Reparations for Slavery and Disenfranchisement to African Americans: Four Hundred Years

By Gene A. Brown

A DYNAMIC BOOK, by Teacher, Entrepreneur, and Author, GENE A.BROWN, has taken the forum of “Reparations for Slavery and Disenfranchisement” to a new height. The Magnitude and duration of this catastrophic event which extended over four centuries, from the Middle Passage Voyages, to the late 19th century. He has, painstakingly, researched the evils of the institution of slavery, and deemed it to be the most heinous of crimes against humanity that the World has ever assessed. This epic revelation unveils the panoramic details and accountability for the ills and effects of slavery. The climatic apex of the book presents the remedies for the Litigation, Payments, Restitution, and Compensation to African Americans for Slave Labor and Bondage for nearly four centuries.

The terms of litigation are modeled after the Jewish Holocaust litigation and compensation Decree, and victims who were compensated for “free, forced labor and property” in concentration camps across Europe, and those who were compensated in the Nuremburg Litigation Decree; to the Japanese Americans, who were encamped during World War II, and who were paid with cash payments and letters of apology from President G. H. W. Bush, and, finally, to Native Americans who were compensated with huge cash payments during the 1970s and 1980s. African Americans, to date, have received No Compensations.

The last chapter, A MODEST PROPOSAL, presents an outline for the mathematical configuration for the amounts and terms of litigation to African Americans for the plurality of slavery. Proof is provided for the sanctioning of over a dozen European Countries, and the United States for such Reparations, collectively. Particularly, from those countries who were abundantly enriched, and who were the beneficiaries of such enrichment from slave labor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 31, 2008
• ISBN: 9781450080729

Gene A. Brown

About the Author The author was born, March 17, 1941, in a small town in Georgia, southeast of Atlanta. He graduated Valedictorian of his high school class, 1960, during the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, and the same year that Charlene Hunter-Gault and Hamilton Holmes enrolled at the University of Georgia as its first black students. He attended Savannah State University, 1960, in Savannah, Georgia, during the time that “sit-in” demonstrations were taking place at the lunch-counters, in the Southern States. Unable to secure financing for his second year, he moved to New York. In 1962 he attended Brooklyn College where he was a student of the renowned, Dr. John Hope Franklin, who was Chairman of the Department of History. He, also, attended the Bernard M. Baruch College, in New York City, and he received a Bachelor of Arts Degree, in Social Science, from Washington State University, Pullman, Washington.

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PREFACE

THE AFRICAN SLAVERY CHRONOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

FAMOUS FIRSTS

AND HEROES

EPILOGUE

ENDNOTES

SOURCES AND FOOTNOTES

GLOSSARY

Dedication

To My Family Tree:

Willie Scott (1848-1888) Born into Slavery, Great Grandfather

William Henry Scott, Sr. (1880-1937) Grandfather

William Henry Scott, Jr. (1930-2005) Uncle

Minnie Dell Scott-Brown (1921-2006) My Mother

Gene (Scott) Brown (1941-) Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A debt of gratitude embraces the many Historians and Students of history whose contributions helped to bring this book to fruition. Special gratitude is given to BURT NEUBORNE whose invaluable argument, in The Holocaust Reparations Litigation: Lessons for the Slavery Reparations Movement, has been a motivating force in setting the stage for the Litigation Process within this dissertation. It is a model, for similar efforts on the behalf of African Americans’ descendents of slave laborers, which is, now, examined and scrutinized. The validity and justification of Reparations to African Americans are, in many respects, similar to restitution and compensation paid to the victims in the Holocaust Litigation.

Historians have, carefully, chartered the vast transfer of wealth amassed from slavery and forced, free labor, from Western Europe, to the shores of North and South America; the countries of Portugal, Spain, France, The United States, Great Britain, The Netherlands, and Denmark—who were unjustly, enriched as a result of the African Slave Trade and the trafficking thereof.

Special thanks is given to the Wharton Alumni Magazine of the Wharton School of Finance for the biography of one of its first, African American, Doctorate recipients, and special university graduate, Richard Robert Wright, Sr. (1855-1948), and to my Alma Mater, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, whose brilliant instructors and invaluable resources were stepping stones to the effective research of the manuscript.

