WHAT WE ARE IS WHO WE WERE

SLAVERY WHERE I LIVE

What do you know about slavery in the United States of America? Did you learn anything about slavery history in your classrooms? I didn’t.

When I was in school, the USA spoke of the propaganda that the Soviet Union, Russia, used as their truth, their history. The USA history that I was taught in my education was propaganda. I was not taught anything about the history of the Native American Indians or the Black slavery. I was not taught anything about the internment camps of the Japanese. Where did I learn about these things? On PBS television shows.

When I was in my all white high school in the 1960s, I found a book in my school library, Black Like Me. I read it with much interest.

Slavery By Another Name by Douglas Blackmon is a book that reveals that once slavery was outlawed, slavery was given another name. I have heard the author twice now speak and just Friday, June 20th, Douglas Blackmon was on Bill Moyer’s Journal. In the 1930’s until World War II, slavery existed.

Slavery exists today, as well: www.notforsalecampaign.org

www.slaverymap.org

From the transcript of this segment of Bill Moyer’s Journal, June 20th, 2008 with Douglas Blackmon:

BILL MOYERS: How is it, you and I both Southerners, how is it we could grow up right after this era, and be so unaware of what had just happened to our part of the country?

DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, I think there are a lot of explanations for that. The biggest one is simply that this is a history that we haven't wanted to know as a country. We've engaged in a in a kind of collective amnesia about this, particularly about the severity of it.

And the official history of this time, the conventional history tended to minimize the severity of the things that were done again and again and again, and to focus instead, on the idea, on a lot of false mythologies. Like, this idea that freed slaves after emancipation became lawless and sort of went wild, and thievery, and all sorts of crimes being committed by African-Americans right after the Civil War and during Reconstruction. But when you go back, as I did, and look at the arrest records from that period of time, there's just no foundation for that. And the reality was there was hardly any crime at all. And huge numbers of people were being arrested on these specious charges, so they could be forced back into labor.

Link to the video of the Bill Moyer’s Journal with Douglas Blackmon:
www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06202008

I live in Newport County in Rhode Island, USA. Amistad the movie was shot here. My favorite scene in the movie is of the argument before the Supreme Court by John Adams. Personal note: My friend made Adams bedroom canopy and bedding, which is in the scene just before the Supreme Court ruling.

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Adams addresses the Supreme Court in Amastad
“Who We Are Is Who We Were”

I learned tonight while googling Slavery in Rhode Island that the founder, William Ellery Channing, of the Unitarian Church where I go, if I go to church, had a slave in his household. I had already known that slaves were auctioned off 12 minutes from where my house is from a previous google search. This place is in downtown Newport, Rhode Island. And that households here were typical if they owned slaves.

The following excerpt is taken from www.eyesofglory.com
“Black History
Here in Newport, Rhode Island we have several physical ‘touch stones’ to remind us of the legacy left by those Africans and later African Americans who graced our city with their presence. From 1696 when the first documented slave ship, the ‘Sea Flower’, touched our shores, to the present, African Americans have worked, raised their families and prospered in the city by the sea.

The American Slave Trade and Newport share similar origins. Newport, the most prosperous of colonial American ports, saw unprecedented growth throughout the 18th century; mostly from the export and trade of rum, spermaceti candles and slaves. By 1784, the fledgling state government abolished slavery.

Many of the slaves that came to Newport’s shore would arrive, like most goods, at the Long Wharf. These slaves would be auctioned off to the highest bidders at the Granary (market), which is today known as the Brick Market at the foot of Washington Square.”

Brick Market is in the central tourist area of Newport, today.

Bristol, Rhode Island is a small quaint town just over the Bristol Bridge from my hometown of Portsmouth. Bristol has a Fourth of July parade, which it boasts is the longest running Fourth of July parade in the country.

