How Many American Corporations Were Built On The Backs Of Slaves?

"In 1858, 75 percent of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance policies were written on slaves." - From, "Medical Apartheid" By: Harriet Washington. So many American corporations were built on the backs of slaves.

How Some Of America's Institutions Were Founded...

“For the Browns, wealth led to greater power, and John Brown became a congressman representing Rhode Island; fellow slave trader James De Wolf represented the state as a senator. Profit from the trade brought the trappings of wealth. When former President John Quincy Adams visited the Browns’ home he called it ‘the most magnificent and elegant mansion that I have ever seen on this continent.’ Today the house still stands at Fifty-Two Power Street in Providence, where it is operated by the Rhode Island Historical Society, which would like the family’s slave trading mentioned as little as possible.

The fact that the Brown family fortune was made in the slave trade is a matter of historical record. In August 1797 John Brown became the first American to be tried in federal court for violating the Slave Trade Act. Brown’s legal maneuvers and favors from cohorts did not save him from reaching the court, as his brother Moses was the person pressing charges. Moses had seen firsthand the horrors of the slave ship and subsequently quit the family business and became its greatest opponent. His efforts stopped the importation of slaves into Rhode Island, and he helped enact a federal law against it. A bill freeing children of slaves and completely banning the trade would have succeeded, but William Bradford of Bristol removed the clause on the ban. His rum business depended on the slave trade. The business of his son-in-law, James De Wolf, depended on in more. John Brown died in 1803, before the trade was banned forever.

The profits from the slave trade helped the Brown family reach immortality. Near the Power Street hose stands Brown University. Because the Browns were such great benefactors, the school originally known as Rhode Island College showed the family the ultimate gratitude by changing its name to Brown University. Although Brown University is the great monument to the profits of the Browns’ slave trade, a lesser known monument to John Brown is the Fleet Financial Group of New England. Brown was one of the founders in 1791 when it was called the Providence Bank. It merged with Samuel Colt’s creation, the Industrial Trust, and underwent a name change to Industrial National Bank. In 1982, the Rhode Island bank changed its name again to Fleet Financial. Finally it merged with the Bank of Boston to become the seventh largest financial holding company in the United States.” -From, “Secret Societies of America’s Elite” By: Steven Sora

Instead Of Christopher Columbus Day, Shouldn't We Have An Atonement Day In Honor Of Native Americans

This is like the E True Hollywood Story of Christopher Columbus...

Slavery After Emancipation: A Morning In The Life Of A Prisoner Of The Convict Leasing System

In his book, "Slavery By Another Name," Douglas A. Blackmon, describes what an early part of the day was like for Black men who were prisoners of the convict leasing system.

These men were basically kidnapped, and charged with crimes that they didn't commit. They were then shipped off to be free labor for corporations. Read the aforementioned description below:

"[They] spent every day but one in a vast labyrinth of black rock tunnels. shared only by dozens of mules and squadrons of desperate men, all slick with sweat and coated in pulverized coal. The absence of sunlight, vegetation, or any prospect for the touch of a not venal human hand had to tear at [their] soul.

Long before sunrise each morning, two White men swung open the doors from the entryway at the center of the wooden prison barrack and pushed into the rancid wooden cavern where two hundred Black men, chained to one another, lay wrapped in coarse blankets. Running the fifty-foot length of the room, a continual series of bunk beds dangling on pipes attached to the ceiling were piled with bodies. Where there was no space on a surface, men draped themselves in suspended contortions across canvas hammocks stretched between the bunks on either side of a marrow aisle down the center. A single potbellied stove, long gone cold, stood at the center of the room.

The sudden opening of the door ushered in a blast of crisp spring air, cutting with swift relief through the musty wet stink of the men, still sheathed in the black detritus of the mine waiting for them outside. As the guards moved toward the opposite end of the room, releasing the men's irons from chains looped through their beds and barking for reluctant prisoners to wake, the men responded in an awkward collective undulation. As each awakened and moved, a succession of pairs of legs and irons slid wearily toward the keys held in the hands of the guard, each time pulling the legs of the next man toward the guard as well, and then the next, all of them spilling gradually off the bunks in a long, groggy metallic jungle.

Once on their feet and refastened to their chains, the column of prisoners filed out through the front stoop, down the wooden steps and into a plain kitchen. Each man stuffed a biscuit and a cut of cold bacon into his mouth and shuffled out the door. At the point of shotguns, they tramped into the deep darkness, across the bare yard, past the pen of bloodhounds trained to track 'Negro scent,' past the barrel across which men were stretched naked almost nightly to be whipped with a leather strap, out the mammoth gate of the stockade, and up to the orifice where they would enter the earth." -From, "Slavery By Another Name" By: Douglas A. Blackmon

Slavery After Emancipation: Debt Slavery & Forced Confessions In Kangaroo Courts

"The county convict leasing system, with its efficient mechanisms for forcing Black men to do the bidding of White business operators, soon leached into the process of collecting debts of any kind. White farmers who advanced money to Black tenants at the beginning of a crop season began to enforce their debts not by evicting those Black men who fell behind, but by swearing out criminal warrants accusing them of fraud. Facing certain conviction by a local White judge, most laborers willingly agreed to accept their White landlords- who had brought them to court in the first place- as their 'sureties.' The defendants typically would 'confess judgment, an archaic legal concept under which the accused confesses his responsibility before being tried. The local judge then accepted payment and forfeiture of a bond from the White surety, rather than render a verdict on the alleged 'crime.' In return, the African American farmer would sign a contract to work without compensation for the White landlord for however long it took to pay back the amount of the bond.

