The Truth Behind the American Revolution: Gerald Horne

The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity.  But the Africans then living in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with the British.  In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne shows that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt. 

Prior to 1776, anti-slavery sentiments were deepening throughout Britain and in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were in revolt.  For European colonists in America, the major threat to their security was a foreign invasion combined with an insurrection of the enslaved.   It was a real and threatening possibility that London would impose abolition throughout the colonies—a possibility the founding fathers feared would bring slave rebellions to their shores.  To forestall it, they went to war. 

The so-called Revolutionary War, Horne writes, was in part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their right to enslave others.  The Counter-Revolution of 1776 brings us to a radical new understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States

Juan (Jan) Rodriguez

http://www.backtoclassics.com/gallery/diegorodriguezdesilvayvelazquez/juandepareja/

Juan Rodriguez^[1][2][3] (Dutch: Jan Rodrigues, Portuguese: João Rodrigues) was the first documented non-Native American to live onManhattan Island.^[4] As such, he is considered the first non-native resident of what would eventually become New York City, predating theDutch settlers. As he was born in Santo Domingo (now in the Dominican Republic) to a Portuguese sailor and an African woman, he is also considered the first immigrant, the first person of African heritage, the first person of European heritage, the first merchant, the first Latino, and the first Dominican to settle in Manhattan.^[5]

He was born in the Captaincy General of Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) to an African woman and a Portuguese sailor,^[5] in an era in which a tenth of the Dominican population was born in Portugal,^[6] at that time in dynastic union with the Spanish Crown (see Iberian Union).

Raised in a culturally diverse environment in the Spanish settlement of Santo Domingo, Rodrigues was known for his linguistic talents and was hired by the Dutch captain Thijs Volckenz Mossel of the Jonge Tobias to serve as the translator on a trading voyage to the Native American island of Mannahatta. Arriving in 1613, Rodrigues soon came to learn the Algonquian language of the Lenape people and married into the local community. When Mossel's ship returned to the Netherlands, Rodrigues stayed behind with his native American family and set up his own trading post with goods given to him by Mossel, consisting of eighty hatchets, some knives, a musket and a sword.^[7]

He spent the winter without the support of anchored ship, at a Dutch fur trading post on Lower Manhattan that had been set up by Hendrick Christiaensen in 1613. This small settlement, and others, along the North River were part of a private enterprise. It was not until 1621 that the Dutch Republic firmly established its claim to New Netherland and offered apatent for a trade monopoly in the region. In 1624, a group of settlers established a small colony on Governors Island. Together with a contingent of colonizers coming from the Netherlands that same year, the traders established in the tiny settlement of New Amsterdam, only 11 years old.

In October 2012, the New York City Council enacted legislation to name Broadway from 159th Street to 218th Street in Manhattan after Juan Rodríguez.^[10] The neighborhoods ofWashington Heights and Inwood in Upper Manhattan have a substantial Dominican community. The first street sign was put up in a celebration with a small ceremony at 167th Street and Broadway on May 15, 2013.

Black Fight to Liberate New Orleans: War of 1812

From: Black Saga: The African American Exprience

On January 8, two battalions of five hundred free Black fought with Andrew Jackson to liberate New Orleans from the British n the last battle of the War of 1812. Identified as the "Free Men of Color," this was the largest single force of Black men ever assembled to fight for the United States up to that time. 

The use of Black troops was the idea of the Louisiana Governor William C. C. Clairborne. 

Jackson accepted the battalion of Free Men of Color plus a battalion of soldiers from Santo Domingo because of the shortage  of effective troops. They held their line on the Chalmette Plains and then counter attacked. It was the worse defeat suffered by the British Army in years. The British lost more than twenty-six hundred soldiers, whereas American forces only lost twenty-one men. Jackson wrote later the he believed that the British commander, Sir Edward Pakenham, was killed by a shot fired by a Black man. Black actually fought on bothe sides of the battle, the First and Second West Indian Infantry regiments fought with the British. Hopes of freedom were dashed when the Treaty of Ghent (which ended the war) was negotiated.

Ironically, Black soldiers who had fought with Jackson were not permitted to march in the annual parades that celebrated the victory. 

Black Studies: Maulana Karenga, Dr. Tukufu Zuberi, Dr. Molefi K. Asante

Maulana Karenga Relevance of Black Studies

AFRICAN AMRICAN STUDIES & THE HUMAN FUTURE - Asante - Zuberi

This is a discussion among Dr. Molefi K. Asante of Temple University and Dr. Tukufu Zuberi of the University of Pennsylvania at the 2nd Annual W.E.B. DuBois Symposium on April 5, 2103 at Temple University. The title of the discussion: WITHER AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES IN THE 21st CENTURY ? The moderator was Ewuare X. Osayande.