Finally, to News Max.Com, whose article of May 9, 2006: John Conyers: U. S. Owes Slavery Reparations suggests that the House Judiciary Committee’s chairman would

Propose full-blown congressional hearings on whether the government should pay black Americans reparations for slavery. In 1989, Representative, John Conyers (D.-Mich.) introduced legislation to establish The commission to study Reparations Proposals for African American Act (H.R. 40). Eighteen Years has passed since this proposal was rendered. It is my wish that this book, will in some way, be beneficial to the commission in this study.

Any book addressing Civil Rights would not be conclusive without the profile of courage, which President John Fitzgerald Kennedy demonstrated during his years in the White House. His concerns, for Justice and Equality for all people, were the prelude for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Gene A. Brown

Atlanta, Georgia

July 31, 2007

PREFACE

The Constitution of the United States recognized the fusion of slavery and the aftermath of this demonic institution. When our forefathers drew up the Constitution, there, in the small print, were precise warnings of the evils of slavery that, apparently, fell through the cracks. The Constitution, clearly, stated the most important rights, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

African Americans have been held under the hand of oppression, inequality, disenfranchisement (denial of the right to vote), and blatant deceit for Four-Hundred years, since slavery began. Since the 1860s, when the 13th, 14th, and the 15th Amendments were enacted, ratified, and became a permanent part of the United States’ Constitution, they have, merely, been entries recorded and printed in the pages of the Constitution. The rhetoric, of these amendments, was as weak as the enforcement policy that they, reportedly, guaranteed when they were made into law.

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the Fourteenth Amendment granted blacks citizenship. The Fifteenth Amendment gave black men enfranchisement, or the right to vote, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 attempted to ban racial discrimination in public places.

Reconstruction, after the fall of the Antebellum South, attempted to deal with the issues of social, political, and economic reforms, but the aftermath of Reconstruction was a success as well as a failure. Its successes reunited the North and South; required all Southern State legislatures to abolish slavery, and the debate of states’ rights vs. federalism was resolved.

Reconstruction began to fail when President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered Federal Troops to withdraw from the South in 1877(a provision of the Compromise of 1877); when former Confederate Leaders and slave owners, methodically, returned to power, and Southern courts passed black codes, imposed voter registration laws, and allowed slavery-type sharecropping, which made it, almost, impossible for the Freedmen to survive. The Northern Radical Republicans grew tired of Reconstruction, and the government, virtually, ignored the violations of blacks’ civil rights. This was due to the acceptance of the Compromise of 1877 in order to satisfy the Democratic south and the Northern Radical Republicans. Rutherford B. Hayes, was declared President in the election of 1876, by one electoral vote (19 to 20),even though he received a minority of the popular vote. In exchange, the South got home rule, money for domestic stability, and their request for the premature withdrawal of Federal Troops from the South. They passed Black Codes that restricted the rights of freed slaves, scraped social programs, and shut down their public schools. The bottom line is that the rights promised to blacks during Reconstruction have not been, fully, granted to this day, because African Americans do not have the PERMANENT right to vote as do all WHITE AMERICAN CITIZENS!!

Such has been the usurpation and the sufferance of African Americans for Four Hundred Years of bondage, slavery, and humiliating Disenfranchisement at the hands of the oppressors.

The time has come when, the debt to the oppressed, must be meet with Reparations, Restitution, and Compensation for Four Hundred Years of painstaking, FREE LABOR and BONDAGE. The same that was bestowed upon JEWISH AMERICANS for free labor in concentration camps across Europe in the Nuremberg Litigation Decree; JAPANESE AMERICANS, who were encamped during World War II, and who were paid with cash and letters of apology from President G.W. Bush in 1988, and NATIVE AMERICANS, who were compensated with huge cash amounts in 1970, 1971, 1979, 1980, and 1988.

Chapter Sixteen, A Modest Proposal, provides the outline and terms of litigation and compensation to African Americans for the plurality of slavery. This chapter provides proof for the sanctioning of over a dozen European Countries, including South America, North America, the United States of North America, Portugal, Spain, France, Great Britain, Holland (the Netherlands), and Denmark. All of these countries were abundantly, enriched from slave labor and slave resources (slave-breeding), and they amassed great wealth and fortunes as a result of slavery. In addition, a petition is made to the United States’ Government of North America for the restoration of some 400,000 acres of land on Sea Island to African Americans, or to provide just compensation for same.