The instances of confessing judgment spread rapidly through the farming regions of the South, according to local court dockets of the 1880s and 1890s...On its face, the arrangement appeared similar to other practices that would remain common in the courts for the next century and beyond- granting mercy to a criminal partly in exchange for a commitment to repair the damage of their crimes, and place themselves under the close supervision of a trusted party.

Occasionally, confessing judgment in the 1880s was precisely just such a legitimate, human resolution of a legal matter. But only rarely. The records of thousands of prosecutions show it was vastly more likely that an arrested Black man- knowing he had no possibility of true due process, or acquittal- agreed to confess judgment specifically to avoid the far more dire alternatives that he knew lay in wait. It was the nineteenth-century equivalent to modern plea bargains, in which a defendant agrees to a lesser sentence ahead of trial in order to be spared any possibility of the most severe punishment. The exception being that in the variation of this practice in the 1880s, it was a nearly forgone conclusion that the man under arrest would be found guilty of something. Often, his only hope for moderating the blow was to negotiate the most bearable form of forced labor.

The Black men who confessed judgment avoided being sold into the slave mines, but traded that fate for onerous labor contracts closer to home or working under men they had at least elementary knowledge of- their present landlord, or often with the same farm families under whom they or their slave forebears had worked in antebellum times. The result was that Black tenant farmers and sharecroppers often returned as uncompensated convict laborers, subject to imprisonment, shackles, and the lash, to the same fields where a few days earlier they had worked as independent, free men. White farmers often continued to claim that convict laborer was incurring additional debts for necessities such as visits by a doctor, medical care, clothing, damaged implements, or housing. Once captured by a contract under which the Black man was not free until all his debts were paid, the 'convict'- who in fact might never have been found guilty of a crime- could be held almost indefinitely. Moreover, almost any White person who became involved in the resolution of a Black man's legal situation could casually add his own 'costs' to the balance of a prisoner's debt and compel him to labor for an even longer period." -From, "Slavery By Another Name" By: Douglas A. Blackmon

Slavery After Emancipation: The Beginning Of The Prison Industrial Complex- Part 4

"By the end of Reconstruction in 1877, every formerly Confederate state except Virginia had adopted the practice of leasing Black prisoners into commercial hands. There were variations among the states, but all shared the same basic formula. Nearly all the penal functions of government were turned over to the companies purchasing convicts. In return for what they paid each state, the companies received absolute control of the prisoners. They were ostensibly required to provide their own prisons, clothing, and food, and bore the responsibility for keeping the convicts incarcerated. Company guards were empowered to chain prisoners, shoot those attempting to flee, torture any who wouldn't submit, and whip the disobedient- naked or clothed- almost without limit. Over eight decades, almost never were there penalties to any acquirer of these slaves for their mistreatment or deaths...

Convict leasing adopted practices almost identical to those emerging in slavery in the 1850s.

By the late 1870s, the defining characteristics of the new involuntary servitude were clearly apparent. It would be obsessed with ensuring disparate treatment of Blacks,who at times in the ensuing fifty years would constitute 90 percent or more of those sold into labor. They were routinely starved and brutalized by corporations, farmers, government officials, and small-town businessmen intent on achieving the most lucrative balance between the productivity of captive labor and the cost of sustaining them. The consequences for African Americans were grim. In the first two years that Alabama leased its prisoners, nearly 20 percent of them died. In the following year, mortality rose to 35 percent. In the fourth, nearly 45 percent were killed." -From, "Slavery By Another Name" By: Douglas A. Blackmon

Slavery After Emancipation: The Beginning Of The Prison Industrial Complex- Part 3

"In 1871, Tennessee leased its nearly eight hundred prisoners, nearly all of them Black to Thomas O'Conner, a founding partner along with Arthur Colyar of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. In the four decades after the war, as Coylar built his company into an industrial behemoth, its center of operations gradually shifted to Alabama, where it was increasingly apparent that truly vast reserves of coal and iron ore lay beneath the surface.

Colyar, like Milner, was one of those prominent southern businessmen who bridged the era of slavery and the distinct new economic opportunities of the region at the end of the nineteenth century. They were true slavers, raised in the old traditions of bondage, but also men who believed that African Americans under the lash were the key to building an industrial sector in the South to fend off the growing influence of northern capitalists.

