Posted on 06/15/2005 12:42:27 PM PDT by JZelle
The slavery-reparations crowd is serious about raiding corporate America. That's the lesson to draw from what's happening to Wachovia Corp., the nation's fourth-largest bank, which says that predecessors to two companies it acquired in 1991 and 2001 once traded in slaves. It doesn't take a historian to see that Wachovia is being mau-maued. Wachovia and other companies are now discovering that giving to the slavery-reparations movement is a losing proposition. Two weeks ago Wachovia announced that First Union Corp., with which it merged in 2001, and the South Carolina National Corp., which joined it in 1991, had absorbed predecessor companies that dealt in slaves, which it learned from a study by the History Factory, a corporate-research company. A Chicago ordinance requires companies contracting with the city to disclose ties to slavery, and since Wachovia is a partner with a Chicago community-development corporation to build low-income housing, it must comply with city law. The History Factory found that the old Georgia Railroad and Banking Co., which was founded in the early 1830s and was acquired in 1954 by a predecessor to First Union, owned at least 162 slaves. It also found that the Bank of Charleston, which merged in 1926 with a company that Wachovia acquired in 1991, used at least 529 slaves as collateral on mortgaged properties and loans. Wachovia said it was sorry. "I apologize to all Americans, and especially to African-Americans and people of African descent," said Chairman and CEO Ken Thompson. Another executive, Stan Kelly, told colleagues that he is "working to get personally connected to this chapter in our company's and our country's history." The company promised an unspecified financial contribution -- in all likelihood an educational fund or some other endowed trust -- to benefit the descendants of the slaves.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Actually, the wrongs of Reconstruction are what caused Jim Crow
The reason being is this. When Union authorities came down here, they had one purpose in mind, to humiliate the South. To treat women in the most crude manner, to deny my ancestors the right to vote because they had too much money (and had held too high a rank in the Confederate Cavalry), not to mention, Ben Butler's famous order.
The reason Jim Crow came about is because, all the while that Yankee authorities were pestering the Southerners, they remained in office because of the votes of blacks, and blacks alone.
Meaning, to the average Southerner, everything that was going wrong was the fault of the black voter, and so for some politicians it became a priority to disenfranchise the black voter.
Once the beloved Reedeemer governments came to power, they realized that black voters could help them stave off the populist movement, and this further angered poor whites, because now blacks were voting for the Bourbon candidates.
And so in the late 1880s, populists, such as Ben Tillman in South Carolina began openly pushing black disenfranchisement as both revenge for the crimes of Reconstruction, as well as the only way for the "common man" to take control of the government away from the Wade Hampton style Bourbons.
Which means, the reason that there was 60 years of Jim Crow was due to the reverberations unleashed by the misrule of the Reconstruction period.
If Congress had just followed the Johnson plan (which had been Lincoln's plan), then by in large, what blacks got in the 1960s, they would have probably gotten around the 1920's.
Yankee Reconstruction delayed progress and caused much of the racial turmoil that reverberates to this day.
Here's the reparations strategy of the left:
1. Target corporations with accusations, which will be well circulated by the MSM. Ultimately, the initial lawsuits - similar to those against big tobacco a decade ago - will be filed. The first case is already in a lower level Federal court. As the article points out, the ridiculous, groveling corporate apologies have already started.
2. Persue the issue relentlessly in the courts. This will make an eventual court victory inevitable. Keep in mind that it took the trial lawyers 25 years to chip away at big tobacco. The first ten years was nothing but a string of defeats at trial. The leftist legal industry has bottomless funding to peruse this from Soros, Kerry-Heinz, the Ford Foundation, et al. They will simply chisel away until enough legal precedent is set in their favor to win at trial. Most judges are on their team as it stands.
3. Once the tide is turned legally, the reparations gang will go for corporate America's jugular with massive series of class-action suits. Corporate elites, most of whom are liberals anyway, will readily cave and run whining to their bought and paid for elected officials to bail them out.
4. In order to bail out their true constituencies, politicians will exempt corporations from the lawsuits and initiate a federally-funded reparations payout - on top of the Supreme Court mandated system of racial preferences already in place. Conservatives, who now talk tough against such an outrage (just like they did against racial preferences a decade ago), will go along with the plan (as they always do) in order to not be labeled racists. Yet another example - of many - how the country mraches continually leftward towards the totalitartian utopia.
"totalitartian utopia."
I rarely comment on typos, but "totalitartian" was too good to pass up... Hillary Rodham Clinton (D) Totalitart LOL.
