Hey to Your Mama N'em

Diaspora Hypertext: NEWS: Harvard to Digitize 18th and 19th Century Anti-Slavery Petitions

Thu, 23 May 2013 21:54:16 -0400

Diaspora Hypertext: NEWS: Harvard to Digitize 18th and 19th Century Anti-Slavery Petitions:

Reblogged from African Diaspora, Ph.D.:

The Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University is digitizing eighteenth and nineteenth-century anti-slavery petitions:

“…Included in the thousands of petitions are first-person accounts of former slaves and…

usnatarchives: From May 22 to 31, the digital collection of the...

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:49:41 -0400

usnatarchives:

From May 22 to 31, the digital collection of the USCT Service Records will be free on www.Fold3.com.

On May 22, 1863, the War Department issued General Orders 143, establishing a Bureau of Colored Troops in the Adjutant General’s Office to recruit and organize African American soldiers to fight for the Union Army. With this order, all African American regiments were designated as United States Colored Troops (USCT).

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the USCT, and the National Archives is pleased to announce the completion of the USCT Service Records Digitization Project. In partnership with Fold3, the project provides online access to all service records—more than 3.8 million images—of Union volunteers in USCT units.

Remember: All National Archives collections on Fold3.com can always be viewed for free at a computer at any National Archives facility nationwide.

The photo and paperwork above come from the compiled military service records of former slave Edmund Delaney. Read his story on the Prologue blog.

"(Among the soldiers hanged for rape and murder was Louis Till, the father of Emmett Till.)"

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:05:00 -0400

“(Among the soldiers hanged for rape and murder was Louis Till, the father of Emmett Till.)”

- Rape by American Soldiers in World War II France - NYTimes.com

Trailer from the 1920 silent film, Within Our Gates, directed by...

Thu, 16 May 2013 20:47:27 -0400

Trailer from the 1920 silent film, Within Our Gates, directed by Oscar Micheaux. The film portrays the hardships blacks faced in Jim Crow America. The subject matter was so controversial at the time, that the film was severely edited. Most prints were destroyed, and the film was considered lost for 70 years until a lone print was discovered in a Spanish archive. Within Our Gates is believed to be the earliest surviving film directed by an African-American filmmaker. The full version of the film is available online.

The Lincoln Motion Picture Company was the first movie...

Wed, 15 May 2013 12:30:00 -0400

The Lincoln Motion Picture Company was the first movie production company organized by black film makers. The company was founded by actor Noble Johnson in May 1916 in Omaha, Nebraska. The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition was the first of six movies the company produced between 1916 and 1921. The films were intended to create positive images of black people and black life in America, countering the explicitly racist images of white films such as D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. The movies became part of a genre known as ‘race movies’ or ‘race films’, a genre that existed until around 1950.

Contrabands of War African Americans crossing the Rappahannock...

Sat, 11 May 2013 12:00:41 -0400

Contrabands of War

African Americans crossing the Rappahannock River, seeking freedom behind Union lines.

Rappahannock, Virginia, August 1862.

Photographed by Timothy H. O’Sullivan during the second battle of Bull Run.

Library of Congress

Contrabands of War Contraband school, ca. 1860 - ca....

Fri, 10 May 2013 12:00:26 -0400

Contrabands of War

Contraband school, ca. 1860 - ca. 1865

Created by the War Department, Office of the Chief Signal Officer

National Archives and Records Administration (ID: 524418)

Contrabands of War Colorized stereograph showing escaped slaves...

Thu, 09 May 2013 12:00:34 -0400

Contrabands of War

Colorized stereograph showing escaped slaves gathered on the Foller Plantation in Cumberland Landing, Virginia

May 14, 1862.

James F. Gibson, photographer

Civil War Photograph Collection, Library of Congress

Contrabands of War Former slave, photographed between 1862 and...

Wed, 08 May 2013 12:00:40 -0400

Contrabands of War

Former slave, photographed between 1862 and 1865

Gladstone Collection of African American Photographs, Library of Congress

Contrabands of War Freed slaves at the Headquarters of General...

Tue, 07 May 2013 12:00:00 -0400

Contrabands of War

Freed slaves at the Headquarters of General Lafayette,” photographed by Mathew Brady

Yorktown, Virginia, ca. 1862

Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University

The term ‘Contraband’ was coined by General Benjamin F. Butler to describe escaped slaves. It was used to describe the thousands of slaves who sought refuge behind Union Army lines during the Civil War. Many of these men and women became laborers in support of the army’s efforts and, for the first time in their lives, earned wages.

"[Patsey] had a genial and pleasant temper, and was faithful and obedient. Naturally, she was a..."

Sun, 05 May 2013 12:00:00 -0400

“[Patsey] had a genial and pleasant temper, and was faithful and obedient. Naturally, she was a joyous creature, a laughing, light-hearted girl, rejoicing in the mere sense of existence. Yet Patsey wept oftener and suffered more than any of her companions. She had been literally excoriated. Her back bore the scars of a thousand stripes, not because she was backward in her work, nor because she was of an unmindful and rebellious spirit, but because it had fallen to her lot to be the slave of a licentious master and a jealous mistress. She shrank before the lustful eye of the one, and was in danger even of her life at the hands of the other, and between the two she was indeed accursed.

In the great house, for days together, there were high and angry words, poutings and estrangement, whereof she was the innocent cause. Nothing delighted the mistress so much as to see her suffer, and more than once, when Epps had refused to sell her, has she tempted me with bribes to put her secretly to death and bury her body in some lonely place in the margin of the swamp. Gladly would Patsey have appeased this unforgiving spirit if it had been in her power, but not like Joseph, dared she escape from Master Epps, leaving her garment in his hand. Patsey walked under a cloud. If she uttered a word in opposition to her master’s will, the lash was resorted to at once to bring her to subjection. If she was not watchful when about her cabin, or when walking in the yard, a billet of wood or a broken bottle, perhaps, hurled from her mistress’ hand, would smite her unexpectedly in the face. The enslaved victim of lust and hate, Patsey had no comfort of her life.”