FULL WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE

African-American Studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to the study of the history, culture, and politics of Black Americans. Taken broadly, the field studies not only the cultures of people of African descent in the United States, but the cultures of the entire African diaspora but it has been defined in different ways. The field includes scholars of African-American literature, history, politics, religion and religious studies,sociology, and many other disciplines within the humanities and social sciences.^[1]

Intensive academic efforts to reconstruct African-American history began in the late 19th century (W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1896). Among the pioneers in the first half of the 20th century were Carter G. Woodson,^[2] Herbert Aptheker, Melville Herskovits, and Lorenzo Dow Turner.^[3][4]

Programs and departments of African-American studies were first created in the 1960s and 1970s as a result of inter-ethnic student and faculty activism at many universities, sparked by a five-month strike for black studies at San Francisco State. In February 1968, San Francisco State hired sociologist Nathan Hare to coordinate the first black studies program and write a proposal for the first Department of Black Studies; the department was created in September 1968 and gained official status at the end of the five-months strike in the spring of 1969. The creation of programs and departments in Black studies was a common demand of protests and sit-ins by minority students and their allies, who felt that their cultures and interests were underserved by the traditional academic structures.

Black studies is a systematic way of studying black people in the world – such as their history, culture, sociology, and religion. It is a study of the black experience and the effect of society on them and their effect within society. This study can serve to eradicate many racial stereotypes. Black Studies implements: history, family structure, social and economic pressures, stereotypes, and gender relationships.

Post traumatic Slavery Disorder Dr Joy de Gruy Leary

Chains in Our DNA

Educator and author Joy DeGruy, Ph.D.,  is the woman who, 25 years ago, coined the PTSS term to help explain the consequences of multigenerational oppression from centuries of chattel slavery and institutionalized racism, and to identify the resulting adaptive survival behaviors. She turned her study into the groundbreaking book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, published in 2005. Researchers have long investigated how historical trauma is passed down through the generations, and findings suggest actual memories are transmitted through the DNA for Jews, Native Americans and other groups, DeGruy indicates. That same concept can be applied to the impact of slavery on African-Americans. 

 

PTSS differs from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which results from a single trauma experienced directly or indirectly. “When we look at American chattel slavery, we are not talking about a single trauma; we’re talking about multiple traumas over lifetimes and over generations,” says DeGruy. “Living in Black skin is a whole other level of stress.”

Read more at EBONY http://www.ebony.com/wellness-empowerment/do-you-have-post-traumatic-slave-syndrome#ixzz486GwmuwB 
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Terrorism in Africa and around the World

2015 World Terrorism

"Acknowledging that Africans, and indeed Russians too face bigger risks than we do also wouldn't fit in with the dominant neoconservative narrative of a "clash of civilizations" between radical Islamists, and "the civilized West," with the latter of course including Israel, the state at the front of the battle. We in the West must be seen as the prime targets of the terrorists, even though we've been backing the same people in Syria and turned a blind eye when they murdered civilians there. It's our values and our way of life which is threatened and [supposedly] no one else's" 

FULL ARTICLE: Terrorism in Africa: A Bigger threat than Europe but Much Less Coverage

BLACK SAILORS IN WAR OF 1812

LINK TO FULL PBS STORY AND VIDEO

Black Sailors and Soldiers in the War of 1812 

"In 1813 Charles Ball, an escaped slave and self-declared “free man of color,” had a choice.  He could row out to the British fleet moored in the Chesapeake Bay and offer his services to the King, or he could volunteer for the fledgling American navy and defend his country.  Ball, whose dramatic bid for freedom is chronicled in The Life of Charles Ball, A Black Man, chose the latter and he was not alone.

Black Sailors during the War
When Ball enlisted, African Americans made up at least fifteen percent of U.S. naval corps.  Although official U.S. policy at the start of the war forbade the recruitment of black sailors, a chronic shortage of manpower compelled the navy to accept any able-bodied man.  These black sailors had a reputation for fierceness in battle.  When Captain Oliver Hazard Perry complained about having blacks on his ship, Commodore Isaac Chauncey replied, “I have nearly fifty blacks on this boat and many of them are among the best of my men.”  Perry soon had the chance to test Chauncey’s recommendation.  At the Battle of Lake Erie, where Perry’s fleet thwarted the British, his black sailors performed so well that he wrote to the Secretary of the Navy, praising their courage.

Life at sea was, by necessity,  an egalitarian existence.  Living in small quarters, away from shore for months at a time, the men developed a camaraderie and mutual respect based on performance, not skin color.  Black sailors made their mark on both official vessels and on the privateers, non-military ships sanctioned by the U.S. government to harass British merchant vessels. On some privateers more than half of the crew was black. These fast and heavily-armed raiders were frequently successful at seizing merchant ships, but just as frequently at being captured by the British.  The sailors on board, including the African Americans, were often sent to the infamous Dartmoor Prison, where the racial divisions they had left behind once again prevailed."