Posted on 03/05/2004 7:07:15 PM PST by Land_of_Lincoln_John
CHICAGO (CBS 2) The highly charged issue of slave reparations took center stage at a Chicago City Council hearing on Friday.
Alderman Dorothy Tillman accused mega-bank JP Morgan Chase of failing to disclose its past ties to slavery, as required by city law.
“We will go back and get with our lawyers we will submit to the law department the reason as to why they lied,” Tillman said.
A top executive with JP Morgan strongly denied Tillman's allegation.
“We've found no evidence to support the allegation that any of our predecessor institutions had issued, financed or underwritten slavery insurance,” said Frederick Hill, executive vice president of JP Morgan Chase.
JP Morgan, which plans to merge with Chicago’s Bank One has multi-million dollar bonds with the city for projects at O'Hare Airport and Skyway construction.
The testimony today provided no direct evidence that the bank profited from slavery.
The fact is large numbers of free Negroes owned black slaves; in fact, in numbers disproportionate to their representation in society at large. In 1860 only a small minority of whites owned slaves. According to the U.S. census report for that last year before the Civil War, there were nearly 27 million whites in the country. Some eight million of them lived in the slaveholding states.
The census also determined that there were fewer than 385,000 individuals who owned slaves (1). Even if all slaveholders had been white, that would amount to only 1.4 percent of whites in the country (or 4.8 percent of southern whites owning one or more slaves).
In the rare instances when the ownership of slaves by free Negroes is acknowledged in the history books, justification centers on the claim that black slave masters were simply individuals who purchased the freedom of a spouse or child from a white slaveholder and had been unable to legally manumit them. Although this did indeed happen at times, it is a misrepresentation of the majority of instances, one which is debunked by records of the period on blacks who owned slaves. These include individuals such as Justus Angel and Mistress L. Horry, of Colleton District, South Carolina, who each owned 84 slaves in 1830. In fact, in 1830 a fourth of the free Negro slave masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more slaves; eight owning 30 or more (2).
According to federal census reports, on June 1, 1860 there were nearly 4.5 million Negroes in the United States, with fewer than four million of them living in the southern slaveholding states. Of the blacks residing in the South, 261,988 were not slaves. Of this number, 10,689 lived in New Orleans. The country's leading African American historian, Duke University professor John Hope Franklin, records that in New Orleans over 3,000 free Negroes owned slaves, or 28 percent of the free Negroes in that city.
To return to the census figures quoted above, this 28 percent is certainly impressive when compared to less than 1.4 percent of all American whites and less than 4.8 percent of southern whites. The statistics show that, when free, blacks disproportionately became slave masters.
Time to track down the descendants of these black slave owners and demand that they pay reparations. I'm sure Dorothy Tillman will heartily endorse those efforts.
"Slavery was established in 1654 when Anthony Johnson, Northampton County, convinced the court that he was entitled to the lifetime services of John Casor, a negro. This was the first judicial approval of life servitude, except as punishment for a crime.
"But who was Anthony Johnson, winner of this epoch-making decision? Anthony Johnson was a negro himself, one of the original 20 brought to Jamestown (1619) and 'sold' to the colonists. By 1623 he had earned his freedom and by 1651, was prosperous enough to import five 'servants' of his own, for which he received a grant of 250 acres as 'headrights.'
"Anthony Johnson ought to be in a 'Book of Firsts.' As the most ambitious of the first 20, he could have been the first negro to set foot on Virginia soil. He was Virginia's first free negro and first to establish a negro community, first negro landowner, first negro slave owner and as the first, white or black, to secure slave status for a servant, he was actually the founder of slavery in Virginia. A remarkable man."
-- Virginia, Guide to The Old Dominion, WPA Writers' Program, Oxford University Press, NY, 1940, p. 378
Oops! I forgot. There hasn't been a former slave alive since 1953.
We're in worse shape than the Hollyweirds! Oh, the Shame of it all!
I don't foresee much in the way of Republican efforts in this state for several elections. George Ryan's legacy is going to be a shadow over elections for a long time.
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