DELRAY BEACH – At reoccurring Congressional issue is the notion of paying reparations to blacks now for slavery dating back to before America’s founding. While reading that headline you might say, of course, it was the “evil” wicked “whites” that owned the slaves and became rich on the backs of the black workers they owned. But, not so fast, all the slave owners during our history were not all white, there were over 3,775 free black people who owned 12,740 black slaves. Should the ancestors of those black slave owners be part of the proposed reparations reimbursement?
Here are some facts the “reparations” promoters never tell you. The first legal slave owner in American history was a black tobacco farmer named Anthony Johnson. He was descended from West Africa where most of the slaves originally came from. The “white” slave traders didn’t go to West Africa and capture black people, they bought the slaves from other blacks who owned their own black slaves from other tribes. Should those relatives of black slave sellers be also a part of the reparations reimbursement?
In North Carolina, the largest slave holder in 1860 (right before the Civil War) was a black plantation owner named William Ellison.
Another unknown fact is that American Indians owned thousands of black slaves. How ironic is that? In fact, during those pre-Civil War days, many black slaves were allowed to hold jobs, own businesses, and own real estate. These facts somehow never reached our history textbooks in our schools.
Even today, slavery exists in Africa and in some Muslim countries. As stated above, black on black slavery was common in Africa for thousands of years. And most slaves brought to America were purchased from black slave owners.
With those facts in mind and how this “reparations” discussion is being conducted, you think that the only “evil” people involved in slavery were white people, mainly in the South. It is estimated that only 1 in 5 people in the South owned slaves (20% of the population). So, that charge that only white people participated in the business of slavery is absurd.
No one in their right mind would condone slavery, regardless who is being enslaved, whether black, yellow, red, or white. By the way, the word “slave” comes from the Slavic people from Europe who were enslaved by the Muslim hordes, who overran their countries in years past. The Muslims have a long history of capturing and using slaves in their culture, and still do today.
Today, the reparations movement is being mainly pushed by militant black groups and by certain members of the Congressional Black Caucus (including some Democrat candidates for president). It seems that their major interest in reparations is political and not really financial, as they know that most people are not in favor of it and that the whole discussion is ridiculous as slavery was abolished over 156 years ago. Their major goal is to shame the white Americans into thinking that slavery was all their ancestors fault and that reparations would be justification for giving money for descendants of slaves. Over the years we have given the black community a form or reparations, it was called “affirmative action”.
So in answer to our headline, the answer is “NO“, reparations are not required to assuage the “white guilt” the promoters of reparations are falsely using to promote this unrealistic idea. The one positive thing of the wrongful practice of slavery is that the descendants of slavery now live in the greatest free country in the world where black people can become anything they want to be, including president of the United States, and not be in one of those oppressive countries from which their ancestors were sold into slavery. God bless America.
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