The PBS television channel will be airing in June 2008, P.O.V.’s TRACES OF THE TRADE: A STORY OF THE DEEP NORTH told by Katrina Browne, whose family is from Bristol, Rhode Island. This is the bicentennial year of the U.S. abolition of the slave trade. Katrina Browne discovered that her slave-trading ancestors from Bristol, Rhode Island were not an aberration, but rather, they were just the most prominent actors in the North's vast complicity in slavery, buried in myths of Northern innocence.

Katrina Browne — a direct descendant of Mark Anthony DeWolf, the first slaver in the family — took the unusual step of writing to 200 descendants. She invited them to journey with her from Rhode Island to Ghana to Cuba and back, retracing the Triangle Trade that made the DeWolfs the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. Nine relatives signed up. TRACES OF THE TRADE: A STORY FROM THE DEEP NORTH is Browne's account of the journey.

From the transcript of Bill Moyer’s Journal, June 20th, 2008:

KATRINA BROWNE: My DeWolf ancestors were known as the "Great Folk" in Bristol. There were professors and writers, artists and architects, and many Episcopal ministers. I was proud to be related to them. It never occurred to me to ask how we got so established.

What no one in my family realized was that the DeWolfs were the largest slave-trading family in US history. They brought over 10,000 Africans to the Americas in chains. Half a million of their descendants could be alive today.

The slave trade was illegal for most of the time the DeWolfs were practicing it. To maneuver around the law, they secured a political favor from none other than President Thomas Jefferson, whose campaign they'd supported. Jefferson appointed their brother-in-law as Bristol's customs official. This man always happened to be looking the other way as DeWolf ships went in and out of harbor.

…At the Bristol Historical Society, tucked away in a corner on the second floor, there was a file cabinet, full of DeWolf papers. These eerie records revealed the details of the logical economic model that the DeWolfs developed from 1769 to 1820. Here's how they made it work.

First they got the financing together. They recruited fellow townspeople to buy shares in their voyages and eventually started their own bank. They also started an insurance company to cover the risk. Rum was the prime currency of the slave trade, so James acquired a distillery from his father-in-law. The DeWolfs also purchased ships, mostly from builders in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The ships took rum to the Guinea Coast to trade for Africans. "July 4th, 1795, bought nine prime slaves, one woman and eight men and paid for them tobacco, rum, hats, bread, mackerel." Many of the enslaved Africans were brought to work on plantations that the DeWolfs established in Cuba. These plantations supplied sugar and molasses needed to make the rum back in Bristol. They also served as holding places for Africans while the DeWolfs waited for slave prices to go up at auction. "Havana, Sept. 11, 1806, John DeWolf of Bristol, Sale of 121 Negroes." Total income: 36,300 dollars, which today equals 553,000 dollars.

The largest number of slaves were sold in Havana and Charleston. But Rhode Island slavers did business in more than 40 markets in the West Indies, North and South America. Rhode Island became the state most complicit in the American slave trade. Rum, Africans, sugar, rum. The efficient wheels of the Triangle Trade were set in motion again and again.

Full transcript with Katrina Browne on Bill Moyer’s Journal:

Watch a portion of the video "Traces of the Trade"
which airs on P.O.V. soon, Katrina Browne. Where I live in Rhode Island, it airs (90 minutes):
June 24, 2008, 10:00 p.m. Channel 44, Boston
June 26, 2008, 3:00 a.m. Channel 44, Boston
June 29, 2008, 9:00 p.m. Channel 44, Boston
June 30, 2008, 10:00 p.m. Channel 2, Boston
July 3, 2008, 9:00 p.m. Channel 36, Providence
July 5, 1:30 a.m. Channel 36, Providence
Source: www.pbs.org/pov

Douglas Blackmon’s website www.slaverybyanothername.com

The History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations
By Thomas Williams Bicknell, page 511 about Slavery

Check out:
Rhode Island’s Slave History -The Unrighteous Traffic
7 part series
“The traffic was so lucrative that nearly half the ships that sailed to Africa (from Newport, Rhode Island) did so after 1787 - the year Rhode Island outlawed the trade.” Source: Rhode Island's Slave History

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