Already, Whites realized that the combination of trumped-up legal charges and forced labor as punishment created both a desirable business proposition and an incredibly effective tool for intimidating rank-and-file emancipated African Americans and doing away with their most effective leaders.

The newly installed White government of Hale County- deep in the majority Black cotton growing sections of Alabama- began leasing prisoners to private parties in August 1875. A local grand jury said the new practice was 'contributing much to the revenues of the county, instead of being an expense.' The money derived from selling convicts was placed in the Fine and Forfeiture Fund, which was used to pay fees to judges, sheriffs, other low officials, and witnesses who helped convict defendants...

By the end of 1877, fifty convict laborers were at work in Milner's Newcastle Coal Company mine outside Birmingham. An additional fifty-eight men had been forced into the Eureka mines he founded near Helena. A total of 557 prisoners had been turned over that year to private corporations by the state of Alabama." -From, "Slavery By Another Name" By: Douglas A. Blackmon

Slavery After Emancipation: The Beginning Of The Prison Industrial Complex- Part 2

"Hardly a year after the end of the war, in 1866, Alabama governor Robert M. Patton, in return for the total sum of $5, leased for six years his state's 374 state prisoners to a company calling itself 'Smith and McMillen.' The transaction was in fact a sham, as the partnership was actually controlled by the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad. Governor Patton became president of the railroad three years later. Such duplicity would be endemic to convict leasing. For the next eighty years, in every southern state, the question of who controlled the fates of Black prisoners, which few Black men and women among armies of defendants had committed true crimes, and who was receiving the financial benefits of their reenslavement would almost always never be answered.

Later in 1866, Texas leased 250 convicts to two railroads at the rate of $12.50 a month. In May 1868, the state of Georgia signed a lease under which the Georgia and Alabama railroad acquired one hundred convicts, all of them Black, for $2,500. Later that year, the state sold 134 prisoners to the Selma,Rome and Dalton Railroad and sent 109 others to the line being constructed between the towns of Macon and Brunswick, Georgia.

Arkansas began contracting out its state convicts in 1867, selling the rights to prisoners convicted of both state crimes and federal offenses. Mississippi turned over its 241 prisoners to the state's largest cotton planter, Edmund Richardson, in 1868. Three years later, the convicts were transferred to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the former Confederate general, who in civilian life already was a major planter and railroad developer. In 1866, he and five other rebel officers had founded the Ku Klux Klan. Florida leased out half of the one hundred prisoners in its Chattahoochee penitentiary in 1869.

North Carolina began 'farming out' its convicts in 1872. After White South Carolinians led by Democrat Wade Hampton violently ousted the last Black government of the state in 1877, the legislature promptly passed a law allowing for the sale of the state's four hundred Black and thirty White prisoners." -From, "Slavery By Another Name" By: Douglas A. Blackmon

Slavery After Emancipation: The Beginning Of The Prison Industrial Complex- Part 1

"With the southern economy in ruins, state officials limited to the barest resources, and county governments with even fewer, the concept of reintroducing the forced labor of Blacks as a means of funding government services was viewed by Whites as an inherently practical method of eliminating the cost of building prisons and returning Blacks to their appropriate position in society. Forcing convicts to work as part of punishment for an ostensible crime was clearly legal too; the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1865 to formally abolish slavery, specifically permitted involuntary servitude as a punishment for 'duly convicted' criminals.

Beginning in the late 1860s, and accelerating after the return of White political control in 1877, every southern state enacted an array of interlocking laws essentially intended to criminalize Black life. Many such laws were struck down in court appeals or through federal interventions, but new statutes embracing the same strictures on Black life quickly appeared to replace them. Few laws specifically enunciated their applicability only to Blacks, but it was widely understood that these provisions would rarely if ever be enforced on Whites. Every southern state except Arkansas and Tennessee had passed laws by the end of 1865 outlawing vagrancy and so vaguely defining it that virtually any freed slave not under the protection of a White man could be arrested for the crime. An 1865 Mississippi statute required African American workers to enter into labor contracts with White farmers by January 1 of every year or risk arrest. Four other states legislated that African Americans could not legally be hired for work without a discharge paper from their previous employer- effectively preventing them from leaving the plantation of the White man they worked for. In the 1880s, Alabama, North Carolina, and Florida enacted laws making it a criminal act for a Black man to change employers without permission.

In nearly all cases, the potential penalty awaiting Black men, and a small number of women, snared by those laws was the prospect of being sold into forced labor. Many states in the South and the North attempted to place their prisoners in private hands during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The state of Alabama was long predisposed to the idea, rather than taking on the cost of housing and feeding prisoners itself. It experimented with turning over convicts to private 'wardens' during the 1840s and 1850s but was ultimately unsatisfied with the results. The state saved some expense but gathered no revenue. Moreover, the physical abuse that came to be almost synonymous with privatized incarceration always was eventually unacceptable in an era when virtually every convict was White. The punishment of slaves for misdeeds rested with their owners." -From, "Slavery By Another Name" By: Douglas A. Blackmon