Anti-Blackness is the American Way: Assessing the Relationship Between Chattel Slavery, Lynchings, & Police Violence During the Civil Rights Movement

Research finds that historical anti-Black violence helps to explain the spatial distribution of contemporary conflict, inequality, and violence in the U.S. Building on this research, the current study examined the spatial relationship between chattel slavery in 1860, lynchings of Black individuals between 1882 and 1930, and anti-Black violence during the Civil Rights Movement era in which police or other legal authorities were implicated. I draw on an original dataset of over 300 events of police violence that occurred between 1954 and 1974 in the sample state of Louisiana, and that was compiled from a number of primary and secondary source documents that were themselves culled from archival research conducted in the state. Path analysis was then employed using negative binomial generalized structural equation modeling in order to assess the direct and indirect effects of these racially violent histories. The implications for social justice, public policy, and future research are also discussed. Keywords Slavery, lynchings, anti-Black violence, civil rights movement, police

Slavery and Abolition in Chartist Thought and Culture, 1838–1850

In Britain between 1838 and 1858, the Chartist movement demanded the implementation of the ‘Six Points’, a parcel of parliamentary reforms centred on universal male suffrage. Despite the movement's recognized importance, little study has been made into Chartism's attitude towards slavery and abolitionism. This article will provide the first comprehensive study of this topic, from Chartism's origins in the 1830s until its decline in the decade after 1848. It will illustrate that Chartism was influenced by the radical labour component of the ‘Democratic’ coalition that supported President Andrew Jackson. This helped reinforce amongst early Chartists theories that wage labour was more exploitative than chattel slavery, alongside a racist reaction to West Indian emancipation more extreme than has previously been acknowledged. By 1842, however, various changes within the movement helped bring to the fore more consistently anti-slavery and even anti-racist sentiment with Chartist culture, as did growing exposure to American abolitionism, especially that of William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. The development of the anti-slavery ‘Free Soil’ ideology amongst American labour radicals profoundly influenced the late Chartist position on slavery by inserting abolition into Chartist aspirations for land reform. Consequently, a core component of late Chartism was its own anti-slavery ‘Free Soil’ ideology, which greatly informed pro-Union working-class agitation during the American Civil War.

Experiential Learning in Ghana: Decentering the White Voice

White supremacy served as the foundation of the transatlantic slave trade and the subsequent practice of chattel slavery in the United States.[i] As such, it is not an exaggeration to say that US history is rooted in the oppression of non-white populations who have experienced and continue to experience various forms of physical and emotional harm. It is in this context that we examine how undergraduate students from XXX University, a predominantly white liberal arts institution, experienced the summer 2019 study abroad ‘Maymester’ excursion to Ghana where the transatlantic slave trade was the main focus of one of the courses, Precolonial African history.[ii] We argue that an interracial dialogue on the terror of whiteness on Black bodies and in Black spaces, which is steeped in historical context, develops when white student voices do not predominate classroom discussions. By centering the co-author’s account of the program, we show that when decentering the white voice, which is generally that of the dominant student population, white students can achieve a reconsideration of their understanding of self, others, and of African and global histories. This article also stresses the importance prioritizing cultural competence as a student goal in light of some of the preconceived notions they held about Ghana and Africa, and finally, we argue that universities have a moral responsibility to introduce Anti-racist pedagogy into the classrooms as a measure to fight white supremacist ideology. [i] Gary Dorrien, “Achieving the Black Social Gospel, “ Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospe (New Haven, CY: Yale University Press, 2018), 1. [ii] Split into two courses, the four-week study program spanned two weeks each.

Imperatives, Impossibilities, and Intimacies in the Imperial Archive: Chinese Men and Women of Colour in Early Nineteenth-Century Trinidad

In this article, I elaborate on Lisa Lowe’s “intimacies as method” by examining the case of 198 Chinese men conscripted to Trinidad in 1806. I argue that tracing Chinese migration to the Caribbean in the early nineteenth century demonstrates that the British empire began to imagine new hierarchies of unfreedom for people of Asian and African descent before the abolition of chattel slavery. British imperial actors hoped that Chinese men would assume a mediating function between white planters and the extant population of colour in Trinidad. This vision was predicated on the assumption that the migrants would partner with women of colour to form heterosexual intimacies while also refraining from other forms of socio-political contact with Afro-Trinidadians. Lowe’s intimacies as method guides my navigation of the imperial archive and, in particular, compels me to think relationally about differentially colonized and racialized sub jects in early nineteenth-century Trinidad, both as they were positioned in the colony and as they refused these stereotypes, brokering their own transactions and collaborations.

Slavery in the Middle Assyrian Period

The Middle Assyrian period (1500–1000 BCE) is used to describe the Northern Mesopotamian state, centered around the capital city Aššur (mod. Qalʿat Aš-Širqāṭ, Iraq). In the early years, Aššur was a small urban center of little political importance. However, as the neighboring state of Mitanni/Hanigalbat weakened, the local rulers were able to politically and militarily dominate Northern Mesopotamia. Due to the expanse of this, originally, small state, a strong administration was required to make the governance of the newly conquered regions possible. Over 3,000 cuneiform texts from the Assyrian administration were uncovered, of which 2,000 were from the two capital cities Aššur and Kār-Tukultī-Ninurta. Just as in any ancient state, slaves were a part of society. However, attestations of slaves are relatively uncommon, and most scholarly attention has gone to the related class of deportees and prisoners of war. Nonetheless, administrative documents such as loans provide us with sufficient information on debt and chattel slavery to make a number of observations on (semi) privately owned slaves.