- SOLOMON NORTHUP, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, 1853

National Humanities Center, On the Masters’ Sexual Abuse of Slaves: Selections from 19th- & 20th-c. Slave Narratives

Advertisement for a teenager, 15 to 16 years old. New York,...

Thu, 02 May 2013 14:17:02 -0400

Advertisement for a teenager, 15 to 16 years old.

New York, March 30, 1789

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division

New York Public Library Digital Gallery

“Lights & Shadows of Southern Life” On the back...

Wed, 01 May 2013 12:00:52 -0400

“Lights & Shadows of Southern Life”

On the back of the photo: “Aunt Martha and children, Slaves, Nashville”

ca. 1860

Created by:T.M. Schleier, Nashville, Tennessee

From: Randolph Linsly Simpson African-American collection,Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Manumission certificate for William Steward, mariner granted...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:00:45 -0400

Manumission certificate for William Steward, mariner granted citizenship.

May 29, 1820

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture / Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division

New York Public Library

Slave pass and marriage acknowledgement from A. Greer to John...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:00:45 -0400

Slave pass and marriage acknowledgement from A. Greer to John Neely allowing the marriage of one of his male slaves to one of Neely’s female slaves, on the condition that they do not let the marriage interfere with their work.

Mecklenburg County, North Carolina

Potts Family, J. Walter, Papers. J. Murrey Atkins Library Special Collections Department, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, N.C.

dynamicafrica: theatlantic: How Cuban Villagers Learned They...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 21:05:50 -0400

dynamicafrica:

theatlantic:

How Cuban Villagers Learned They Descended From Sierra Leone Slaves*

They were adamant about going all out. People who sing the village’s songs—melodies and rhythms that tie them to this inaccessible chiefdom — are considered family. “Our grandparents who told us the stories about our people going as slaves, we know now that they didn’t lie,” says Joe Allie, an elder of the village and Pokawa’s uncle.

“These must be our people,” says Solomon Musa, a young man who works as a teacher in the village, “when we saw the people who practice the same things we used to do, we were so happy, we are full of joy.”

Read more. [Image: They Are We]

*Sierra Leonean enslaved peoples.

Receipt for the purchase of a slave named ‘Davy’,...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 12:00:50 -0400

Receipt for the purchase of a slave named ‘Davy’, September 28, 1850.

Davy was sold by M. Kelly of Richmond, Virginia to John Finlayson of Jefferson County, Florida for $765.

State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory

King Cotton's Long Shadow

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 23:39:53 -0400

King Cotton's Long Shadow:

Without slavery, however, the survey maps of the General Land Office would have remained a sort of science-fiction plan for a society that could never happen. Between 1820 and 1860 more than a million enslaved people were transported from the upper to the lower South, the vast majority by the venture-capitalist slave traders the slaves called “soul drivers.” The first wave cleared the region for cultivation. “Forests were literally dragged out by the roots,” the former slave John Parker remembered in “His Promised Land.” Those who followed planted the fields in cotton, which they then protected, picked, packed and shipped — from “sunup to sundown” every day for the rest of their lives.

Eighty-five percent of the cotton Southern slaves picked was shipped to Britain. The mills that have come to symbolize the Industrial Revolution and the slave-tilled fields of the South were mutually dependent. Every year, British merchant banks advanced millions of pounds to American planters in anticipation of the sale of the cotton crop. Planters then traded credit in pounds for the goods they needed to get through the year, many of them produced in the North. “From the rattle with which the nurse tickles the ear of the child born in the South, to the shroud that covers the cold form of the dead, everything comes to us from the North,” said one Southerner.

As slaveholders supplied themselves (and, much more meanly, their slaves) with Northern goods, the credit originally advanced against cotton made its way north, into the hands of New York and New England merchants who used it to purchase British goods. Thus were Indian land, African-American labor, Atlantic finance and British industry synthesized into racial domination, profit and economic development on a national and a global scale.

When the cotton crop came in short and sales failed to meet advanced payments, planters found themselves indebted to merchants and bankers. Slaves were sold to make up the difference. The mobility and salability of slaves meant they functioned as the primary form of collateral in the credit-and-cotton economy of the 19th century.

It is not simply that the labor of enslaved people underwrote 19th-century capitalism. Enslaved people were the capital: four million people worth at least $3 billion in 1860, which was more than all the capital invested in railroads and factories in the United States combined. Seen in this light, the conventional distinction between slavery and capitalism fades into meaninglessness.

We are accustomed to reckoning the legacy of slavery in the United States in terms of black disadvantage. The centrality of slavery to the nation’s economic development, however, suggests that any calculation of the nation’s unpaid debt for slavery must include a measure of the wealth it produced, of advantage as well as disadvantage. The United States, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, was “built upon a groan.”

Advertisement for a fugitive slave, Maryland, 19th century....

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 12:00:29 -0400

Advertisement for a fugitive slave, Maryland, 19th century. Chicago Historical Society. Accessed in: The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record

“She set about getting slaves any way she could, but her...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:00:26 -0400

“She set about getting slaves any way she could, but her usual method was to buy children.”

“Aunt” Eliza a Slaveholder

Cleveland Gazette, Vol. 9, Issue 10; October 17, 1891

via ohiohistory.org / The African American Experience in Ohio, 1850-1920