corrupt the truth and re-write history into a false narrative to celebrate white supremacy.

For the rest of America, Juneteenth is an opportunity to finally celebrate freedom in our society, but it is also a blunt reminder of the perversity of the Fourth of July.

In 1852, well-meaning white Americans believed that it made sense for a formerly enslaved Black American to celebrate the Fourth of July alongside them and embrace the freedoms that white Americans had given themselves, yet intentionally denied to Black Americans.

When Black Americans vigorously celebrate white freedom and the Fourth of July, America creates a hypocritical double consciousness that normalizes white supremacy and impedes freedom. Through Black celebration, white and Black Americans are encouraged to believe in the existence of an equitable American freedom that has never existed. To create the freedom its promised, America must liberate itself from many of the lies we have long told ourselves.

True freedom in America did not arrive for another 13 years after Douglass speech, so all he could do was denounce the bad-faith lie of the Fourth of July. Luckily for us, Juneteenth now provides America with an opportunity to celebrate the freedom of all Americans.

Continue reading here:

Forget the Fourth of July, It's Time to Celebrate Juneteenth - The Daily Beast