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LEGACY
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| HEIR TO A FORTUNE |
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| BRITE STAR 001 |
| COLD CASE FILES "A Case For Restitution" |
| The Civil War brought astonishing, unexpected changes not only to Sam Houston and Nathaniel Banks but everywhere in both North and South. For some, wealth changed to poverty and hope to despair; for others, the suffering of war spelled opportunity.
Few Americans understood what they were getting into when the war began. That fighting meant Killing.
The onset of hostilities sparked patriotic sentiments, optimistic speeches, and joyous ceremonies in both North and South. Northern communities, large and small, raised companies of volunteers eager to save the Unions and sent them off with fanfare.
In the South, confident recruits boasted of whiping the Yankees and returning home in time for dinner.
Through the spring of 1861 both sides scarmbled to organize and train their inexperienced, undiciplined armies.
On July 21, 1861, the first battle took place outside Manassas Junction, Virginia, near a stream called Bull Run. General Irvin McDowel and 30,000 Union troops attacked General P.G.T. Beauregard's 22,000 southerners.
As raw recruits struggled amid the confussion of their first battle, federal forces began to gain ground. Then they ran into a line of Virginia troops under General Thomas Jackson. "There is Jackson standing like a stone wall," shouted one Confederate. "Stonewall" Jackson's line held, and the arrival of 9,000 Confederate reinforcements won the day for the South.
Even more than the fighting itself, disruptions in civilian life robbed southerners of their gaiety and nonchanlance. The war altered southern society beyond all expectations and with astonishing speed.
As a result, southerners adopted new ways in response to these changes. Women, restricted to narrow roles in antebellum society, gained substantial new responsibilites. The wives and mothers of soldiers now headed households and performed men's work, adding to their traditional chores the task of raising crops and tending animals. Women in nonslaveowing families cultivated fields themselves, while wealthier women suddenly had to manage field hands unaccoustomed to female overseers. Only the very rich had enough servants to allow a woman's routine to continue undisturbed.
In the cities, white women who had been virturally excluded from the labor force found a limited number of respectable new paying jobs. Clerks had always been males, but the war changed that, too. "Government girls" staffed the Confederate bureaucracy, and female schoolteachers became commonplace in the south for the first time.
President Lincoln was a sensitive and compassionate man whose humility and moral anguish during the war were evident in his speeches and writings.
Fredrick Douglass, the astute and courageous black protest leader, sensed that Lincoln was without prejudice toward black people.
Lincoln first broached the subject of slavery in a substantive way in March 1862, when he proposed that the states consider emancipation on their own. He asked Congress to promise aid to any state that decided to emancipate, and he appealed to borderstate representatives to consider this course seriously.
What Lincoln proposed was gradual emancipation, with compensation for slaveholders and colonization of the freed slaves outside the united states.
Before the war was over, the Confederacy, too, addressed the issue of emancipation. Jefferson Davis himself offered a strong proposal in favor of liberation.
Racism in the Union Army was strong. Most white soldiers wanted nothing to do with black people and regarded them as inferior. "I never came out here for to free the black devils," wrote one soldier, and another objected to fighting beside African-Americans because, "We are a too superior race for that" For many, acceptance of black troops grew only because they could do heavy labor and "stop Bullets as well as white people." A popular song celebrated "Sambo's Right to Be Kilt" as the only justification for black enlistments.
But among some a change occurred. White officers who volunteered for black units only to gain promotion found that expeience altered their opinions. After just one month with black troops, a shite captan informed his wife, "I have a more elevated opinion of their abilities that I ever had before.
Black trooops created this change through their dedication They had a mission to destroy slavery and demonstrate their equality.
The human cost of the Civil War were enormous. The total number of military casualties on both sides exceeded 1 million a frightful toll for a nation of 31 million people. Aproximately 360,000 Union soldiers died, 110,000 of them from wounds suffered in battle. Another 272,175 union soldiers were wonded but survived. On the Confederate side, and estimated 260,000 lost their lives, and almost as many suffered wounds. More men died in the Civil War than in all other American wars combined until Vietnam.
