Slavery by Another Name

Months ago we published a post: Brown Trucks that reflected upon heightened awareness. The idea is that once someone becomes aware of something, evidence of it occurs more frequently. And so it is with the analogy of enslavement and imprisonment. Both restrict freedom, enable oppression and often are accompanied by dehumanization. In the United States of America, however, the elements of race, crime and punishment take peculiar twists and turns Read More

I’d Rather Die

At the height of the Jim Crow era in the United States something occurred on a train strikingly similar to the tone of today’s political discourse. According to the story, a White woman traveling on a train through the South suddenly became ill. A porter arrived and seeing the crisis, said he would call for a doctor. There was quite a commotion among the people on board as the conductor cleared Read More

Saltwater Africans

The term “saltwater African” is not familiar to many. It specifically refers to Africans who survived the Middle Passage. They had come across the ocean, the salt water. For the first two hundred years in the Americas there was a continuous supply of this population. Until Africans in the Diaspora were able to maintain fertility rates that lessened the demand to import, a majority of the black population, particularly in Read More

Jump!

Click to Listen to “First Time I Saw Big Water” produced and composed by Bernice Johnson Reagon, performed by Bernice Johnson Reagon and Toshi Reagon for the PBS-WGBH film score for series Africans in America, Executive Producer Orlando Bagwell Shackled and forced from the interior, the bush, often marching for weeks and months African captives destined for the transatlantic slave trade endured hardships beyond our imagination. Many had never seen Read More

Source Documents for Blog Visitors, February 2012

This project is committed to getting out information to those who are interested. We pledged to provide readers quarterly with materials that we base the posts upon, so here are the second quarter’s materials as promised by category with annotation. Articles: African Burial Ground Project: paradigm for cooperation? by Michael Blakey (Museum International, UNESCO, 2010). Professor Blakey is on our project’s advisory board and worked continuously on the Manhattan African Burial Ground Project. Read More