You'll notice they had NOTHING TO SAY when Bush pledged 15 billion a few months ago to Africa, which sold its own people during the slavery days. You'll notice they had NOTHING TO SAY when Geldof and Company decided to hold concerts to shovel boatloads of money to Africa, which sold its own people during the slavery days.
And you'll notice THEY HAVE NOTHING TO SAY NOW in present times when slavery still exists in the world.
They don't give a damn about slavery - they are looking for the biggest wallet to tap into. Nothing more.
Typso Ping!
Sorry - LOL! Thanks for spotting it. Maybe if Hill-Bill Clinton becomes dictator it really would be a totalitartian utopia!
Stan sounds like he has some personal issues. I suggest he donate a large percentage of his humongous salary for the benefit of poor black people. Star Parker's organization would be a good recipient, or Jesse Lee Peterson's.
"Typso"
Totalitartian Typsopia?
I want to paid by the black community for what my Quaker ancestors did to free their black ancestors.
Also anyone with ancestors who were in the Union army are due money for the same reasons.
Lets get it on.
Of course, a full telling of Black History would not be complete without a telling of the origin of slavery in the Virginia colony:
Virginia, Guide to The Old Dominion, WPA Writers' Program, Oxford University Press, NY, 1940, p. 378
"In 1650 there were only 300 negroes in Virginia, about one percent of the population. They weren't slaves any more than the approximately 4,000 white indentured servants working out their loans for passage money to Virginia, and who were granted 50 acres each when freed from their indentures, so they could raise their own tobacco.
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." http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/secret/famous/johnson.html
I found the reference, out of Michael A. Hoffman II's "They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America" : Joseph Cinque was himself a slave trader, selling his fellow blacks into this horror after he himself was set free by a US court.
Amistad producer Debbie Allen calls this destabilizing fact a "rumor." She'd better. If the thinking public, black and white, discover that "noble" Cinque later sold his own people in the very manner he condemned, then there will be a second mutiny, this time against Spielberg and his shameless hoaxing.
Here is Samuel Eliot Morrison, one of the most distinguished of American historians, writing in his "Oxford History of the American People,"
(New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1965), p. 520:
"The most famous case involving slavery, until eclipsed by Dred Scott's, was that of the Amistad in 1839. She was a Spanish slave ship carrying 53 newly imported Negroes who were being moved from Havana to another Cuban port. Under the leadership of an upstanding Negro named Cinqué, they mutinied and killed captain and crew. Then, ignorant of navigation, they had to rely on a white man whom they had spared to sail the ship.
"He stealthily steered north, the Amistad was picked up off Long Island by a United States warship, taken into New Haven, and with her cargo placed in charge of the federal marshal. Then what a legal hassle! Spain demanded that the slaves be given up to be tried for piracy, and President Van Buren attempted to do so but did not quite dare.
"Lewis Tappan and Roger Sherman Baldwin, a Connecticut abolitionist, undertook to free them by legal process, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. John Quincy Adams, persuaded to act as their attorney, argued that the Negroes be freed, on the ground that the slave trade was illegal both by American and Spanish law, and that mankind had a natural right to freedom.
"The court with a majority of Southerners, was so impressed by the old statesman's eloquence that it ordered Cinqué and the other Negroes set free, and they were returned to Africa. The ironic epilogue is that Cinqué, once home, set himself up as a slave trader."
(End quotation from historian Samuel Eliot Morrison)
BLACK SLAVEOWNERS
http://americancivilwar.com/authors/black_slaveowners.htm
Child slavery today in West Africa?
http://gbgm-umc.org/nwo/99ja/child.html
Slavery throughout historyhttp://www.freetheslaves.net/slavery_today/slavery.html
"To pursue the concept of racial entitlement--even for the most admirable and benign of purposes--is to reinforce and preserve for future mischief the way of thinking that produced race slavery, race privilege and race hatred. In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American."
--Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
"The democracy will cease to exist when you take it away from those who are willing to work and give it to those who would not."
Thomas Jefferson
Perhaps the group that had the strongest vested interest in seeing the South victorious were the black slaveowners. In 1830 approximately 1,556 black slaveowners in the deep South owned 7,188 slaves. About 25% of all free blacks owned slaves. A few of these were men who purchased their family members to protect or free them, but most were people who saw slavery as the best way to economic wealth and independence for themselves. The American dream in the antebellum South was just as powerful for free blacks as whites and it included the use of slaves for self-improvement. They bought and sold slaves for profit and exploited their labor just like their white counterparts.