The end finally came in the spring of 1865. Grant kept battering Lee, who tried but failed to break through the Union line. With the numberical superiority of Grant's army now greater thatn two to one, Confederate defeat was inevitable. On April 2, Lee abandoned Richmond and Petersburg. On April 9, hemmed in by Union troops, short of rations, and having fewer than thirty thousand men left, Lee surrendered at Appattoxx Courthouse. Grant treated his rival with respect and paroled the defeated troops, allowing cavalrymen to keep their horses and take them Home. Within weeks, Davis, who had wanted the war to continue, was captured in Georgia, and the remaining Confederate forces laid down their arms and surrendered. The was was over at last.
With Lee's surrender, Lincoln knew that the Union had been preserved, yet he did not live to see the war's end. On the evening of Good Friday, April 14, he accompanied his wife to Ford's Theatre in Washington to enjoy a popular commedy. There John Wilkes Booth, an embittered southern sympathizer, shot the president in the head at point-blank range. Lincoln died the next day. Twelve days later, troops tracked down and killed Booth... |
| Civil War History |
| The Question of Reparations for and to African American Descendants
In America, the slavery system gave rise to poverty, landlessness, underdevelopment, the crushing of culture and language, the loss of identify of Africans and their descendants, and the indoctrination of whites into a racist mindset.
After the Civil War ended in 1865, the African American slaves were freed and each family was to receive 40 acres, and sometimes, the loan of an army mule. This order was later rescinded. The promise was never kept and the idea of reparations began to grow.
Reparations for African slavery in the U.S. have been discussed since the end of the Civil War, when Andrew Johnson reneged on Union Army General William Sherman’s promise “Special Field Order #15” in 1865 (with the War Department’s Approval), which set aside land along the Georgia and south Carolina coasts for black settlement.
In 1963, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s book, “Why We Can’t Wait”, Dr. King writes that while “no amount of gold could provide adequate compensation for the exploitation of the Negro in America down through the centuries, a price could be placed on unpaid wages”.
Today, the African American (black) experience has been one uniquely marked by slavery, segregation, and persistent discrimination. Most blacks would probably agree that the legacy of African slavery in the United States continues to saddle many blacks with poor schools, hunger, poverty, a drug and crime plague, discrimination, high rates of African american prison incarcerations, family deterioration and racially isolated neighborhoods.
Randall Robinson in his book “The Debt: What America Owes Blacks” has an impressive list of legal and moral reasons why blacks should be paid for slavery’s ills.
It is estimated that approximately six thousand lynchings occurred between 1892 and 1921 (Feagin and Feagin, 1999)
In 1865, Congress passed a bill establishing the Freeman’s Bureau to oversee the transition of blacks from slavery to freedom. The bureau controlled 850,000 acres of abandoned and confiscated land. In 1866 & 1867 Representative Thaddeus Stevens introduces Reparation Bills. Both houses of Congress approved the bill for reparations, but President, Andrew Johnson vetoes it.
Africa and Africans have made a substantial, though involuntary, contribution to the building of the West’s industrial civilization. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 - Title VII prohibits employment discrimination based on race, sex national origin, or religion. title VI prohibits public access discrimination, leading to school desegregation. Title VIII is the original “Federal Fair Housing Law”, later amended in 1988.
The search for a sea route to India led the Portuguese in the fifteenth century to explore the West African coast. Having “discovered” Brazil in 1500, the Portuguese founded a sugar colony at Bahia in 1551. Between 1551 and 1575, before the traffic to North America had gotten under way, the Portuguese delivered more African slaves to Brazil than would ever reach British North America.
Along the 2,000 mile west coast of Africa between Senegambia and the northeastern shore of the Gulf of Guinea, a number of kingdoms flourished. As the demand for slaves rose, slavers moved down the West African coast from Senegambia to the more densely populated hinterlands of the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Senegambian coast and the area near the mouth of the Congo River yielded the greatest numbers.