Baudelaire's Creole Gothic : A Postcolonial Afterlife for Les Fleurs du mal

Baudelaire’s verse poetry is informed by a pervasive Creole Gothic resonance. Two separate but related topoi, the Undead and the Living Dead, lie at the heart of the collection’s necrological imaginary of slave and zombie labour. It is this Gothic double-trope of death-in-life/life-in-death that activates the Gothic Creole strain running through Les Fleurs du mal. Ironically, those poems that seem to evoke most directly the Creole world that Baudelaire encountered in 1841, firstly in Mauritius and then in Réunion, avoid all evocation of plantation slavery. Conversely, the city poems associate modern metropolitan life with the idea of slavery, representing it as a living death and death as a merely temporary and reversible escape. The collection’s representation of this ‘living death’ foreshadows the construction (by Orlando Patterson, most notably) of transatlantic chattel slavery as ‘social death’. As for the poetic representation of the ‘Undead’, this centres on the figure of the zombie. The zombie is essentially a slave for whom death has proved no guarantee against an endless ‘living death’ of hard labour. If the Creole inflection of Baudelaire’s imagery relates primarily to the realities of industrialized plantation labour and to the chattel slavery on which it was based, it is further reinforced by indices of tropical localisation and of racial difference, more specifically pigmentation. However subliminal its resonance, this Creole Gothic strain guarantees for Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal a vivid postcolonial afterlife.

Social workers’ attitudes toward reparations for African American descendants

Summary Reparations for African Americans in its most basic form amounts to a concerted effort to repair damages from hundreds of years of exploitation and mistreatment toward people of African ancestry. The legacy of chattel slavery manifests in ongoing racial injustices, including gross disparities in health and wealth. The injustices resultant from the system of chattel slavery and its sequela have not been formally addressed by the U.S. government. As a profession, social work is dedicated to the empowerment of marginalized communities and upholds a mandate to advocate for social justice. As such, this study examines social workers’ attitudes toward reparations for African American descendants. Descriptive analyses and analyses of association were used to interpret survey data. Findings A convenience sample of 186 social work professionals and students participated in this exploratory study. Findings of the study suggest that a majority of social workers agree with reparations (73%) as a strategy to redress present-day disparities. Additionally, a majority of the participants agree that reparations can begin to repair racial inequality. Applications This groundbreaking study lays the foundation for future research about social workers’ perceptions and support of reparations. Furthermore, results of this study should encourage social work organizations to infuse scientific research in formulating position statements and advocacy on the issue of reparations.

Coercing the Delta. The French Grammar of Control in the African Landscape of Colonial Louisiana, 1699-1732

The long-term transformation of the Louisiana delta beginning in 1699 has been primarily understood as a French colonial struggle for the control of nature. Yet, in order for French colonisers to control nature, they first sought to control enslaved Africans. While slave coercion was a daily problem for French inhabitants, documentation of the 'routinized violence' of chattel slavery is predictably absent in records of the built environment. As a result, the building of colonial New Orleans, beginning in 1718, has become a story of French design, not of enslaved African labour. This paper examines the accounts and correspondence of French colonisers who veiled their own dependence on indigenous, indentured and enslaved people by adopting a performative language of mastery as they projected or described labour projects essential to the 'control of nature'. What colonisers could not master in person they performed on paper via pronouns, tenses, constructions and the passive voice. The 'French' Louisiana delta is better understood as an African-built landscape reinscribed on Indigenous territory under French coercion.

The Captive Maternal and Abolitionism

This keynote (article) examines political theory and organizing against anti-Blackness and police violence. It reflects on community, vulnerability and care, and political agency from the perspective of the “Captive Maternal”—a gender diverse or agender function of caretaking, protesting, movement and maroon-building and war resistance emanating from communities stalked by anti-Blackness and the legacy of 500 years of chattel slavery in the Americas.

Somerset’s Case: The Unsung Verdict and Its Legacy

The paper is a comparison between the English court case Somerset v. Stewart(1772) and the infamous American suit Scott v. Sandford(1857), both of which deal with the issue of a slave’s freedom and seeks to analyze the reason why the judges overseeing these cases rendered different verdicts. The paper specifically explains the verdict of Somerset, which freed the slave in question, and Scott, which did not, in a socio-economic lens, pointing to the American dependency on slavery as a factor in the disenfranchisement of African-Americans, which was less of a factor in England that contributed to an early end to slavery in that country, including through the inclusion of black men in the Royal Army and Navy during Britain’s conflicts with the United States of America. Although a misinterpretation of Somerset’s Judge Lord Mansfield’s verdict, a wide-spread, broad understanding of his decision led to the acceptance of legal freedom for slaves throughout Britain, reinforcing American attempts to resist runaway attempts of slaves for British-controlled territory during the Revolutionary War and later the War of 1812. The paper finally renders the American Revolution as a hypocritical one that did not immediately contribute to equality, and notes Mansfield’s overlooked role in the abolition of chattel slavery.