Connecting the past to the present for a better future.
For years, Southern states benefited from convict leasing. This practice added millions of dollars in revenue to state and local governments. It lowered the tax rate for average citizens and generated money for infrastructure. The firms that hired out prisoners and the employers who worked them to exhaustion profited the most. It served as a …
In the book, The Negro Pilgrimage In America, the author C. L. Lincoln wrote “The Black person’s place in society became a matter of law in every Southern state during the 1890’s. The long legal history of racial discrimination and segregation in the United States antedates the Civil War.” Lincoln wrote that slavery has been …
According to the book, Slavery And The Making of America by James and Lois Horton, in January 1865, months before the South’s surrender, U.S. General Sherman met with about twenty black community members in Savannah, Georgia and discussed what to do with confiscated Confederate land in Georgia, South Carolina and northern Florida. The Secretary of …
Many Black colleges and universities were founded after Reconstruction. An Army officer, General O.O. Howard, head of the Freedman’s Bureau, founded Howard University in Washington, D.C. Some other schools founded during the Reconstruction period are Fisk University in Nashville, Atlanta University, Hampton Institute in Virginia, Talladega College in Alabama, Tougaloo College in Mississippi, Morgan College …
According to C.L. Lincoln in his book, The Negro Pilgrimage in America, the Civil War ended at Appomattox Courthouse in central Virginia on April 9, 1865. There were some cries of vengeance by the Northerners for “treason” by the Southerners. Jefferson Davis, the Confederate President, was never brought to trial for his role. There were …
According to the book by C.L. Lincoln, The Negro Pilgrimage In America, by the middle of the nineteenth century, there were sectional differences as to whether new states admitted to the Union would be slaveholding or free. The Compromise of 1850 attempted to improve relations by setting up a balanced set of conditions for the …
In the book by C. L. Lincoln, The Negro Pilgrimage In America, slaveholders rejected both Biblical and political arguments. They used the Bible to “prove” justification of slavery by identifying black people of Ham, forever ordained to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” They argued there was a historical justification for slavery. Wealthy …
I remember reading about The Underground Railroad when I was in junior high school. The Railroad was a large network of secret contacts between free Black people and white people to help escaped enslaved people reach freedom. I remember reading about Fredrick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. I remember the book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, …
After the westward expansion of the United States in the early 1800’s, there was a need for a labor force. This labor was provided by enslaved people. There was a one mile stretch of productive agriculture regions from South Carolina to Texas. The key crop was cotton and that plant became king in the South. …
American history involves many slave revolts. According to C.L. Lincoln’s book, The Negro Pilgrimage in America, between 1663 and 1864, there were at least a hundred and nine separate slave revolts on land. Between 1699 and 1845, fifty-five revolts took place on slave ships at sea. According to historians, the first recorded slave revolt in …