In America, in 1619, a Dutch slave trader, who needed food, exchanged his cargo of Africans for edibles. Those Africans became indentured servants for cheap labor. And the whites became slave holders and slave masters.
It is estimated that from 1450 and 1850, at least 12 million Africans were shipped from Africa across the Atlantic ocean primarily to colonies in North America and the West Indies.
On the African continent, flourishing civilizations were destroyed; systems of government were disintegrated; millions of African citizens were forcibly removed and a pattern of poverty and underdevelopment directly resulted.
Slavery laws dehumanized not only the people who were labeled as slaves but also the slave owners and political leaders who created and maintained this culture of the society. Although the inital status of person of African descent in this country may not have been too different from that of the English indentured servants, all of that changed with the passage of laws turning human beings into property and making slavery a status from which neither individuals nor their children could escape (Franklin, 1980). While, the U.S. government encoded slavery into the Constitution, protected and nourished it for a century, it also waged the Civil War that cost thousands of white lives and ultimately ended slavery.
Gaining freedom did not give African Americans equality with whites. African Americans were subjected to many indignities because of race. Through informal practices in the North and Jim Crow laws in the South, African Americans experienced segregation in housing, employment, education, and all public accommodations. African Americans who did not “stay in their place” frequently became the victims of violent attacks and lynch mobs (Franklin, 1980). Lynchings were used by whites to intimidate.
In 1989, Congressman John Conyers first introduces a bill that would establish a commission to examine slavery and its lingering effects on African Americans and contemporary U.S. society. (He, Conyers, has introduced legislation to examine the lingering effects of slavery and the case for reparations in every congressional session since 1989. In every session, the bill has failed to win a hearing.)
In 1991, the Civil Rights Act of 1991 - adds provisions to Title VII protections, including a right to a jury trial. In 1995, House of Representatives Bill 891, which calls for a Reparations Study Commission, is introduced in the 104th Congress by John Conyers and former representative, Norm Mineta. Many Americans willingly admit slavery was wrong, and agree it is morally correct to pay victimized groups interned during World War II for their suffering. Yet they are not willing to pay blacks for theirs.
In 1995, after being sued by descendants of African slaves for a number of kinds of damages, the Ninth Circuit affirmed that the Federal Tort Claims Act (which waives the government’s “sovereign immunity” in some situations, but retains it in others), bars such class action suits.
June, 1997, President Clinton launches what he says will be a “great and unprecendented conversation about race” that will “transform the problem of prejudice into the promise of unity.” The “conversation” falls short of its expectations for many, and ends up becoming a forum for black grievances.
In 1997, during a trip to Africa, President Clinton says, “Going back to the time before we were even a nation, European Americans received the fruits of the slave trade and we were wrong in that”. This is the closest the American government has come to an apology. Also, in 1997, President Clinton apologizes and the U.S. government pays $10 million dollars to the black survivors and family members victimized by the syphilis experiment conducted in the 1930’s by the U.S. Public Health Service and which ended in 1972, in which 399 black men with syphilis were not treated in order to study the progression of the desease. In 1974, the U. S. government paid the $10 million settlement.
And on January 6, 1999, Representative John Conyers introduces the “Commission to Study Repartion Proposals for African-American Act:
A California law enacted in late 2000 requires insurance companies to disclose insurance policies they may have issued. The state also is requiring university officials to assemble a team of scholars to research the history of slavery and current California busineses who benefited from slavery.
In February, 2001, a state commission in Oklahoma appointed to study the Tulsa incident that in 1921 which killed nearly 300 people, mostly blacks, urged the state to pay restitution to survivors an victims’ descendants.
On March 26, 2002, three class actions suits seeking reparations for the profits of slavery were filed on behalf of the descendants of slaves against FleetBoston Financial Corporation, insurance company Aetna Inc., and railroad operator CSX. These became the first of what may be a succession of such actions against various corporate and governmental defendants. According to the actions, FleetBoston is the successor to Providence Bank, which was Rhode Island businessman John Brown. Brown owned ships that embarked on sea voyages and FleetBoston is said to have lent substantial sums to Brown, thus alleging and profiting from Brown’s slave trade. FleetBoston also collected customs fees during transporting slaves according to an article written in ClassActionAmerica,com.