Some nations, in particularly, bear the brunt of compensation, to the extent of their involvement in the Middle Passage voyages of slave importation. The Portuguese held the early lead in the slave trade, followed by Great Britain, who gained, virtually, a monopoly during the 18th century. However, Portugal went so far as to establish colonies on African soil, namely, Angola (1571), Sao Tome and Sao Principe, which provided Portugal with an inexhaustible supply of African slaves for their own use, and for exportation and sale to North and South America (the United States of America and Brazil).

THE AFRICAN SLAVERY CHRONOLOGY

1444 – First slaves brought to Portugal from northern Mauritania

1444-5 – Portuguese make contract with Sub-Saharan Africa

1471 – Portuguese arrive in the Gold Coast

1482 – Portuguese begin building Elmina Castle on the gold Coast

1488 – Bartholomew Diaz goes around the Cape of Good Hope

1490 – First Portuguese missionaries go to the Congo

1500 – Sugar plantations established on Island of Sao Tome two hundred miles From the coast of West Africa

1510 – First slaves shipped to Spanish colonies in South America via Spain

1516 – Benin ceases to export male slaves from Africa for fear of manpower loss

1532 – First direct shipment of slaves form Africa to the Americas

1652 – Dutch establish colony at Cape of Good Hope, South Africa

1700 – Asanti begin to consolidate power

1780s – Slave trade at its peak

1776-83 – American War of Independence

1787 – The Sentiments of Slavery by Quobna Ottobah Cugoano published

1789 – French Revolution & Life of Olaudo Equiano published

1791 – Slave uprising in Haiti led by Toussaint L’Ouverture

1804 – Danes pass law against slave trade and Haitian Independence

1807 – British pass law declaring buying, selling, and the transporting of slaves Illegal (ownership continues)

1808 – North America abolish slave trade (ownership continues)

1814 – Dutch outlaw slave trade

1823 – Founding of Anti-slavery committee London

1834 – British law declaring ownership of slaves illegal

1839 – Amistad slave ship rebellion

1848 – French abolish slavery

1860-65 – American Civil War

1865 – Thirteenth Amendment abolishes slavery in America

1868 – Fourteenth Amendment makes African Americans citizens

1869 – Portugal abolishes slavery

1870 – Fifteenth Amendment enfranchises African Americans

1886 – Cuba abolishes slavery

1888 – Brazil abolishes slavery

1936 – Slavery made illegal in Northern Nigeria

INTRODUCTION

Africa boasts one of the world’s earliest civilizations, that of the Ancient Egyptians of Northern Africa. The Egyptian Pharaohs built great Pyramids and Temples. Later, other nations established Colonies in Northern Africa, as did the Phoenicians who built the city of Cartage. The Romans came and built their own cities, and they were followed by the Arabs Conquerors, whose armies swept across Northern Africa, bringing with them the Muslim Religion. The southern part of Africa was across The Sahara Desert, and along the Nile River. Just south of Egypt is a country called Sudan. It was called Nubia during the time of ancient Egypt, and a civilization arose there about 2000 B.C. The people of Nubia or Kush were Black. About 1500 B.C., Egypt conquered Kush, and for the next 500 years, Kush was ruled by Egyptians. By 1000 B. C., The Kushites were able to drive out the Egyptians. Subsequently, the Kushites began mining iron and weapons. The Kush rule lasted until 350 A.D.

During 350 A.D., a Kingdom called Ghana rose up. Ghana was rich in Gold, and Islam became part of their religion, which weakened the Kingdom. The Mandingo people of a Kingdom called Mali took over Ghana near the end of the 13th century, and from 1312 A.D. to 1337 A.D., the Mali Kingdom was ruled by Mansa Musa, who was a Black Muslim. He invited Arab Scholars to come to Mali, and teach, and nearby, Timbuktu became a center of Muslim learning. Mansa Musa became famous when he made his pilgrimage to the Holy City of Mecca in Arabia.

Askia Mohammed of the Kingdom of Songhai took control of Mali during 1400 A.D. to 1528 A. D., and Timbuktu reached its height as an important trading and learning center. The Moroccan King, Mohamed al-Mansur, defeated Songhai with guns versus spears which was used by the Songhai warriors.

During the time of Christ (1 A.D. to 33 A. D.), a great migration began in Africa. Black peoples of