Richard Rollins
After their capture one group of white Virginia slave owners and Afro-Virginians were asked if they would take the oath of allegiance to the United States in exchange for their freedom. One free negro indignantly replied: "I can't take no such oaf as dat. I'm a secesh nigger." A slave from this same group, upon learning that his master had refused, proudly exclaimed, "I can't take no oath dat Massa won't take." A second slave agreed: "I ain't going out here on no dishonorable terms." On another occasion a captured Virginia planter took the oath, but slave remained faithful to the Confederacy and refused. This slave returned to Virginia by a flag of truce boat and expressed disgust at his owner's disloyalty: "Massa had no principles." Confederate prisoners of war paid tribute to the loyalty, ingenuity, and diligence of "kind-hearted" blacks who attended to their needs and considered them fellow Southerners.
Ervin L. Jordan, Jr.
A History of the South
Fourth Edition, Alfred A. Knopf 1947, 1953, 1963, 1972
by Francis Butler Simkins and Charles Pierce Roland
P. 125-126
BEGIN QUOTE: Abolitionist assertions that the bondsmen were frequently inadequately clothed, underfed, and driven to death are economically unreasonable. Masters wished to preserve the health and life of their slaves because a sick Negro was a liability and a dead Negro was worth nothing. A rough plenty prevailed on the average plantation. “The best preventive of theft is plenty of pork,” was the advice of a Virginian.
Slaves probably fared as well in the enjoyment of the necessities of life as did most of the free laborers of the country. One of the most respected of all Northern critics of slavery, Frederick Law Olmsted, wrote that the Southern bondsmen lived in quarters quite as adequate as those of most mill or mine workers elsewhere, and that the slaves were perhaps the best fed “proletarian class” in the world. He also testified that they worked less than did free laborers.
Incomplete statistics reveal that the slaves averaged somewhat higher sickness and death rates per thousand than did Southern whites as a whole. But the slaves were from all indications as healthy and long-lived as white common laborers in the United States before the Civil War. It was general knowledge at the time in Louisiana that the slaves were better off in these respects than were the thousands of Irish immigrant laborers engaged in clearing land and digging drainage canals on the sugar plantations.
The planters were reluctant to commit their expensive chattels to this dangerous work, but preferred to hire free laborers, whose loss by death, sickness, or injury cost nothing. A careful study of the figures on a group of 875 plantation slaves whose records are preserved indicates their average life expectancy at the time of birth to have been longer than that of the general population of such cities as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia during the same period. An authority on urban slavery concludes that the medical care, health, and welfare of slaves in Southern cities were superior to the care, health, and welfare of the free Negroes; and the outstanding work on the life of Negroes in the North at this time shows that they fared no better in such matters than did free blacks in the land of slavery. END QUOTE
Booker T. Washington. It’s worthwhile quoting.
“There is (a) class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their (the black people’s) wrongs – partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs . . .”
Booker goes on to say: “There is a certain class of race problem-solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out, they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public."
Read about Child Sex Slaves!!
Tennessee in June 1861 became the first in the South to legislate the use of free black soldiers. The governor was authorized to enroll those between the ages of fifteen and fifty, to be paid $18 a month and the same rations and clothing as white soldiers; the black men appeared in two black regiments in Memphis by September.
Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia, Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1995) pp. 218-219
The last thing the UN is trying to do is reduce slavery throughout the world!
There are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The modern commerce in humans rivals illegal drug trafficking in its global reach and in the destruction of lives.
"Typso" are typing errors that also make a political point.
Oh... sounds fun. Ping me in.
"I understand the anger, but why direct it at Wachovia?"
Because being an American is about having a backbone and the intelligence to know when you are being shaken down. I won't support _any_ company that cowers so easily before the new lynch mob.
Wachovia could have very easily shown some leadership and made a public announcement that they will no longer do business in Chicago or Philadelphia. When the state of New Jersey began shaking down auto insurers, almost all of them no longer wrote policies in the state.
Shame on Wachovia!
I am making it my mission in life to drive away as many of their customers as possible.
You're on.
Outsource them.
Apology? TO whom? There are no living slaves. For What? Accepting an 'item' of value as collateral on a loan?
What's next, kowtowing before some almighty golden calf for loaning a rancher money to build his herd?
This is crap, unmitigated extortion, and I would not have an account with these people because they do not have balls enough to resist it.
I see Race Pimp Charles Ogletree has chimed in.
This stuff makes me retch! Seriously.
Cool screen name.
More like "Totalisow."
Informative post!
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