Since the slaves or their descendants have never been paid, Cornelius Jones, in 1915 sued the U.S. government, arguing that it had profited from slave labor through a federal tax on cotton.
In conclusion, as 1998 Nobel Prize Winner Amarttya Sen has written, “income does not equate to freedom”. As he points out, for all the financial income that Blacks in America have - more than those in developing countries and Blacks in other countries throughout the world, they, African American descendants, have an absolutely lower life expectancy than these other supposedly “poorer” nations and people. Certainly a reparations check isn’t going to address that problem in the black community. And unjust enrichment arguments ignores the real losses of slavery - identity, health and life. And further, although some African Americans have made substantial occupational and education gains, many more have not. The African American employm |
| A War With Purpose |
| SO MANY SHADES OF BLUE
There are so many shades of Blue
Like me and you...
There are so many shades of Blue.
Like two and who?...
There are so many shades of Blue...
Like Red, White and Blue.
There are so many shades of Blue.
Like the Twilight...Stars in Navy Blue...
There are so many shades of Blue.
Times are old and times get new.
There are so many shades of Blue.
From morning till night...
From Spring to fall...
From God to you...
There are so many shades of Blue.
From heaven’s basket...
Babes pink and ------
There are so many shades of Blue.
Do you miss me..
like I miss you?
When you don’t call, it makes me ------
Blue...Boo
Then I find that...
There are so many shades of Blue.
Like my three gold rings...there stones are light blue and dark blue too
There are so many shades of
Blue.
MY DAD
I never knew my Dad...
My father...Who art in Heaven is all I had.
My Real Dad Never Fed me...
Never Changed my Diapers...
He..Never Heard my first Words...
Never saw my First Step...
Never gave me any help.
So..,
Throughout the years,
My Dad...Who art in Heaven is all I had.
That Day...I learn to Read,
My Real Dad never heard me,
And..On that Day I learned to Survive
My Dad, Who art in Heaven had heard my Cry
He picked me up, and Held me tight..
And dried my tears from crying throughout the night.
And when the morning came..
Joy...replaced the Fears and Blame..
So To God...
My Dad...
My Father...who art in heaven is all I had
Thank you for Jesus, your son, and all his blessed ways.
I shall never forget him and be forever grateful all my days.
THE SEARCH
I sit back and daydream about this world of mine...
And...I sit up thinking about is my mother really Clementine?
So, I inhale the feelings of gladness
To Later on,
Then exhale the moment of sadness
You’ll count the tears roling down my face...
I’ll count the steps “On my heart” without a trace.
Searching for my father...Longer than I expected it to be.
But I soon had to search closer,
And I found the inner me.
To me, It seemed normal, But no one ever Believes us
To them it seems strange, But I really found my Jesus.
Even as time leaves you, Whatever...
Our God’s love stayes with you forever.
So,...
Don’t be scared and have no Fear!
Give your love and get closer and Near!
And don’t mistake me as the slave you want me to Be.
I’m only a child of God, and for that, I’m very H-A-P-P-Y!!
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| A PROPROSAL |
| A PROPOSAL
African American Descendants Reparation Foundation A.A.D.R.F.
U.S. TAX W - 2 FORM
Weekly - Bi-Weekly or Monthly
Earnings and Deductions Pay Stub
Mr. John Doe
222 Congress Street
U.S.A Gross Pay
Reg._____Overtime:______Federal FICA_____
Local:______ State:____ SDI Advance
Other Ded:_____ P/R Ded Net Pay Check No.
Check Date_______
Beginning 2004 Social Security :555-44-0021 A.A.D.R.F:______
Voluntary: $1 - 10
Contribution:
Ö...Yes, I wish to contribute $1.00 or more per week per payroll deduction toward the African Americian Descendants Reparation Foundation.
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